Manufacturing Will Prevail!
It was a great day participating in the Manufacturing Day event, part of the GROW Manufacturing organization, hosted at the St. Charles Community College. Approximately 500 local students in middle school and high school attended to see what manufacturing is all about. The goal was to give them a glimpse about manufacturing and the strong and viable career path it can be. After attending the event, students were taken to local manufacturing companies to tour their facilities and take a deeper dive into what a modern manufacturing facility is all about.
Since we were not a tour site, we had a relatively large display at the event compared to other vendors. However, our goal was to provide the students insight into what is involved in CNC manufacturing. With this in mind, we setup a simple three stage display.
Three stage display:
Programming
- Engineering delivers a model / part for manufacturing.
- Inside Mastercam, we apply toolpaths to properly program the CNC machine.
- We output the code from Mastercam and load it into the CNC Machine.
Machining
- With the code loaded from Mastercam and the machine setup, we are almost ready to start cutting.
- We load the vice with a piece of stock billet and hit cycle start.
- Next we flip the part over to machine the back side.
- Finally we pull out a complete part.
Inspection
- Now it is time to check our work, just like math class!
- We put the part on a fixture and inspected the part with Verisurf on a Faro arm.
- Once we determined we made the exact part engineering told us to manufacture, we press in the bearing and we have a fidget spinner!
Conclusion
It was great to see kids genuinely interested and excited about manufacturing. Many kids came back multiple times to ask more questions about how the CNC machine worked and commented how neat it was. One kid said, “Dude, they totally just made a fidget spinner right in front of my eyes! This is so cool!”
