SKC, Inc. Internship ReportBill H. Hervol

Manufacturing Engineer

MAYSKC, Inc. is a company that manufactures air sampling equipment. Before I got this

internship I started to give up hope that I wasn’t going to get one. It wasn’t even a few

days after I had that thought that Scott had contacted me. Scott Marshall is the Quality

Assurance supervisor at SKC, Inc. After Scott and I talked for a while, it was clear that this

internship was going to be good for me. I was extremely nervous the first day and had no

idea what to expect. I was supposed to working alongside Johnathan O’Brien but he was

gone on vacation. While John was away and I was not yet set up with a computer or a

desk, Scott took me around to see all of the other buildings, what goes on in those

buildings, and who I should talk to in those buildings. There are nine buildings on site.

Building one is where all the glass tubes are cut and shaped to the right dimensions. This is

also where they add the “fuzzies” or the filters that go inside the tubes to test for any

unwanted chemicals in the air. Building two is where most of the offices are. Building

three is where the engineers are, where most DMR’s (defective material report) are, and

where the air pressure checkers are. Building four is the warehouse. This is where their

orders come in, get logged, and sent to the area or building that they belong to. Building

five is the production building. This is where Don, Scott, and Shane are. These guys handle

the first article inspections. This building is also where most of the training and larger

meetings take place. Building six is the machine shop. This is where some of the more

impressive tools are like the comparator. The comparator can get a really accurate

dimension reading by projecting a shadow of the part on a bigger screen above the stage

where the part sits on and you physically have to move the on screen ruler and it will tell

you the dimension. The comparator is a really cool machine to work with. This building is

also where they assemble their air sampling bags. Building seven is a chemical lab and

houses some of the chemical equipment. Larissa is the supervisor for the chemical labs.

Building ten is pretty much a storage shed. There is no building nine though. Building eight

is where I work. This building has a chemical lab on one side and the quality department

on the other. The chemical lab in building eight is where cassettes are put together. Anne

and Virginia assemble the plastic ends of the cassettes and then puts a band around them

that shrinks when they dry. That band shrinks up around the cassettes and holds them

together so no other impurity can get in. On the other side is where John and I work. We

also have Jim and Justin in our room as well. Jim is the maintenance guy and handles a lot

of problems almost daily. Justin is the grounds keeper and helps Jim out from time to time.

John and I handle the incoming inspections. John is also the assistant administrator and

handles a lot of the networking at SKC. SKC deals with a third party networking company

named DMS. John is trying to completely take over their responsibilities as well as his in

quality. In our area, we use calipers, micrometers, pin gauges, and other test parts to make

sure the new parts we are receiving will successfully work with their mating parts and make

a flawless product for the customer. While John was away on vacation, Scott had set me

up at John’s computer for the time being. Even though I could not access his computer or

any files on the network, Scott had kept me busy. I inspected samples of parts and made

sure that all of their dimensions were within tolerance, according to their drawings. I also

helped file and reorganized a lot of their calibration certificates for the equipment that

they used. Just before John got back from his vacation, I then went on my vacation.

JUNEAfter I had returned from my vacation, John had a desk, some filing cabinets, and a tablet

set up for me.

The tablet was set up to run a full desktop set up and serve as a second screen next to my

monitor. At first, Scott and I could not get everything to run properly. After John had

gotten back, he got everything hooked up correctly and started it up. He then had to email

DMS, SKC’s third party networking company, to get my password so that I could finally log

into my computer. After I finally got to log in, I didn’t have access to the network. John

had to send another email to DMS and they finally got my networking issue out of the way.

After a few more emails to DMS, John had me set up and logged into my SKC email, the

Autodesk Vault that they use to store all of their drawings, and Fourth Shift, the software

that they use that has information on their vendors, cost of parts, purchase order

information, and location of parts. John had sat with me and talked me through most of

their procedures for inspection. There was a whole folder on one of their drives that

contained every single inspection of every single part that they have on file. In that folder I

would have to open up the file of the part number, find the master file for that and open it.

In that mast file I would have to change the purchase order, quantity, quantity of samples

being inspected, follow the notes in the document to do a thorough inspection of that part,

then add any extra notes that would be important for someone else to see, and then

changed the date and save it as the part number then the current date and save it into that

same part folder. After the first week of June, there was a certain issue that Scott wanted

me to handle. There were metal parts that screwed together that SKC had received in the

past. The bottom metal ring’s threads were too close making a really tight fit and

destroying the grooves of the top rings. After we received the new ones, I had to go

through every single top and bottom and make sure that they would screw completely on

without any resistance. I had to screw some tops on about half way and then unscrew

them so that I could break the threads before trying to screw them on all the way.

Above is a picture of these parts. On the left are the bottoms. On the right, the metal

rings on the cardboard strips, are the top metal rings that I had to make sure would fit.

