Adam — Maintenance Technician

everything from standard GMAW welding to specialty glues to laser welding on all kinds of materials.

Slitter/Sheeters w/ 13 roll back stands, 7 former/gluer machines, conveyor systems, and other packaging machinery

A few years ago, Simpson Strong-Tie was struggling with having enough high-level talent on their maintenance crew. They built a team consisting of 5 positions. A fabricator, mechanic, electrician, controls technician, and a maintenance planner. This team is responsible for all major repairs, equipment moves and continuous improvement. I was added as a lead over this group to ensure that our projects were safe, efficient and on schedule. A large stamping facility with mostly mid-sized stamping presses. Most people are familiar with their products but if you are not then they supply the construction industry with connectors, adhesives and fasteners. The Columbus facility makes wood to wood connectors. For example, joist hangers and plywood clips. I thoroughly enjoyed this job. It was challenging and I had a great team all around me from associates to management. It is a fantastic place to work. Most of the projects we worked on were equipment moves and process improvements. Equipment moves were interesting because of the size of the equipment. Everything needed to be planned out and scheduled correctly so we could get the job done safely and on time. The process improvements were much more involved as they required a lot of research and off-line trials. We worked directly with a small group of engineers and management to accomplish these projects and set targets. Sadly, I had to give up this job for family reasons.

Responsible for maintaining all equipment, new installs, and all facility related critical equipment (powerhouse, electric panels, busways, chillers and cooling tower system.) Building and maintaining an inventory system. Building and maintaining a Preventative Maintenance Plan. Scheduling and assigning PMs for all equipment. EWI 100+ employees and too many pieces of equipment to count. EWI is a R&D facility. They specialize in material joining. That covers everything from standard GMAW welding to specialty glues to laser welding on all kinds of materials. I manage equipment breakdowns, new installs, PM schedules, inventory, equipment upgrades, scheduling contractors, etc. I have one dedicated technician that handled most of the monthly PM work and several others that jump in as time allowed. EWI was very challenging for me. In the past, they had a lot of equipment donated to them and lack of funding. This created an environment where the engineers doing research had to install and maintain their own equipment. I found a ton of safety issues and poor installation. When I started at EWI I was running across a new concern daily. Occasionally I was able to help their engineering team with some projects. One of the most interesting was a remote welding operation. I can't say much about the project because of customer restrictions but my portion of it was developing a software interface for PC hardware. The device drivers were written in C++ and the engineers needed a C interface. I built a DLL library they could access from their preferred platform so they could directly interface with the equipment

PM's and breakdown recovery for Fanuc and Motoman robotic welding cells, equipment moves and continuous process improvement. TS Tech 900+ employees, 4 production lines, 22 weld cells, 2-1000 ton stamping presses and 2-800 ton stamping presses. I was one of 23 Maintenance Technicians. My primary focuses were robotics, electrical, controls, and communications. I mostly stayed in the weld areas. The weld cells (Genesis and ArcWorld) had up to 4 PLC's running in each cell with multiple fixtures for some. They have 3 and 4 different types of communications systems installed. Some of the cells are connected for production tracking purposes. Because of all this there is a lot of hardware being implemented in the weld area. More equipment means more failures, so I spent most of my time there. In our slower times I worked on special projects that have been passed down from management. Writing short robot jobs, touching up PLC and camera programs are some of the smaller. Other tasks have taken up to 4 weeks to complete. The last one that I worked on was setting up a positioning system for a tool balancer so we could track install locations. I started from a computer programming background, so I picked up on the Robot, PLC, and HMI programming very quickly. Working at TS Tech was a very good experience for a couple reasons. There have been a lot of different people's programs implemented in the plant. I picked up a lot of good practices from looking at all the different styles of programming. The second is working with all the different people there. I have found that my biggest asset as a maintenance tech is the machine operator. They know the machine better than anyone. If you ask the right questions, you can get some really good insight into what happened and save a ton of time.

Manage breakdowns and PM schedule in the printing department. Any maintenance needs for the plant during second shift which included building improvements and breakdowns. Burrows Paper Corp. 60+ employees, Slitter/Sheeters w/ 13 roll back stands, 7 former/gluer machines, conveyor systems, and other packaging machinery. My major responsibility at Burrows was the Press Department. I took care of all the PM schedules for both presses and maintained inventory, ink pumps etc. I learned a lot about flexographic printing from Burrows. Their paper mill had a known issue that caused web problems for us on both machines. I worked with operators and management to try and reduce the effects of these problems. Because of that I learned a lot about paper and printing press operations. My biggest accomplishment at Burrows was in the sheeter department. We were under a tense squeeze from management to increase run speeds. Our group was able to improve run speeds in the department by 38% over about 8 months. My portion was to understand the machines and help the operators tweak settings to compensate for varying conditions. I also created a solution for a long-time problem in the department by rewriting a portion of a machine program and altered the HMI so the operators could use the changes easily. This was a huge win for the whole plant.