November 2023 Volume 5

MEMBERS SPEAK

My Forging Industry Internship Experience at Walker Forge By Abby Frisk

My name is Abby Frisk, and I grew up on my family's dairy farm in central Wisconsin. I attended Fox Valley Technical College and earned my associate degree in industrial welding technology in 2022. Currently, I am a junior at Ferris State University in Michigan working towards my bachelor's degree in welding engineering with a prospective graduation date of May 2025. I was fortunate to receive the Forging Industry Educational and Research Foundation – Al Underys Engineering, Metallurgical and Materials Science Memorial Scholarship in the 2022-2023 school year. A piece of this scholarship is completing an internship with a Forging Industry Association member company. I was able to intern at Walker Forge/ Precision Thermal Processing in Clintonville, WI during the summer of 2023.

One aspect of interning at Walker Forge/Precision Thermal Processing I really liked was that I could investigate the forge floor. I spent time learning about how the hammer shop worked, how they could tell if a steel bar was not up to temperature by its color, what changing dies looked like and how the pine boards wear and need to be replaced. The timing was right that I was able to help stud weld fasteners to steel bars so the hammer shop operator can grab the fastener to have a better hold of the steel and make a good part. In heat treating I learned how induction hardening operates, sizing the coils correctly, heating and quenching times as well as helping to load baskets. I also was able to load and unload parts to the wheelabrator to be shot blast. The other half of the summer I spent in the welding department learning how to make welding repairs on forging dies, punches, nests, and trim blades. I was able to learn more about preheating, post heating, and tempering on tool steel. Learning how to gas

My time was split between working in the metallurgy lab and welding department. Getting to work in the metallurgy lab was really neat, as I've always been interested in that side of metal working. This gave me hands-on real-world experience of what working in a metallurgy lab looks like on a daily basis. The metallurgy lab exposed me to some operations I've done before such as Rockwell hardness and tensile tests, but also many more that I hadn't done. New experiences included using the optical emission spectrometer to test the chemical makeup of a steel sample and learning how to properly cut a part sample, mount and polish it to accurately test it. Running effective and total case depth, microstructures, and macrostructure analyses. I learned a lot about identifying the different microstructures. A test that I have only learned about but was now able to help with were Charpy V notch tests; Learning how to cut them from a part to a rough sized block and to the final Charpy V test piece.

FIA MAGAZINE | NOVEMBER 2023 86