July & August SME Plant Tours set

Nucor Steel Tuscaloosa has invited SME Birmingham members to tour their Steel Production facilities on Thursday, July 30, 2009 from 4:30pm - 6:30pm. Early arrival for Social time begins at 4:00pm. Please, report to the Guard Shack. There you will be given a brief safety introduction along with directions to the meeting building. For those who choose to socialize afterwards, Dinner will follow at Wintzell's Oyster House from 7:00pm to 9:00pm. Dinner costs are $20.00 for members and for guests. Please, RSVP email to Blane.Vines@BhamFast.com in order to confirm your reservation to dine with us. As always, we would like an accurate count of attendees for our hosting restaurant.

With a business philosophy committed to safety, productivity and profitability, Nucor maintains strong business ethics while promoting excellence in environmental stewardship. Nucor has always been committed to producing superior quality. Demonstrating their committment to leading the industry, Nucor Steel Tuscaloosa was the first mill in the US to install Steckel Mill machinery, leading the whole steel industry toward improving production efficiencies while reducing costs. This new innovation provided a better technological implementation for incorporating "scrap steel" into the production process, while also maintaining higher flatness standards and greater consistencies for their plate products. Jon Walton, a Process Metallurgist will be conducting the facilities tour.

Directions: Go to http://www.bing.com/maps
Nucor: 1700 Holt Rd. NE, Tuscaloosa, AL 35404
Wintzell's Oyster House: 1 Bridge Ave., Northport, AL, 5 miles SW (on the Banks of the Black Warrior River)

Please, remember to bring your PPE Safety Gear: safety glasses, hard-hat, steel-toed boots.


Thompson Tractor Company has invited us to tour their Tarrant facilities on Thursday, August 27, 2009. Thompson CAT is the full-line Caterpillar equipment dealer across Alabama and panhandle Florida and represents Mitsubishi Caterpillar forklifts across most of Georgia. While Thompson has always stood tall promoting Safety, Training, and Construction Partnerships, today, additional attention is being devoted to Promoting Environmental and Energy efficiencies. This Birmingham / Tarrant, Pinson Valley Parkway (Hwy 79) location is the corporate headquarters for Thompson Tractor. Details about this event, along with a time to meet is forthcoming.

Please, remember to bring your Safety Glasses for this tour.


Please, consult http://www.sme.org/ or email BrianE@PrecisionGrinding.com if you would like to know more about SME Chapter 143, Anniston, Birmingham, Gadsden, Tuscaloosa, AL.

UAB Mechanical Engineering Tour

Bharat K. Soni, Ph.D., Professor and Chair of the UAB Mechanical Engineering Department and his staff hosted a tour for us on Thursday, April 30, 2009 at the Business / Engineering Building at the University of Alabama Birmingham.

Dr. Alan Shih, a specialist in numerical geometry, introduced us to the Modeling & Computational Simulations Lab, touching on subjects such as Emergency Response modeling; medical, anatomical and bilogical simulations; and modeling projects involving manufacturing, assembly, and technical training. Dr. Soni stands at the bottom right of the picture above.

Dr. Vora from the Automotive Research Association of India (ARAI) took time to explain how India is ramping up to support automotive manufacturing. With 16 Million people riding 2-wheelers every day in India, companies such as TATA are beginning to mass produce smaller, less expensive automobiles in order to reach this 2-wheel market. Dr. Vora, along with Dr. Soni support automotive research competitions such as BAJA, FSAE & AWIM that support student engineers working together to improve vehicle technology from Formula to BAJA racing. We thank Dr. Vora from Pune, India for taking time from his busy schedule to visit us during his three week trip to the US.

While there, we met several student engineers who were working in the UAB Machine Shop on both the BAJA project car and the Formula project car.


We thank the UAB Mechanical Engineering Department, especially Dr. Soni and his staff for taking time out of their Exam Week scheduling to support our group.

If you would like to join us at any of our SME Meetings or tours, please, visit the SME website to view our touring schedule or contact Brian Everling at 205-942-2491 or BrianE@PrecisionGrinding.com.

O'Neal Steel Plant tour March 26, 2009

On March 26, 2009 O’Neal Steel, a full-line metals service center headquartered in Birmingham hosted a tour for members of the local Chapter 143 of the Society of Manufacturing Engineers.

O’Neal offers a vast array of metal products from multiple distributions centers across the United States and Mexico along with recent activity as far away as China.

The plant tour featured a view of their automated metals storage and retrieval machine, manufactured by KASTO. This "parts picker" demonstrates how O’Neal continually works to increase efficiencies, improving upon their multi-stage processing capabilities. Automating processes trim costs of production, further enabling O’Neal to provide fabricators, job shops, and a wide variety of OEMs with exactly what they need, when they need it, at competitive prices.

The KASTO parts storage machine is seven stories tall with over 4000 compartments. With a single crane and multiple conveyor lines, this 21,000 ton capacity storage and retrieval system is awe-inspiring to view in action.


