One college, four campuses, six facilities, and a dozen tool room lathes from Kent USA—manufacturing is alive and well at Mid-State Technical College
Residents of Stevens Point, Wisconsin, might have noticed a new building recently. It sits on the north side of Coye Drive, just east of Hoover Road, and is called the Wayne H. Bushman Advanced Manufacturing, Engineering Technology, and Apprenticeship Center, or AMETA™ for short. According to its website, it is a “cutting-edge training destination to cultivate Wisconsin’s next-generation workforce” that challenges people of all ages to ride the coming wave of growth and opportunity.
Add to this Mid-State Technical College’s four campuses at Adams, Marshfield, Wisconsin Rapids, and Stevens Point—which together offer more than 100 academic and vocational programs, among them agriculture, architecture and construction, health sciences, information technology, and many others—and it’s easy to understand why the school is recognized for its crucial role in the development of Wisconsin’s young people and future workforce.
A Long Road
Ryan Kawski is one of the many community members and staff who were instrumental in the planning, fundraising, and construction of Mid-State’s latest expansion, the AMETA Center. Dean of the college’s School of Applied Technology, Kawski oversees all academic programming at the new facility, which he says required roughly five years of fundraising.
“To date, we’ve raised just over $23 million to build and equip the AMETA Center,” he explains. “Much of that was due to the support of local businesses and no small amount of writing grant applications, but it was well worth it. The center measures 48,000 square feet and, as its name suggests, offers a variety of industry-related programs. These include Metal Fabrication, Welding, Civil Engineering, Mechanical Design Technology, Advanced Manufacturing and Instrumentation and, of course, Precision Machining.”
This last offering is a four-semester college credit program that begins with blueprint reading, shop floor safety practices, and applied mathematics and concludes with CNC programming and multi-axis machining. In between, students learn plenty about machine tool set-up and operation, with hands-on exercises on both manual and automatic equipment—put another way, the HLC-accredited (Higher Learning Commission) college gives attendees the tools needed to find a good-paying job as a machinist.
Note the word “apprentice” in the AMETA acronym earlier. It signifies a growing need within the manufacturing industry for two things—skilled workers and affordable education. The apprenticeship model addresses both, which helps explain why so many businesses opened their checkbooks to help make AMETA possible.
“The level of financial support we received was incredible. There are eight federal, state, and local municipalities that either funded the center or continue to provide funding, as well as 187 individuals or families and 131 business partners. Many of the latter are active participants in our apprentice program, where students have the opportunity to learn valuable skills while earning a paycheck. Regardless, it was a huge endeavor, and while it’s delivered a very positive result for us and our students, it illustrates the school’s importance to the larger Wisconsin community, which will continue to benefit from robust employee training for years to come.”
Tooling Up
Kent Industrial USA, a machine tool manufacturer, distributor, and service provider based in Tustin, Calif., is proud to have supplied the twelve pieces of the AMETA Center’s equipment line-up, all purchased and supported by local Kent USA partner Staehle Precision Corp.—ten TRL-1340 manual precision lathes and a pair of CSM-1640 “teach lathes,” called that for their Acu-Rite TURNPWR turning control and ability to operate in both manual and CNC mode.
“We did a lot of research prior to purchasing them,” says Kawski. “We needed to make certain the lathes could do everything defined within our manual turning curriculum, but also wanted machines similar to those used at many high schools. At the same time, we were looking for lathes that could serve as an introduction to CNC, which the Acu-Rite control with its conversational programming mode supports. The Kent equipment has proven to be both dependable and accurate, so we’re very happy with our decision.”
When asked why the school chose to offer training on manual machinery, Kawski laughed. “It’s not the first time I’ve been asked that. In fact, I can recall an advisory committee meeting several years ago, where one of our employers said, ‘Ryan, nobody’s doing manual machining anymore, so why are you still teaching it?’”
Crawl, Walk, Run
He admits it was a fair question, but the fact remains that at least some of the businesses AMETA serves—among them a local paper mill and several repair shops—continue to use manual machinery, making the skills needed to operate them valuable commodities. A similar example comes from the school’s welding and metal fabrication programs, where manual machining remains common. But more important is the philosophy of learning to walk before you run.
“That guy on the committee was right—most shops are CNC these days—but pull someone off the street who wants to be a machinist and you’ll often find they’ve never even seen a lathe or mill, let alone operated one,” Kawski notes. “They have no metalworking skills to speak of, no concept of what chip formation looks like, how to sharpen a cutting tool or what it’s supposed to sound like when it’s removing metal.”
The short answer is quite simple, he adds. “We still believe everyone needs a basic grasp of manual machining, for the same reason you can’t expect a future track star to run the hundred-meter dash on their first day in gym class. We still need to teach students foundational skills, and this is best accomplished by having them manipulate hand wheels and gain an understanding of why cutting speeds, feedrates, depth of cut, and all the rest is very important. It makes them better machinists, which is something every employer will find valuable.”
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