Cal Poly Baja Machinist
Fall 2024-Fall 2025
I joined this team in my first year of college and gained all my shop tags from this club, which, in turn, I used to manufacture parts for them. We mainly used manual machines, getting high tolerances using the digital readouts on the machine. I also learned how to weld and what good vs bad welds looked like. We would meet on Monday and Wednesday, 6-10 pm, and Saturdays, 9-5 pm. While I made a lot of friends and got valuable experience from this club, I felt like I was just going to manufacture for the foreseeable future, and gained no CAD or design value. Also being an Aerospace Major and having built my 1970 Ford Maverick, I felt I could have been doing more with my time, so I decided to leave it.
Photos of my manufacturing:
Sometimes we had so much material to remove that some of the strains of metal chips would clump up and would cause a mess around our parts.
Surface Grinder:
This machine was used to get those extremely tight tolerances that the designers needed from us. It would take off 0.0005in off at a time, so if our parts weren’t close to tolerance, we would be there for a while.
Weld Prep:
Welding is generally very difficult, especially when you don’t have good surfaces to weld to, so we would be tasked with cleaning the metal surfaces of finished parts so the welding lead could achieve almost perfect welds.
Lathing Away:
Being on a Baja team, most of the manual manufacturing was spacers for the suspension of our car, these needed to be high tolerance, usually having a go no go of ±0.005
