They will probably take more electronic equipment than they are likely to need.

The district champions will be given an image of a three-dimensional object with some measurements. They will take that through engineering, design, and finally manufacturing.

Junior pre-engineering student Ben Hampson’s job will be to use Computer Aided Drafting (CAD) to make corrections to the drawing, including taking away any unnecessary information, and redraw the part in detail, with precise measurements.

Hampson then literally hands off his work to senior machining student Dylan Burt.

Times Observer photo by Brian Ferry Warren County Career Center student (front to back) Dylan Burt, Hunter Trawick, and Ben Hampson are on their way to the SkillsUSA Pennsylvania State Championships in automated manufacturing technology.

“I take the USB drive and generate those tolerances and all those dimensions into code,” Burt said. “Basically, I redesign the part to put it in X, Y, Z coordinates.”

The Computer Aided Manufacturing program he uses, and that is used in the next step, doesn’t want inches or millimeters. It wants to know where in a three-dimensional space there should be material and where there should not. “I tell where to cut,” Burt said.

Then, there is another literal hand-off to a teammate.

“He gives me the USB, and I plug it into my trainer,” senior machining student Hunter Trawick said. At the competition, there aren’t mills and lathes making parts. Instead, there are trainers making virtual models.

Trawick’s job is to tell the machine what to use to make the cuts and give a starting position.

“I’ll set the tools, tell the machine what length they are, and set up the machine so it knows where the part is in the machine,” Trawick said.

Usually, that work is all done on computers.

At the district competition in New Castle, it started out that way.

When doing a last-minute check to make sure they had the gear they needed, Burt made an unpleasant discovery.

He had the computer on which he would design the part. That machine is the bridge between Hampson’s engineering phase and Trawick’s manufacturing phase. And, the battery was at 50 percent. But, he didn’t have a charger.

“The computer died halfway through the competition,” Trawick said.

“At first I was like, ‘Are you joking?'” Hampson said.

“Nope,” Burt said. “We were sure we were going to get dead last.”

Since the team won the district championship and moved on to states, that is not the end of the story.

Hampson had gotten the team off to a great start. Trawick said he knocked out the engineering at 100 percent.

From there… it got more interesting.

“There are a lot of ways to skin a cat,” Trawick said. “If you’re good enough, you can write it out by hand.”

So, the team engaged in a whole lot of “precision eye-balling.”

“Our help died, but we could still do it,” Trawick said.

“The way the career center helped us (deal with this particular situation)… we took what we know from machine shop about the basics of programming CNCs and made a tool list by looking at the print and put a little bit of the coding in,” he said.

“Code or automation, we are taught both,” Burt said. “We wrote everything out long-hand. We wanted to portray to the judges that we know what to do.” Just so the judges knew they could do both, Burt made a point of showing them the work on the computer shortly before it died.

“We couldn’t help but laugh the whole time,” Hampson said.

In addition to using pencil and paper when other teams had computers, the WCCC team was up against more specialized teams. Meadville — Tool City — and other large programs offer programs specific to the design phase. Burt is receiving that design instruction in the same class that Trawick is receiving manufacturing instruction.

“The judges understood our problem,” Burt said. “But they graded everything critically.”

They were on the bus headed home when they heard the results.

“Are you sure?” Trawick said.

“There were four or five teams there from big career centers,” Burt said.

The competition will be even fiercer at the state level.

Trawick is “nervous” but confident.

“I feel like it’s going to be tough, but it’s not going to be out of reach,” Burt said.

“I think we’ll do all right,” Hampson said. “We have a solid team.”