A New Start
May 26, 2014 8:31 pm Leave your thoughts
Hello all my name is Chris, and I am the Mechanical Engineer Intern for Canfor in Bear Lake. I am originally from Hamilton Ontario and I take Mechanical Engineering Technology at Mohawk College. Let me tell you a little about my past.
So I am in my 3rd and final year of my program in college, and this is my 3rd of the 4 internships I must complete, and my first time in the forestry industry. My first two internships where in the Aerospace industry for a company called Pratt and Whitney in Mississauga, so as you can guess this is a huge change for me. Now I’m sure you’re asking your selves why switch industries, and it’s quite simple, to see what’s out there. I’m not quite sure where I want to end up in my career so I’m trying to get exposed to as much as possible.
I got introduced to the GreenestWorkforce contest through one of my previous teachers, who came into our class one day and told us about a chance to explore a fun and exciting industry. So I said to myself, why not? Some time passed and I went on with school and forgot all about the contest, but luckily had put a reminder of when the contest had ended in my phone. Then there was a mad dash to the computer to sign up for the contest and try and win an internship. Only problem was it was the last day and I hadn’t gotten any votes, so I thought I had blown my chances of getting an interview. Well as luck would have it that there were only five people including myself who had applied for this position, and I was lucky enough to get an interview. But long story short I got the internship.
Fast forward to today, I have now been in BC for almost a month and it has been very good to me. The people I live with are very nice and friendly, and I am a short walk from a shopping centre, which is nice. The first two weeks of my internship flew by, with so much to learn and so much to see. Everyone I have been working with or introduced to here is very friendly to me, which is always helpful when coming to a new place. I am currently working at a sawmill in Bear Lake, which is pretty cool because of all the machinery. I was paired up with a Quality Supervisor to help show me the ropes for what needs to be done around here. So far I really enjoy it, they let my voice my thoughts and opinions to help them with the problems at hand. Sometimes in my previous internships, they do not care what the interns have to say, but here it’s different and I feel like I am contributing instead of always just being told what to do. For example, the mill was seeing some discrepancy between the Edger Scanner and the actual size of the boards. So I asked the supervisor I was working with, when is the last time the scanner was calibrated, and sure enough it had been a while so he made the adjustment with the help of me to calculate the encoding offset of the chain. Something as simple as me asking a question and getting it acknowledged and checked is very rewarding in itself. Since then I have been making suggestions on things in the system to check and asking questions about how the line works, which have been raising awareness to small things that have an impact on production and quality. An example of this is how the machines know where their positions are. So I asked how the machines know where they are, and my supervisor told me that they have probes that tell them. I then asked how the probes are calibrated and then he told me they have a constant that is input into the system, which got him to wonder if they were the correct constants, and in the end some were not correct.
Well so far the first two weeks at the Canfor sawmill have been very fun and interesting to say the least. There is still a lot to learn and I still am trying to get a total understanding on how the mill operates. But I have a better understand of the operation then at the beginning, which was a log comes in, and lumber comes out.