Aerobloggen

Now that our activity week, when we were out in Europe, has passed and the new year has begun it is time for most of us to make our first rotation and start at a new department. This only applies to the five of us that belong to the local program, and not Malin and David who belong to the global program. They will stay at the same department until they leave for their first assignment abroad.

I have been with the manufacturing engineers working with space and military during my first rotation (10 weeks). It has been lots of fun to be that close to production and I have seen and done quite a lot during this time. I have been a part of a development project developing the future generations of space nozzles and I have seen what the daily work with the production is like. I have made so-called JTDs. JTD is short for Job Training Document and is a kind of work instruction that can be used as a compliment for regular drawings and work instructions. A JTD has a lot of pictures and explicit explanations to facilitate for someone who has never performed these operations before. One of the JTDs I have made covers a welding operation and as I had no previous experience of welding, I found it very interesting!

My new department, where I started straight after coming home from our activity week, is with the design engineers. They are ones who makes the drawings and places requirements on products. They are also in contact with both the customer and people from production to make sure the things they do are aligned with the customer needs as well as possible to produce. It is a very exciting world and something I believe is very valuable to have insight into, especially later on when I am working with production. I will also learn the basics of the CAD program NX. I have not worked with CAD since my first year at Chalmers, which is now more than 5 years ago!

It is also time to say goodbye to 2016 and look forward to an exciting and eventful 2017. More experience within different areas at GKN, more company visits and meetings (especially those with the GKN leaders Kevin Cummings and Nigel Stein in February), my first “real” vacation and ending with the assignment abroad!

Happy New Years to you, dear readers!

Hi Again

Time flies and I have just started my next period on my next department, namely fabrication. Here I have got involved with an exciting improvement project involving welding. The manufacturing methodology of fabrication allows us to utilize lighter materials and exploit more suppliers to reduce the cost of their products and manufacture lighter products with reduced environmental impact. Although the usage of fabrication provides several benefits to stay competitive, it comes at the expense of handling a manufacturing process with increased complexity in terms of more advanced fixtures and additional numerous degrees of freedom for their assembling, compared to our historical methods of large castings. This concludes that the welding is an important process to optimize and sustain a statistical process control over. Those of you who have read my personal presentation here at the blog might be familiar with some of my previous experience at GKN within this field, in terms of master thesis, summer employments etc. It thereby feels like a welcome return to be part of these improvement projects again and continue the work of which we strive to continuously maintain zero deviations on all of our products and processes. It is even more exciting to return after almost 1,5 year and witness the outcome of the previous work I have participated with in the past. I look forward with enthusiasm towards the upcoming two months and what conclusions and improvements we will be able to achieve.

In addition to my assignments at the fabrication, there is much happening with the young graduate project in the short term future. During January, we will travel and visit several of the ninth grade classes in Trollhättan and talk about engineering and other ways of working with technology. Among other things, we will elaborate upon what an engineer is, what they do on a daily basis and which different paths there is to become an engineer. We will also host an inspirational event on the evening of the 17^th January. Here, we will try to talk and inspire young adolescents more about studying at high school, college, university etc. But also how to think about future careers, tips on how to apply for summer employments etc. Are or someone you know studying in the 9^th grade and might be interested? In that case, I think you should sign up for our inspirational event at aerotrainees@gknaerospace.com. Register name and number of visitors, and don’t forget that the application deadline is the 10^th of January.

A fun last note, me and David recently had our first article published in the AES News, if you are interested to learn more about RRSP-contracts, I definitely think you should check it out!

/ Niclas