Hi all,

Looking for a bit of help.

I designed and made a prototype piece of machinery. During initial testing, I made alterations to it.

The first part of my report/writeup details the setup of the machinery- what it comprises, how it works etc.

The second part is pretty much a results section.

Problem being that the I want to talk about the alterations I made to the initial design, but not sure if it should go at the end of the 1st section (I did this, but then I changed it to that), or talk about it through out the 2nd section, as I talk about the relevant results which led to the alterations.

Any thoughts?

I would ask my boss, but, depending on who you ask, he is either my dad, who is on holiday, or one of his employees, who is also on holiday…

Ta, Duane.

who is the target of the report?

My boss.

EDIT: And whoever takes over the project when I leave.

You would describe WHAT the alterations were in the initial methods section e.g. prototype 1 comprised the following…prototype 1.1 comprised the following modficiations.
You would then discuss WHY you made the alterations and what the results were in the discussion section.

agree with gary.

what happened, 1st section

2nd section results for both protos.

One thing to bear in mind is that whoever reads it probably won’t care about how you worked 90 hour weeks to fix some small part, they just want a clear explanation of what you’ve done and why. If you had to try 30 different variants of a particular part before you could get it working don’t list them all, just present maybe 2 or 3 key ideas.

Same for the actual results- no point having pages and pages of table/graphs (or if you do stick them all in an appendix).

Personally, unless it’s detailling research and things that should not be tried again so as not to waste time, I’d probably just lob the modifications from original as an appendix and present the final item as-is.

Cheers guys, helpful stuff 🙂