Content area
Full Text
As a part of IndustryWeek and Applied Industrial Technology’s celebration of Manufacturing Day, a handful of editors from IndustryWeek invited local high school students to join them on October 9 for tours of local, Cleveland-area factories. I joined the Benedictine Engineering Club and followed them on their Manufacturing Day journey. Benedictine is an all-boys private, Catholic high school in Cleveland that, since 2015, has rapidly grown its engineering program.
The first stop was SKF’s plant in Highland Heights, where we were greeted by Patricia Wilson, director of operations, Solution Factory North. She showed the students into a small gallery of the various products SKF worked on there, including a bearing almost the same size as some of the smaller students, and invited them to look around before the tour of the factory floor. She also mentioned that the students would be invited to take a quiz afterwards on what they saw, with one lucky winner to receive a pair of Airpods.
On the shop floor, the students split into two groups and saw three stations featuring products made by SKF: seals, bearings, and spindles. At the bearings station, the students huddled around a metal table. A tin on the table held a curious sample of bright blue goo with the consistency of cookie dough. Nearby, two workers packed the goo into bearings and cooked them. This was Solid Oil, a solid lubricating product made of a polymer matrix saturated with lubricant....