Machine Shop Capabilities

There are a wide range of projects fabricated in the Mechanical Engineering Machine Shop, from undergraduate and graduate student work to professors’ research projects. This requires that our shop house a large variety of assembly tools. The machine shop currently is equipped with five engine lathes, four vertical milling machines, one 3-axis and one 4-axis CNC vertical milling machine, MIG and TIG welders, and sheet metal fabrication tooling. Material selection is key to the design of any project part. The machine shop has the capacity for users to work with many types of materials under the categories of sheet metal, plastics, composites, ceramics, and metals.

We employ the use of advanced solid modeling and computer aided manufacturing programs in the shop. We recently improved our solid modeling capabilities by upgrading to Solid Works, a more advanced and user friendly program that allows students to spend less time in front of the computer and more time machining. We have also upgraded to the newest version of our computer aided manufacturing program, Mastercam X. These tools have advanced our design capabilities to the highest that they have ever been.

We are always looking for new ways to make our shop more efficient and our projects more accurate and well-constructed. For this reason, in the last year we have had two major additions to our already vast array of machining capabilities: a new 4-axis CNC Vertical Machining Center and a Dimension BST Rapid Prototyping Machine. The CNC machine has greatly improved the complexity and precision of the geometry we can create for departmental projects. The rapid prototyping machine allows students and faculty to create prototype parts very quickly. Many of the prototypes made on this machine have found use in laboratory experiments or in project design aids.