Day 4- Tuesday, May 14

Today I shadowed Mike Teter. He is an engineer who works on the rapid response team.  The RR teams job is to get parts quickly for projects. If any engineer needs a part quickly for whatever reason they would go to the rapid response team. Right now Mr. Teter is working with the R and D team (research and development). They are working on a second generation nozzle, meaning it will not go into use for a long time, similar to the actuator my sponsor is working on. On Friday of last week, another high-school student (from Chagrin Falls) started at Parker as well, with a different mentor. We shadow people together now. Also on Friday I started assembling the valve box. This is the device that will control the actuators that Mr. Melzak is developing and enable us to test them. I was not able to do much because we where waiting for pieces to come in. Hopefully I will be able to do more on Wednesday or Thursday. I got to do one other thing on Friday, I got a detailed tour of the production floor. This is area about the size of a football field where all the machines for making the parts are kept. It is about a third of the facility, the other parts being offices, labs, and storage. The machines are high tech, most of them computer operated. This means they can produce extremely detailed parts can be made with reasonable accuracy.