November 2019 Volume 1

INDUSTRY NEWS & CALENDAR

Walker Forge has been working with technical, university-type, academic institutions for decades. We nowwork at ALL educational levels, from grade school to graduate school and it has been a very worthwhile transition. It’s been apparent here for some time that most university interns were ill-suited for the ‘non-complexities’ of day-to-day manufacturing. Strength of materials – yes; Strength of relationships - not so much. The summer/semester internship is a great way to build the necessary skills to help make career choice less intimidating and personal experience skills more impressive. A successful internship is as much about the student as it is the enterprise and its’ mentors. What we do to help with a student’s ‘Summer Vocation’

Unfortunately, a single recipe for success does not exist. We believe it is different for each and every applicant/mentor experience. We support FIERF Magnet Schools projects, Wisconsin Technical Schools programming, and local school systems in all curriculums. These collective efforts, from many, have provided the makings for some great stories over the years, unfortunately, success is still cannot be guaranteed. Get over it. Engage anyway. The following is one series of unedited thoughts, from one of the twelve students working at Walker Forge and Precision Thermal Processing during the Summer of 2019: company. A common occurrence working so closely with steel mills is finding indications and seams in bar stock or already forged parts. Throughout the internship I have worked on many different instances for multiple steel mills of cracked bars and seams. Due to this relation I have expanded my knowledge of the steel making process to better understand the work I do within the forge. What I learned: Coming into a job with little to no knowledge base of the day to day process can be intimidating. Here at Walker Forge not once did I feel like I didn’t belong in the metallurgical lab working alongside trained professionals. Walker Forge believes heavily in the ability to train dedicated workers to do any task, evident my first week learning all there was to know about being a lab technician. In the short three months I spent in the Walker Forge metallurgy lab I was taught skills and knowledge that go beyond four years of engineering schooling. Through the work with hands on practice I can now identify microstructures, determine carbon content, design heat treating processes, and follow predesigned specifications. All of these skills were developed through on the job work, not by sitting in a lecture hall. Besides major specific tasks I also expanded my soft skills working in a small company and becoming self-reliable on completing tasks. I didn’t stay cooped up in the lab all summer; I even had the opportunity to tour other departments within the plant. From quality control to machining and forge presses, to robot operations, I was given the ability to learn in depth all the possibilities at Walker along with forges across the country. It is pretty obvious that this could be the beginning of one of those great stories. Manufacturing firms in general, and FIA members in particular, need to create opportunities for stories like this to be written. It would be best if we all tried to find or, heaven forbid, help create many more like her. Rick Recktenwald President, Walker Forge

How I got toWalker Forge:

I began my search by asking my advisor for possible summer internships from companies hiring first-year students. There I learned about Walker Forge and was given the contact information for a former Michigan Tech graduate who currently worked at the forge. When I sent my first email to Rick I didn’t even know he was the president of Walker Forge. I knew this job would be different from any other

internship based on the phone calls I had with Rick and John. The small town feel was evident and I knew that was something I grew up with being from the Upper Peninsula. Then began the long and hard search for housing that I could stay in for the three months I would spend in Clintonville. Working closely with Amy in HR, no apartments could be found in the area available for rent. She went so far as to asking other workers at the plant if they would take me in for the summer. Finally, I came to the decision that I would stay with family in the Green Bay area, about a 40 minute commute to Through rapidly gained experience and working alongside John, I was able to greatly excel inmy position as ametallurgical technician without any prior knowledge as to what someone working in the metallurgy lab did for a living. I had the opportunity to work start to finish with little supervision on the failure analysis of an oil well pump shaft. The results yielded an eight page report fabricated completely on my own, with some guidance from the lab supervisor. Almost every piece of equipment at Walker Forge is maintained and/or fabricated in house, this allows not only for self-reliance, but also the ability for an intern like myself to analyze and create reports on parts that will be utilized by the work each day. What I did:

FIA MAGAZINE | NOVEMBER 2019 9