Cal Poly Baja Machinist
Fall 2024-Fall 2025
I joined this team during my first year of college and earned all of my shop certifications through the club, which I then used to manufacture parts for various projects. We primarily worked with manual machines, achieving high tolerances using digital readouts. I also gained experience in welding, including how to identify high-quality welds versus poor ones.
We met on Mondays and Wednesdays from 6–10 pm, and Saturdays from 9–5 pm. While I built strong friendships and gained valuable hands-on experience, I began to feel that my role would remain focused on manufacturing, with limited exposure to CAD or design work. As an Aerospace Engineering major, and through my experience building my 1970 Ford Maverick, I felt I could be pushing myself further, so I decided to move on.
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
