Four recent Mechanical & Manufacturing Engineering graduates spent their senior year gaining valuable industry experience with Coldspring, a natural stone and bronze manufacturer with corporate headquarters only 20 miles from St. Cloud State University.
The growing partnership allowed Luke Miller, Chris Ishimwe, New Bu and Asrar Khan to attend regular meetings on design progress, brainstorm ideas and receive feedback and direction.
“The senior design project is an integral part of the Mechanical Engineering curriculum at SCSU,” Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering Eric Little said. “We are pleased to partner with a local industry like Coldspring to create practical experiences for our students in preparation for their professional lives.”
They were tasked with helping make a granite splitting line run more efficiently and safely. The production line takes granite slabs Coldspring can’t use for other projects (like countertops or gravestones) and puts it through a series of splitters to create landscaping blocks. This takes the byproduct of excess materials and turns it into something the company can market.
Jordan Massmann ’18 graduated from St. Cloud State five years ago, previously holding two degrees from St. Cloud Technical & Community College. He’s been at Coldspring for 13 years and is currently an electrical engineer, but he will soon be transitioning into an engineer management role. He helped oversee the design project.
“It’s not a high-dollar product line, so less people working on it the better,” Massmann said. “We want to make sure the system is reliable, and that we can run it off one person and not constantly have operator intervention to keep it running. If one operator is running it, we want to make sure we can do it safely, which is very important to us.”
Each of the four SCSU students focused on different areas of the product line, including the multiple conveyors, quality control on the granite bricks and providing plans and prototypes to Coldspring. That gives the company the potential to integrate their work into a future full-working system.
“We learned a lot; we gained a lot of tools that we can use in our professional careers,” Chris Ishimwe said. “We not only used tools we’ve learned in school … we’ve learned how a full project goes along.”
New Bu also noticed benefits from learning new concepts in a professional setting. “At St. Cloud State we’re taught a different 3D modeling software (than Coldspring uses), so you have to adapt and learn new things on the job.”
Luke Miller worked at Coldspring last summer as an intern, and on May 15 he began a full-time mechanical engineering role with the company. Now an SCSU graduate, there’s potential for him to roll over this current project into his future work with Coldspring.
Coldspring has a budding relationship with SCSU and worked with a team of SCSU Computer Engineering students last semester.
They’ve also partnered in past years to help present Huskies Invent. The event is a weekend long “invent-a-thon” where SCSU student teams have 48 hours to develop and present their unique solutions to real-world challenges. Ideas and solutions generated from the event have been implemented into actual manufacturing practices at Coldspring.
“The project we’re working on, they fully intend to use it … we’re actually helping them improve their systems,” Miller said. “It gave us exposure to how the industry works in the real world.”
