OVERVIEW
During summer 2020, I was looking for a temporary job but, due to COVID-19, there was limited availability of jobs in supermarkets or similar. Instead, I decided to apply to local engineering companies and landed a job at Presto Engineering. They specialise in CNCing aluminium parts and their unique selling point is the quality of their finished parts. I worked full time (7:30am - 4:30pm) for seven weeks during the summer. I learnt lots working alongside machinists and gained a better understanding about how parts are made.
My main job was inspecting and packaging parts to be sent to customers or to anodisers to be processed. I also sometimes had jobs such as tapping holes, pressing fittings, cleaning parts and reworking damaged parts. Reworking often required sanding the surfaces of the parts to remove scratches or anodising errors. I also got the opportunity to rework parts on a CNC machine. Other odd-jobs I did included emptying swarth (discarded aluminium) bins and cutting raw material.
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WORKING WITH ROBOTS
A big part of my job was maintaining a robot (see below). The robot's job was to place raw material into a CNC machine and then remove the finished parts. It worked 24hrs a day.
The robot was maintained twice per day. It required that I load up new material onto the table next to the robot and then remove, inspect, clean and package the finished parts. I also had to remove swarth (discarded aluminium) left inside the CNC machine and clean it. Finally, I had to change the tips on a face mill in the machine regularly to ensure a perfect surface finish.
This gave me lots of experience operating basic functions of a CNC machine as well as running a robot. Occasionally, the robot would stop or not work and I learnt how to reset it and diagnose simple problems.
The robot was maintained twice per day. It required that I load up new material onto the table next to the robot and then remove, inspect, clean and package the finished parts. I also had to remove swarth (discarded aluminium) left inside the CNC machine and clean it. Finally, I had to change the tips on a face mill in the machine regularly to ensure a perfect surface finish.
This gave me lots of experience operating basic functions of a CNC machine as well as running a robot. Occasionally, the robot would stop or not work and I learnt how to reset it and diagnose simple problems.