[mrwright]

We have been in a growth/expansion mode the past two years with our engineering program and with our team. Luckily I am the head of both so each program has complete access to these machines.

We received the grant through our department of education because they have funding for high demand career fields that are showing critical shortages. Our town, Sedalia has a huge presence of manufacturing facilities as well as an abundance of machine shops. They are constantly trying to find qualified skilled people to come work for them. We have a community college here in town that has a machine tool program as well as CNC and we were able to partner with them to develop our own machine tool program here at our high school.

With this new program and along with the grant funding we purchased these machines along with other manual tools. The students also receive dual credit at the college.

One of the major reasons why we chose the lathe over the 4th axis, or another mill was because of our program goals of preparing our students with a wide variety of machining and programming skills that will better prepare them for careers.

I realize that the lathe will probably not be used quite as much as our mill for the robotics side of things but it will definitely be put to use. One of the things that we love about the Haas toolroom lathe is that it can be used just like a manual lathe if needed.

We built a 4x8 CNC router table last year and we love it.