silos that mixed the precursor materials needed to make the flooring products, as well as how to operate some of the heavy equipment around the facility. After a few months, I was offered a position as a Junior Engineer at an aerospace production plant by an instructor at the school. I accepted and began to learn to fill my new role. The job involves programming CNC machines to cut air -
craft parts from aluminum stock. However, in addition to the programming for each part, I also need a fixture and clamps to hold the stock firmly in place so it doesn’t move during the machining operations. Each part is also inspected both manually by trained technicians, who use a physical blueprint to compare to, and on a Coordinate Measuring Machine, which is a machine that probes that part and compares it to a computer model in order to find deviations. After only a few days on the job, both of the other engineers I worked with (including the instructor that offered me the job) announced they had put in their two-week no- tice within 10 minutes of each other. On the one hand, I was quite pleased to be the new department head. On the other hand, I was now in way over my head. An intern was brought in to help me out, who would later be brought on full-time. We spent the next two weeks desperately scrambling to learn as much as we could, but to quote the intern, “This is 10 miles of information that’s only about an inch deep.” Eventually we were sent for training courses. First, we flew all the way to Irvine, Cali- fornia, to learn a programming language called NCL. NCL forms the backbone of what we do in our shop, as the majority of our programs have been written in this language over the past few decades. With our new knowledge, we were able to make edits to existing programs to bring them in-line with current engineering revisions, or even op- timize them to run faster or produce a better end-result. We are also able to convert programs that could previously only run on one machining center to be able to run on multiple different machining centers. This made it easier for our shop to schedule jobs, as we now have multiple different options of where to machine them. Next on our training course was an online course for Catia basic modeling. Catia is a cornerstone of aerospace machining and a powerhouse software that can be used for drafting, 3D modeling, and CNC programming. This course compounded on the 3D
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