CANON CITY, Colo.—It isn’t your grandfather’s welding shop. Canon City High School’s vocational department has a brand new Milltronics CNC Control Vertical Machining Center thanks to the annual Carl Perkins Grant, which is shared amongst the CCHS industrial departments. “It’s a federal program for career education classes,” said CCHS welding machine shop teacher Jake Hogan. “Usually, we just alternate between who gets the big purchase every year. That’s how we got this machine.”
The Milltronics CNC uses conversational programming, on screen help, intuitive menus, color graphics and prompted tool setting routines.
“This is going to make it possible for students to use what industry uses,” Hogan said. “So, we’re going to be able to train high school kids in CNC machining to be able to go out and get a job straight out of high school, or go on to higher education in the field.”
Before he had the CNC machining capabilities, Hogan would have to take several additional and tedious steps to draw the designs used by the welding classes. The computer program simulates what the machining center will do. Students still will learn the basics on how to cut metal in general, Hogan said. Eventually, the students will learn the programming part of the machining center.
“Now we have a computer program that will take that drawing, and it will figure out for us all the tool paths the machine is going to go and cut,” Hogan said. “So, there’s that aspect of it. There’s the design and program part of it. If we didn’t have the computer program, it would be a lot more complicated to figure out.”
The machining center’s conversational program offers prompts, which guide the user step-by-step through the process.
Students in the advanced welding classes will learn how to use the machining center during the 2010 -11 school year.
“I’m still learning how to use it myself,” Hogan said. “The goal is to be able to teach kids how to use it.”
Recently Hogan gathered his classes around to explain how the piece of equipment works. Using a computer program, he creates a plaque, before transferring the computer-generated image to the machining center.
“First, there is the tool changer;” he explained to the students, “This will hold about 16 tools.”
Hogan placed the blank slab of metal into the machine to demonstrate the machining center’s engraving capabilities.
“It will run fully automatic,” he said. “If you have a large part once you have it all programmed, you’d just start it. Other than monitoring it, you can go do other things.”
The long-range plan is to incorporate the machining center capabilities with the design and drafting classes.
“It’s not going to be just us using it,” Hogan said. “We’ll be able to have other classes in the drafting program that’ll be able to do some stuff.”
In the future, he would like to use the machining center to generate some business from the Fremont County area for the students.
“I hope to be able bring in some work from the community to have my kids do on it,” he said. “If we could get jobs from another machine shop, maybe some of their overflow work where they maybe won’t have time to get to it, we could do it and raise some money for our program. That would be ideal. The advanced students have been coming in and looking at it they’re excited for it for it for next year.”
