Out of curiosity, what exactly is your major and what classes have you taken? While radiocontrolhea's response did come off as a bit snarky I was thinking something similar myself. Are you a civil engineer instead of mechanical, or maybe mechanical without physics? I only ask because while programs like Solidworks are very useful tools, if you can't understand the papers you are reading concerning other similar work perhaps your foundation in materials science isn't strong enough. If your goal is just to do something interesting for a project assignment that's understandable. However, if you really want to do fresh and important work in the field you might want to consider brushing up on some of the basics before you "cheat" by jumping straight to software. Statics barely scratches the surface of what you need to understand to do real analytical research, the other option being to just build-test-destroy, which is a perfectly acceptable, if expensive, option. Lastly, if theory really isn't your thing, the easiest way to get hard data (without "borrowing" it) would probably be to throw some rosettes on that puppy and ride it.


That's a gross generalization, an insulting stereotype, and just generally an a**hole thing to say. For what it's worth I'm an engineering physics student with better spelling, grammar, and vocabulary than most language majors. [READ: In the 99th percentile, nationally] So not only are many of us "able to spell correctly" we can do vector calculus much better than the average bear. The image of the snorting lab dork in front of a basement chalkboard is a bit outmoded, to work in the engineering industry today you are expected to be well rounded. Perhaps the OP's spelling issues were rooted in something as simple as typographical errors or maybe, like me, his hands are too large to comfortably fit an average keyboard. Why be hateful?