Hello from Kent, WA

Hello from Kent, WA

Sunday evening August 4,  2013   (First travelogue of this trip).

As I have mentioned in previous posts, I am going to be in and out of Seattle several times over the next few months.  This trip is to “audit” a course  at the Auburn Boeing facility.  The course has a strange title:  Ball Screw.  Ball screws are a major component in large machining equipment.  They are the component that controls the movement of the part being machined. 

Auditing a course means that I am doing the final preparation to be able to teach the course.  In this
course, we do a complete inspection of one of the ball screws (both on the machine and with the screw and nut mounted in a lathe).  The machine we were working on was a Cincinniti Milacron T35 5 axis horizontal mill.  It is about two stories tall.  We removed the “Z” axis ball screw.  Fortunately the students do all the work, as it was a tough job.  A critical part of the installation is to set the thrust bearing backlash.  If it is not set correctly, the machine controls will “go crazy”.  While we set the thrust correctly on this ball screw assembly, one of the students left the bolts in the ball screw nut too loose, and the machine went crazy.  It is exciting to see the main machining table (probably 2000 pounds) jumping back and forth and making a terrible noise!!

The class was held on the second shift (2:30 – 11:00 PM).  That takes a bit of adjustment.  It seems funny to be eating “lunch” at 7:00 PM.  By the third day, you get used to it. 

I left Denver on Monday evening and stayed at the Holiday Inn in Kent, WA (map).  I have stayed here before.  It is an older Holiday Inn, but has very friendly employees and the rooms are OK.

As is often the case, I am completing this post from home.  We left Seattle Friday late morning and got into Denver mid-afternoon.

All in all, a pretty good trip.

That is all for this trip.