A group of IRE students along with students from the Eveleth campus of Mesabi Range Community and Technical College drove down to Peoria, IL on Sunday. We started in the snows of Minnesota and ended in the balmy 85 degree weather in Illinois. We visited four facilities in and around Peoria, including a production plant for track machines, a distribution plant, as well as a research and testing facility for Caterpillar. These were all highly informative and interesting tours, where we were exposed to some machines that only exist in a handful of locations in the world. The size and precision of the manufacturing processes employed by CAT in these plants are staggering, for instance one of the facilities, the one for storage and distribution of parts, has 51 acres under the roof.
Besides seeing the CAT plants in Peoria, we were able to get to know several of the industrial technology students from the Eveleth campus. We have started a relationship that could be very beneficial to both programs in the coming years.
On our way out of Peoria we were able to swing into Chicago and visit the science museum. It is a very interesting place, with hundreds of amazing exhibits. Bodyworks and a captured German sub from WW2 were two of the most notable exhibits, but they had everything from tornadoes and a cola mine to flight simulators and a toy manufacturing line. All in all, it was a very successful, interesting and educational trip.
Proofed by DP
No comments:
Post a Comment