More important than the mills themselves is what we do with them. Myself and a few other students from the IGEN shop supervisor team have taken on the task of learning all that we can about these machines and how to use them, and developing this knowledge into curriculum to pass these skills onto our larger student community.

After setting up our PCNC 1100 mill in Summer 2021, Myself and head shop supervisor Zach Huser began running trainings on the CNC mill. We wanted the trainings to be hands-on, and we ended up running sessions that took upwards of three hours, covering everything from the basic concepts of how CNC works and what inputs the machine receives to operate, all the way to toolpath and post processor settings in HSMworks, and through to endmill selection, workholding, tolerances, etc.

These sessions partly took so long because there is so much knowledge in the field of machining, and as a group of engineering students, we often want to properly understand every aspect. As an educator, I am never satisfied giving people answers like “cause I said so.”

Over the summer of 2022 and with the upgrade to the Tormach 1100mx, Zach and I developed a set of curriculum documents and training procedures to concretize the more ad-hoc trainings we had been running prior. I was responsible for the CNC-specific curriculum, while Zach was responsible for the fundamental concepts of manual machining. We shared hands-on training sessions for these two modules between us and a few other shop supervisors. Below you will find our Manual Mill training document and CNC mill document which builds upon this.

These documents were required reading for all attending our training sessions, which helped reduce the level of theoretical technical detail we needed to get into in the sessions and allowed us to be more hands-on in our teaching.