Some of the rings would get tight but after

muscling them a little they would screw off

“breaking” the threads. Some would be able

to screw completely on afterwards. Others

got stuck… I almost destroyed my hand trying

to get some of those rings off. To the left is a

picture of my hand after trying to get some of

those rings off. My fingers were almost raw

and I had calluses there the next day. I was

so worried about getting the rings off that I

went next door to Anne and Ginger to ask

them if they had anything that could help get those rings off. Ginger suggested the heat

gun that they had. I brought the pieces that were stuck together over and we heated

them up for about ten minutes. I put some heat gloves on and used a rubber opener to

try and get them back off but they still wouldn’t come off. After they cooled down, I

took them over to Scott and let him know of the issue. I dropped off the rest of those

metal pieces for him as well. I never heard anything else of that issue so I assumed that

the vendors fixed the problem. Towards the middle of June and going into early July

there was huge issue that came through to John and I. The plastic adjustable flow

holders, which go on the end of rubber hoses to test for air quality, had cracks in the

tops where the aluminum inserts were heat pressed in. Most of the cracks were about

an eighth of an inch wide or smaller. Some had just a hairline crack in the top. Scott had

put me in charge of inspecting the entire few thousand lot that we had of these. The

majority of these plastic parts were cracked badly enough that you could see them from

a good distance away. After looking at them under magnification and determining the

bad from the good, there were a few hundred of them that were ok to send to

customers. The engineers had discovered that some of those parts that we had and

were using from a few years ago were cracked just as bad. This peaked a lot of

questions at SKC. Shortly after the discovery, Scott, the engineers, and the vendor go

into a huge discussion about what was causing these cracks. Scott thought that the

temperature before or after the heat pressing of the aluminum inserts had something to

do with it. The vendor that it was the oil that they used was possibly too corrosive.

John was dragged into this issue as well. He mainly emails and talks with the vendors

directly if there is a huge issue like this. After speaking to the vendor, John found out

that the vendor had their home makers put some of these parts together without heat

pressing them and discovered that there weren’t any cracks. Even after this discovery,

no one wanted to take responsibility for this issue.

JULYShortly after this very long discussion about the flow holders, I was informed that we

needed to fill as many orders as quick as we could. Now we couldn’t use any of the bad

flow holders, but we could use everything else that was attached to them. I had to go

back through the few thousand bad ones and take off all of the rubber ends and keep all

of the brass pin screws separate. After I disassembled all those parts, I had to rush all of

those extra parts down to the machine shop so that they could put those on the good

flow holders that they had on hold that weren’t completely assembled yet. Once they

got all of those parts they could reassemble them and finally start filling some of the

smaller orders. After everything was all said and done this was the result. There were

about 650 that were bad and got scrapped.

I felt like I helped out a lot and actually had a purpose at SKC after this big issue. A little

while later, Scott had put me in charge of a little project. He wanted me to go around to

every building and make a list of every piece of equipment that SKC employees use to

determine the quality of parts. He needed me to make a list of the description of the

equipment being used, the ID or serial number of that piece of equipment, the date that

it got calibrated last, and the date that it was due for a calibration. Scott has a huge

binder full of calibration certificates that go with every piece of equipment being used at

SKC. After I got everything listed, I went by building and cross referenced with the

calibration certificates to reorganize those certificates by buildings. The purpose of this

project was to make it easier, for either Scott or anyone else who was looking for certain

items that needed calibrated, to quickly find what building they were in and then to go

acquire it. Shortly after this little project, SKC underwent an upgrade for Fourth Shift.

The upgrade required certain programs to be compatible with the new version. It also

required John to have full administrative privileges. Between the third party

networking company, John, and Spencer (the other guy who works with their

networking) there were a lot of issues and John was busy trying to get everything

running properly on everyone’s computers. Scott was also busy with certain Fourth Shift

issues. While everything was being taken care of, I had very little to do. I would come in

and take care of the incoming inspections, then I’d ask Scott if there was anything else

that he needed me to do. If there wasn’t much else that he needed during that upgrade

I’d ask to leave early because I didn’t want to keep bothering John or Scott for extra

work while they were handling an issue that was much more important than I was at

that time. When the Fourth Shift upgrade was finally completely and everything was

running smoothly, everything seemed to

slow down. At least things slowed

down for me. I was back to just doing

regular inspections. If certain parts

came in that required a first article

inspection, I’d fill out the necessary

paper work, print it out, and send that

along with two samples to production to

do a thorough inspection and double

check all of the changes that were

made to that part. Towards the end of

July we finally received more of those

plastic adjustable flow holders that I had inspected earlier in the month. Out of the

twenty that I had received as a sample to

inspect, I only found one with a very small

crack in the top. Above is a picture of the

one part that I found the crack in. To the

right is a side view of the crack showing

that it was cracked all the way to the base

of the part. After a couple more weeks of

some everyday inspections, I got some bad

news. One of my cousins who I was very

close with had passed away. Unfortunately

I didn’t get a chance to work in August. My

parents had planned a vacation the first

week of August. My dad has his own

business and while he was away, he wanted me to stay home to make sure everything

was running smoothly. After the funeral and after my parents got home, I got a chance

to have a meeting with Scott. According to their records, I had amounted 240 hours. He

stated that all the work that I was faced with, I had done a great job in handling it. I was

also offered to stay and work at least up until I started the next semester. I was very

happy about that offer.

WHAT I LEARNEDI learned a lot at this internship. Even though it wasn’t a direct manufacturing

engineering field related job, I still got to see the manufacturing process from start to

finish. I got to see how parts were brought in from the vendors, how the parts went

through inspections (or first article inspections if they were required), how the parts

were sent back to inventory or stock, and then how they got shipped either back to the

vendor if there was an issue or straight to customer. I also go to learn how to use some

really cool equipment. I got to use the Keyence machine to accurately measure multiple

parts and multiple dimensions. I also go to use an optical comparator to measure

certain dimensions. I used many other basic tools such as calipers, micrometers, pin

gauges, and depth gauges. Above everything else, I got to meet and work with some

really nice people and some very professional people as well. I had a great experience

with great people in a relaxed environment.