A bridge to a great fabrication experience

Figure 1
Zach Kalcic (left) and Jake Allen do some early work on the bridge project. Photos courtesy of Curt Claycomb.

It’s a wonderful time for an educator when a bridge can be built between classroom learning and real-world experience.

Curt Claycomb and his welding students at Northland Career Center in Platte City, Mo., got to experience just that in 2015. That’s when the municipality of Platte Woods, Mo., a small city surrounded by Kansas City, Mo., approached the career and technical school about fabricating a footbridge for the local Emerson Park.

The opportunity meshed perfectly with the school’s commitment to creating educational environments that simulate real-world workplaces. Northland Career Center has been working on this style of project-based learning over the past four years. The goal is to offer students not only the expected classroom and technical instruction normally associated with their desired area of learning, but also have them replicate tasks that they might be expected to accomplish in their chosen fields. This was going to be a big deal for the welding class.

“It was the largest thing that we ever built,” said Claycomb, industrial welding instructor.

This project wasn’t just about joining metal tubing together to create the bridge. The students were responsible for everything. They put together a design, with the help of the Project Lead The Way students from Platte County High School, and did a cost analysis to determine the most cost-effective way to create a bridge worthy of a park. Once city officials approved the design, which highlighted the use of a naturally rusting metal that doesn’t need painting, students researched availability of materials and established a relationship with a tube mill in the Southeast that was able to provide and deliver for a reasonable price. They also arranged for pickup and delivery of the bridge.

Of course, the students also were able to employ their fabricating skills (see Figures 1 and 2). Again, they handled the production decisions. In this instance, because they were working inside, they elected to use the gas metal arc welding process to join the tubing and 70S-6 general-purpose welding wire. They looked at a welding wire designed specifically for the rusting steel, but ultimately decided that such wire was not really needed, just as long as the welders didn’t lay down too much metal.

In the end, the biggest takeaway for the students was how they handled the entire project, according to Claycomb.

“The biggest thing that they get out of a project like this is ownership of it. They know that they made it,” Claycomb said. “Several students took their parents over to show them their work. I even had a couple of students bring their girlfriends.”

The welding students showed a lot of enthusiasm in the bid to complete the bridge job before the end of the 2015 school year. Claycomb said it wasn’t unusual to see them working on a Friday night, when most of their peers had begun their weekend party plans.

Just as any future employer would expect, the students met their deadline, and the bridge was delivered by the established date. Several months would pass until the bridge was installed, but the core team got together one last time for the official dedication in November 2016 (see Figure 3).

Figure 2
(Left to right) Tanner Martin, Dustin Pritchard, and Bailey Churchill weld the railing in place.

Claycomb said that he hopes this project opens the door for other opportunities in the future. “After this has happened, there is always a chance that we could participate in other large projects as well,” he said.

Brian Noller, director of Northland Career Center, was excited to see the project involve other students outside of the welding curriculum. Some of the students in the construction technology program installed the cedar railing and flooring on the subframe built by the welding program, and the agriculture classes were called upon to design and install landscaping around the bridge in the weeks after it was installed.

“We have executed a lot of projects in this building, but this one really took the cake,” Noller said.

Northland Career Center, www.northlandcareercenter.com

Figure 3
(Left to right) Brian Noller, Tanner Martin, Brennen Hicks, Bailey Churchill, Zach Kalcic, Dustin Pritchard, Curt Claycomb, and Noah Stallo join John Smedley, the mayor of Platte Woods, in the dedication of the footbridge that was fabricated for the town’s Emerson Park.