Model students make mini machines

Neil Bainbridge, Centre Director for Technology with some of the Extended Diploma in Engineering Year 2 students that made the mini machines: Aqib Iqbal, 19 from Rochdale, Erfan Qaiser, 20 from Rochdale, Greg Cugunov, 18 from Rochdale, Gavin Rigby, 18 from Rochdale, Aminoor Rahman, 19 from Shaw, Hamas Javed, 20 from Oldham, Robert Jessop,18 from Middleton

A team of Mechanical Engineering students at Hopwood Hall College have been busy manufacturing mini machines for local firm Farrel Ltd.

The company, based in Castleton, Rochdale, design and produce industrial mixing equipment. They asked the students to create mini replicas of one of their pieces of machinery to be used as awards for customers.

The students worked on the project for three months and had to re-scale the piece of machinery, design and manufacture each of the components in miniature and assemble the model machines. And all they had to work from was a computer model, not the real thing – as this piece of machinery is actually 10ft tall!

This is the first time that Farrel Ltd has worked with the College but they were so impressed that they want to join forces again later on in the year. Ryan Horridge, Purchasing Support Engineer at Farrel Ltd, who is an ex-student of Hopwood Engineering, said: “Working with the College has been excellent. I was pleased that the engineering students had a chance to get involved with this project and show some of the skills that they have learned”.

Neil Bainbridge, Centre Director for Technology, commented: “This has been a fantastic opportunity for our leaners to work to the tight schedules that industry demands while studying engineering on our full time programme.” He adds, “The students all worked so hard on the project but a special mention must go to 21 year old Patrik Szentkiralyi (from Middleton) who stayed late on many occasions in order to finish some of the components.”