Skills Work - At Camp!

Linamar, Guelph

Well, I’ve been dreading it, but it had to come – my last week!  I totally ended on the best note possible.  This camp at Linamar in Guelph?  It was an all girls’ camp!  I definitely didn’t need to worry about being the only girl!  It was so awesome to meet different women who work for Linamar in so many different trades.  And they let us use all kinds of machines and tools!

On the first day, we met Linda Hasenfratz.  She’s the big boss, so that was super cool!  Ms. Hasenfratz was so incredibly nice.  Her dad started Linamar way back in the 60s, and Ms. Hasenfratz told us all about her job and how she worked her way up through the company.  Then we got a tour of the facility and a presentation about safety.  I’m going to be the safest person ever after all this!

We had our leaders from Skills Canada – Ontario, April and Shannon, but we also had people from Linamar helping us through workshops too – Jamie and Chris.  Since we were trying so much new stuff, I was super happy to have extra help!

Our first workshop of the week was machining, something I had never done before.  But before we got started, one of the women who works at Linamar, Grace, talked to us about what machining is.  Good call, since it’s her job!  She was so totally enthusiastic about it, it was awesome!  Anyway, after that, we were given a piece of plastic, and then we had to do measurements to figure out what parts to cut off and how much.  Then Chris helped us use a machine to cut the plastic into the right shapes and specifications and ended up with…a pen holder!

On the second day, we did a workshop in hand tooling, I think it’s called?  One of the workshop leaders, Jen, is a millwright, which is somebody who repairs machines when they break down.  She knows a lot of stuff!  Anyway, she told us about what being a millwright is and how to use different types of tools.  We brought our pen holders with us so we could use different tools to refine them.  It was pretty cool.

We did an electrical workshop on Thursday, where we soldered a resistor to a LED bulb in a circuit.  I am so good at electrical work!  Maybe I should think about being an electrician too.  So many choices!  One thing I hadn’t tried before, we used heat shrink tubing to secure the connections.  Weird!  And also cool.

Our last workshop of the week was automation and robotics.  It was just awesome.  It was nothing like those nerdy robot shows on TV.  Robots are used all over the place in manufacturing!  They can be really simple and really confusing at the same time!  After we learned some of the basics, we programmed robots to touch different points on a grid, without knocking pegs over.  We were in two teams, and we competed against each other to see who could leave the most pegs standing.  Super fun!

 We also toured a few other facilities.  I really liked SkyJack.  I’ve seen those machines around, and I had no idea they were made in Southern Ontario!  Crazy.  Courtney, a welder at SkyJack, showed us a bit of how they’re made, and we got to see a giant robotic welder (see?  Robots everywhere!), and then we went up and down in the different lifts.  So fun!  Another tour we did was to a place called Vehcom, which is part of Linamar.  They told us about products they make and we asked lots of questions.

I’m really glad I did this camp after trying out a lot of other hand tools and stuff at other camps.  It really made the whole thing less scary and I felt more comfortable with some of the really unusual stuff I tried out this week.

What an awesome summer!  And here I was, totally thinking it was gonna be boring!  I have so many stories to tell my friends when I go back to school.  Good thing I don’t have to wait long!  Thanks a lot for a wicked summer, Skills Canada – Ontario!  Maybe I’ll get on a cardboard boat race team this year and see some of my leaders again!