Medway & Millis August 2019

Page 6 Medway & Millis Local Town Pages www.localtownpages.com August 2019
Tri-County Student’s Project Aims for the Stars – Literally
By J.D. O’Gara
When you go to high school,
probably the last thing you expect
to do is create a part that
will be used by NASA, but that’s
exactly what Medway resident
and recent graduate Dominic
Parrella was able to do as an
engineering shop major at Tri-
County Regional Vocational
Technical High School in Franklin.
The school is part of NASA’s
HUNCH program (High School
Students Unite with NASA
to Create Hardware), and advanced
manufacturing is part of
the engineering shop. The school
even has an advanced manufacturing
facility.
“HUNCH prototype and design
is where NASA has a list of
problems, and they put it out to
all the schools that do HUNCH,”
explains Parrella. “NASA would
send us a blueprint, and we had
to create that project with all
the tolerances and features they
want. They sent us the metal they
wanted it to be in. Our dimension
could only be 1/5000th of
an inch below the target dimension.”
Dominic came in on the project
after another student had
begun it, working with teacher
Jeffrey McCall.
“A different student sautered
the project early in the year, but
he went out on coop,” says Mc-
Call. “Dom picked it up right
after we went through the design
phase very early on in the project.”
“We had to actually make
the part,” says Dominic, of the
ISS flight hardware parts, called
actuators. “Mr. McCall went
through the designing the tool
paths, and so I had to do all the
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Shown is recent Tri-County graduate Dominic Parrella, who got a realworld
experience creating a part for NASA through its HUNCH program
and the advanced manufacturing facility at the school.
set-up work on the machine, setting
up the softjaws and getting
tool offsets and work offsets. After
we actually milled out the pieces,
I had to do the deburring on the
edges to make sure they’re not
sharp—the quality control (QC)
work, and (make sure) all the dimensions
were the right dimensions.
It doesn’t matter if it looks
good as much as if it’s right. It’s
definitely more important to get
the right dimensions. If you have
it wrong, it’s just not going to
work.”
“This is actually (Tri-County’s)
1st year that we had been
manufacturing hardware for
(NASA),” says Jeffrey McCall,
who began three years ago at the
school, taking over where teacher
Kristin Maggis had left off with
the HUNCH program. “We had
been working on the prototype,
such as the things astronauts can
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use in space, like storage and
bedding, things of that nature. It
wasn’t until this year that we really
had the capacity to do something
like that.”
“Probably the most impressive
part of this was that we milled 11
parts out, and those were our first
11 parts,” says Dominic. “All 11
of them were perfect, and they
loved the parts. They had great
surface finishes, no burrs, no
sharp edges. The actuators had
to fit into other small pieces.”
Dominic realizes he had a
unique opportunity in working
on this project.
“The project was almost a
simulation, a real job you’d have
in a real manufacturing facility.
We had a lot of unique teaching
moments, and it was a really
fun experience,” says Dominic,
who benefitted by being the sole
student working on the project
with Mr. McCall. “There are
certain lessons I don’t think Mr.
McCall would have been able
to teach.” Parrella, who’ll be
headed to UMass Dartmouth for
mechanical engineering in the
fall, is grateful, he says, for the
time Mr. McCall took to teach
him. “He could very well have
just instantly fixed the project
without me knowing, but he took
the time and purposefully taught
me every time. The project overall
was just an amazing learning
experience.”
“So, a lot of these projects that
we’re doing, this project in particular,
you don’t always know the
end result of what you’re making
is. You may not have that mating
part. We made an actuator, and it
actually goes to some other part
that another school is making. It’s
important that they fit together,
and that is a real-world scenario,
on top of doing something for
NASA, which is a highly recognizable
organization. It’s quite an
opportunity for a young kid to be
able to do something like that.”
also getting a tight job (
There’s one more perk
to working with the NASA
HUNCH program, says Dom.
“My name’s going to be up in
space twice,” he says.
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