Third-grade Classes Spend Day at Local Timken Plant

Third-grade Classes Spend Day at Local Timken Plant The Bucyrus bearing plant of the Timken Company recently welcomed Kristen Perkins' third-grade classes from Hannah Crawford and Lincoln Elementary schools as part of the Kids And the Power Of Work Program. This was the 10th year in a row that Timken has participated in the KAPOW work day program. Students arrived and were helped to clock in on the time clock. They were then taken to a conference room where plant manager Jack Yohe issued safety glasses, ear plugs and T-shirts to be worn for work. After being divided into five groups, the students began their day's work. In human resources, the groups filled out job applications, learned about references and were told about drug testing and why they should never use drugs. The next stop was the store room, where they learned how to shop and buy company supplies by catalog and computer.As a treat, their final job was to use the computer to find bags of potato chips hidden within the thousands of items in the store room.Continuing on into the maintenance department, students donned welding coats, gloves and welding helmets. Each student was assisted in welding their initials on metal. Afterwards, they cut metal to length on the shears and smashed pennies in the 80-ton press.Machine repair journeymen taught the groups about gears and gear boxes. Leverage and correct tightness were learned by the use of long wrenches, short wrenches and torque wrenches. Their final job in machine repair was putting four slanted pieces together to form a capital T; if the students had difficulty accomplishing this task, they were given a blueprint that showed them how to do it. This taught them the value of blueprints.The puzzle was sent home with the students for them to try out on their parents. Timken provided a lunch of pizza, fruit juice and cookies in the cafeteria for the students.After lunch, engineering was the next stop, where each student made a print of an airplane on the computer. The planes were to be flown that night at home. In the heat treat department. they tested for hardness on a Rockwell machine and learned what a 1,700 degree hot furnace looks like in the inside.The next stop was in the cone finish area, where students programmed a laser and watched it burn their name and school in a souvenir metal strip, then tested the unit bearing for breakage.The final task of the day was inspecting and boxing cups for shipment. Back in the conference room, each student received a Worker of the Day certificate from Judy Thiel, manager of continuos improvement. After clocking out, the students boarded their bus and headed back to school.