Our SME Chapter 143 membership regularly tours Manufacturing facilities across Alabama in order to view Leaner Manufacturing techniques. Through community cooperative manufacturing plant tours, these members are able to gain insight to share with their own companies to improve upon manufacturing quality assurance efficiencies. We are fortunate that O'Neal team members, Henley Smith, Marketing Director; Todd Johnson, a member of Sales; and Steve Holley, General Operations Manager for the Birmingham plant were able to schedule an afternoon shift tour for us to see their operation while under light production. We offer sincere thanks to O'Neal Steel for allowing their members to host our tour.

Directions to O'Neal Steel Offices:

Take I-20/I-59 to Birmingham, Exit Tallapoosa Street, take a left to go underneath the interstate. Approximately 2 blocks, at Stockholm Valve, take a left. Drive to the next block, 41st Street S. and take a right. Follow 41st Street across the railroad tracks. You'll see the corporate office on the right. We'll meet there preceding 3pm.

For more information, please, contact Brian Everling, BrianE@PrecisionGrinding.com or LaVada Varner, LVarner@atn.org.

Jan 27, 2009 Lawson State - Bessemer Meeting

Lawson State Community College Bessemer Campus will host the Birmingham SME Chapter meeing from 4:30pm - 6:00pm on Tuesday, January 27th, 2009.

Donnell Perry, Manufacturing & Engineering Instructor along with Nancy Wilson, Division Chair are graciously hosting our meeting. We look forward to hearing about their growing Manufacturing Curriculum, especially about their latest explorations into Manufacturing Robotics.

The Ethel H. Hall Automotive Building Auditorium, labeled as #4 on the campus map http://www.lawsonstate.edu/Campus/Bessemer.pdf is our meeting site. This is a 4Mb pdf file.

Take I-59 to Exit 108, Academy Drive. Go east toward Bessemer Super Highway 11. Turn north (left) onto Hwy 11. Less than 1/2 mile ahead on the left is the Lawson State - Bessemer campus. The Ethel H. Hall building is clearly labeled on the .pdf map. Please, visit http://maps.live.com/ and type in "Academy Drive Bessemer AL" to find an excellent map.

We will hold Elections for 2009 Posts. All members are welcome to volunteer for a position. Tina Brudnicki, our Southeastern Coordinator for SME plans to attend to help us formulate a solid 2009 gameplan. A light dinner will be served.

Expect to meet a few additional guests.

Brian Copes from Calera High School's Shop Rat program may be looking for partners to help build better relationships from Shop Classes to Manufacturing Education courses offered at Alabama high schools, Alabama small colleges, and the manufacturing community. We applaud Brian for having already enlisted over 100 manufacturing companies toward helping his shop rats with Auto Manufacturing.

If you would like to meet with us, please, send us a note. We will be happy for you to join us.

Questions?
Please, contact Brian E., BrianE@PrecisionGrinding.com or 942-2491. Or contact LaVada V., lvarner@atn.org or 616-9766 for more info.

Society of Manufacturing Engineers Chapter 143

Society of Manufacturing Engineers (SME) Chapter 143 Intro

There are three (3) active SME Chapters within the state of Alabama, in the Huntsville area, the Birmingham area, and the Montgomery area. The Birmingham, Alabama SME Chapter 143 includes members from the Anniston, Birmingham, Gadsden, and Tuscaloosa areas. One-half of our membership recently agreed to hold formal meetings and to tour manufacturing plants together. At our January 2009 meeting, we plan to elect officials and to discuss formal SME business.

We have a very strong core of Volunteer individuals whose organizations are also offering their support to help us make our chapter stronger, including Alabama Technology Network - ATN, BAE Systems - Land & Armaments Division, Benchmark, Birmingham Fastener, Honeywell ES & S, Motion Industries, Precision Grinding, Quixote Energy Absorption, and Siemen's Energy & Automation. We have already toured two plants together and we attended a LEAN Manufacturing presentation at the Jefferson State Community College campus in Hoover.

On December 9, 2008 we visited the Land and Armaments Division of the world's premier global defense and aerospace company, BAE Systems. Fifteen (15) members were joined by another five (5) non-member visitors, including one who drove in from Anderson, SC. From Atlanta, Dr. Ronald A. Bohlander, Chair, 2008 SME Member Council brought an associate Research Engineer from the Manufacturing Research Center at Georgia Tech to talk with us about strengthening our program offerings and building our leadership team.

The Manager of Operations for the Anniston facilities helped to direct a team of ten (10) hosts from BAE Systems. Along with offering an introductory presentation about their company from its historic roots in the 1800's to current worldwide production capacity spanning all of the continents, they were able to show us how they're integrating LEAN manufacturing principals into their new 12-station line for retrofitting a group of military vehicles that have been in production for years. The tour walked us from casting finished parts from hot, round billets to their newest assembly line. BAE Systems engineers and designs complete systems, manufactures many of their own parts from raw steel, such as steel plate and rounds, and assembles and/or retrofits these military vehicles for their lifespan, until they become obsolete.

Along with a follow-up article about our tour to BAE Systems, we will also begin to post regular articles about our local chapter.

If you would like more information about SME Birmingham Chapter 143 or membership with SME, please, contact our editor, BrianE@PrecisionGrinding.com or visit http://www.sme.org .