Pennsylvania College of Technology's Society of Manufacturing Engineers student chapter recently toured two Pennsylvania companies the Benton Foundry on Oct. 12 and the Perryman Co. on Nov. 2.
The Benton Foundry, located about 40 minutes away in Benton, mixes and pours its own compositions of iron and steel according to customer requirements.
"We watched as they were adding ingots of steel and other additives to large melting furnaces then pouring the molten iron or steel in to smaller containers to be transported and poured into many different molds," said Chase A. Mathews, SME president. "We also saw their metallurgical lab, pattern shop and control rooms. It was a very impressive and in-depth tour."
Perryman Co. is located just south of Pittsburgh in Houston and is the workplace of Penn College graduate Christopher Hauge, who earned a bachelor's degree in manufacturing engineering technology in Spring 2007.
"Perryman Co. is very happy with the skills that Chris gained from his time spent here at the college," Mathews said, adding that the company is apparently so happy that it paid for a Susquehanna Trailways bus to transport the club members to the company and treated them to lunch following their tour.
Perryman is a global leader in specialty titanium products for the aerospace, automotive, medical and recreational facilities. They transform billets of titanium 4 inches around and about 12 feet long down to rolls of wire that can be as small as 28-thousands of an inch in diameter and very long, Mathews explained. "This wire is used primarily for medical or aerospace technology," he said.
The company has a $10 million, one-of-a-kind rolling mill that does the work of forming the wire, but it was not in operation when the students visited.