Career and Leadership Development Academy Cohort One, Manufacturing and Energy Day

Career and Leadership Development Academy Cohort One,Construction, and Real Estate Day Blog

Written by the 7th grade team at Murray Middle

Throughout the Wilmington Chamber of Commerce’s Career and Leadership Development Academy ten month program, each of the eight middle schools are assigned a day to write about their experiences. 51 students from across all eight New Hanover County middle schools participated in the sixth industry exploration day in Cohort One, Manufacturing and Clean Energy, on February 7, at Wilmington Grill and Rulmeca. In addition, they heard from leaders at GE Hitachi, Duke Energy, and Cape Fear Solar Systems. Below is the sixth blog write up from Cohort One of the Wilmington Chamber of Commerce’s Career and Leadership Academy experience.

We learned about how manufacturing is used for making grills and stuff like that. how  does that help with making grills and Motorized pulleys, you may ask, well all of that is used.

INTRODUCTION:

We will be telling all of our experiences that we had today. First we went to the Wilmington Grill. Next we went to Rulmeca. Then after that we went to a community college where we heard from people from GE Hitachi, and Duke Energy. Hope you enjoy it!  

WILMINGTON GRILL:

Today was a very enjoyable experience as we met Jon Barber who kindly welcomed us and offered a wonderful introduction to the Wilmington Grill, a company dedicated to making grills for their customers. As their grills do offer a very high price of two thousand dollars, it provides premium quality to the customers as they utilize stainless steel, a material known for its durability, ensuring the grills to last a lifetime while minimizing the risk of rust forming. The initial phase in the grill manufacturing process is creating a design blueprint that will serve as a guide for the grills. It takes a step-by-step process to make these grills. First, they take a large sheet of stainless steel. Next, a machine cuts different shapes out of the sheet of stainless steel to create the lids of the grill. After that, they put a different sheet of stainless steel to make different parts of the grill, like the legs of the grill. The extra parts that come off of the stainless steel that they do not use goes straight to a pile, but they don’t want that because they don’t want any of their materials going to waste. Next, they weld the metal together. A different word for welding is to be put together. Welding is an extremely bright and tedious process that's why whoever is working in that space, they have to wear a shield to protect their eyes and we couldn't get too close to it. Finally, they use screws to put everything together, however when you order the grills they are not fully assembled and come in different parts you have to assemble on your own. You can even apply your own business label to the grill to make it your own. One intriguing aspect that caught my attention was that individually everyone has their own workspaces and they choose their favorite sports team to hang from the ceiling of Wilmington Grill. Having Jon Barber give us a tour around Wilmington Grill has taught us to use teamwork can help you tremendously in life, whether it's because of a job or just making friends.

RULMECA:

Today we experienced the pleasure of meeting some of the staff for Rulmeca. Rulmeca is an italian based company made by Antonio Ghisalberti in 1963 and now managed by his two sons.Rulmeca makes motorized pulleys to use in conveyors . Rulmeca currently has 19 locations worldwide and is one of the world's leading manufacturers of rollers and pulleys. They have been in Wilmington since 2003 and started in a tiny building with 2 shipping containers to store the pulleys; they now have produced over five million pulleys and have 16 current people working there . The materials for the pulleys come from Germany  Some of the things the pulleys are used for are moving salt,rock, and other natural materials in mines all over the world. Some of the careers in Rulmeca include accounting, sales repair department, and shipping department. One of the members we met was Zack who has been the sales manager since 2017. Zack also taught us that there are 25.4 millimeters in an inch and he has to convert millimeters to inches daily for his customers in other countries. He also said if you can't grow it then you mine it. Our group also got to go and take a tour around the area where the pulleys are made and where they are tested. Also on our tour we got to all the sizes of pulleys including the hundred thousand dollar pulley which weighed five thousand pounds.

 DUKE ENERGY:Today was an experience that I will always remember. I got the chance to see a great leader and role model Pam Hardy. One way she impacts my future is the way she has helped me understand you can always work your way up in any industry. I might not like to work with electricity or duke in general but her and he words help inspire me to keep working even when I am discouraged.She works with specific districts and their power line to make sure everything is running smoothly. She is one example of the teamwork and leadership being a manager takes and more. We Touched on small businesses and bigger ones. She also helps with internships for college students. You don’t need a degree for what your job is, you do need education though, one example is she got a degree in journalism.

CAPE FEAR COMMUNITY COLLEGE:

Another place we went to is Cape Fear Community College where we learned more about Mechanical Engineering.There are many topics to learn about in mechanical engineering that we learned about today in the College. One of those was Mechatronics. In this topic you learned about Robots,machines and how to make them. Another topic was machine technology which includes steel molding and other machines that work with metal. The last topic was welding which is fusing 2 pieces of metal together using other metal known as a filler rod.

CONCLUSION:

In conclusion this field trip was very engaging and informed us a lot about different mechanical engineering careers in Wilmington.