Manufacturing Students Win Top Award at Prestigious Event
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
March 29, 2006
Kathleen McPartland
530-898-4260
Leonard Fallscheer, Manufacturing Technology
530-898-5320
Manufacturing Students Win Top Award at Prestigious Event
California State University, Chico Manufacturing Technology Program students won the Grand Prize in the prestigious WESTEC Manufacturing Challenge on March 27 for a cast aluminum transmission adapter.
This is CSU, Chico's third Grand Prize win in the last four years: 2003, 2005, 2006. Chico also won first places in 1987, 1993, 1995 and 1998.
The students will demonstrate their winning entry for the public and news media at 1 p.m. on Thursday, March 30, in the Computer Numerical Control and robotics lab in Plumas 121.
CSU, Chico competed against a field of other universities at the challenge, held at the Los Angeles Convention Center, that included Brigham Young University; Cal Poly, Pomona; CSU, Long Beach; CSU, Los Angeles; CSU, Northridge; San Diego State University and Western Washington State University.
The adapter was built for Skyway Transmissions in Paradise as a commercial product. The students took Skyway's design and made all the patterns and core boxes for casting the part and then created the tooling for machining the part. They also developed an innovative method of inspecting the part's accuracy by programming the robots in the robotics lab to check the size and location of holes and other machined features.
Matt Branson, owner of Skyway Transmissions, said that he and some friends wanted dual transfer cases for their automatic Toyota transmissions, but no company made them. He began looking for someone to do it. "The students know what they are doing. I was impressed with the amount of knowledge they have for being so young. It is awesome that they won!"
"This project was started in late October and completed as an extracurricular activity on the students' own time," said Dirk Vanderloop, former coordinator of the Manufacturing and Technology Program. "Their planning and documentation of the whole procedure was professional, and their presentation flawless. More than 20 students made the trip to WESTEC this year. They are very pleased with the recognition received, and we can all be justifiably proud of their accomplishment."
Former astronaut Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin visited Chico's booth at the LA Convention Center on Monday, March 27, and presented the Manufacturing Challenge award to them at a ceremony that afternoon.
The students on the WESTEC team are in the bachelor of science program in manufacturing technology and are members of the student organization Society of Manufacturing Engineers. The team presenters were Chris St. John, Calvin Leiker, Kevin Stein, Kevin Maynard, Phil Linscheid and Chris Marks.
An additional 15 students made primary contributions to the project, from fabrication to display, from welding to robotics. They are Scott Baldwin, Steven Boruta, Neal Cameron, Jamie Cogorno, Jeff Ferreira, Stephen Foute, Kyle Greer, David Hill, Ben Hoover, David Lyman, Orian Price, Erik Rott, Paul Ting, Zack Waddle and Alba Zenil.
The faculty advisor to the team is Leonard Fallscheer, who can be reached at 530-898-5320 or e-mailed at lfallscheer@csuchico.edu.
WESTEC is the largest manufacturing competition west of the Mississippi River. The Expo and Manufacturing Challenge are sponsored by the Society of Manufacturing Engineers (SME), which has more than 400 professional and school-based chapters worldwide. CSU, Chico's manufacturing technology program has an SME chapter and 85 student majors.
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