Mars may be 35 million miles from Earth, but we Minnesotans have a close connection. Parts of the Mars rover, which is sending back all those wonderful pictures, were built right here. At a local machine shop.
It took Andrew Tool and Machining in Plymouth about 18 months to design the processes and manufacture the parts, in an all-out brain-teaser. The shop had to allow for how various metals and designs would perform in zero gravity, at extreme temperatures, and at manufacturing precision of 50 one-millionths of an inch. (A human hair is about 4 one-thousandths of an inch.)
And Andrew, like the many other machine shops in Minnesota, cannot find enough machinists to fill its jobs.
What's going on? Recently there has been a lot of attention paid to the so-called "skills gap." Some reject this idea, countering that it's nothing but a political ploy to suit business. As part of its higher-education reform project, the Citizens League, with which I'm working, was interested in finding out more about this supposed skills gap. We decided to learn more about one corner of this issue -- so I visited a number of machine shops.
I had never before set foot in a machine shop, nor any other manufacturing facility. So let me tell you first how dumbstruck I was, say, on the day I stared at an odd-shaped metal object that fit in the palm of my hand. The center was gouged out, and holes run through it every which way. What was it? A part for a "bionic" leg for returning war veterans who have lost a limb. The holes allow for wiring activated by brain signals, and for gears that allow the leg's mechanical foot to move nearly as smoothly as a flesh-and-blood foot. It, too, is made at Andrew.
There are machine shops sprinkled throughout Minnesota. Most are small and locally owned. But whether you're in Chanhassen or St. Cloud or Alexandria, you notice the same thing when you walk through them. They are clean and well-lit and at a comfortable temperature. They can be noisy, but generally are not. From time to time, workers will be huddled together on a problem, but mostly they work at individual stations, in self-directed and independent work.
Their work is like a 3-D chess game. They must visualize a three-dimensional part from a blueprint and think several steps ahead in order to figure out how to make the part using computerized machining equipment that costs upwards of $350,000.
When you look at parts they are making, you know you are seeing the future. Parts for the telecommunications industry are so small that you feel clumsy trying to pick them up. For agricultural equipment, parts can be so large that a forklift is needed to move them. There are parts for aerospace, medical devices, the military, computing, automobiles and agriculture. The parts feed our entire economy.