Toyota Motor Manufacturing, Kentucky

Ben Dizney a Mechanical Engineering major at UK, graded his second tour at Toyota Motor Manufacturing, Kentucky in Georgetown, with an "A+". " After working for Toyota I feel I have the skills to take on any job that may come my way. My supervisor and all of my fellow co-workers have a wealth of knowledge and have taught me so much during my time here."

Read excerpts from his report to find out what he worked on:

Toyota Motor Manufacturing of Kentucky is responsible for production of the Camry, Solara, and the Avalon. The plant was built in 1987 and production started in 1988. The department that I worked in, Paint 2000, was added on in 1993 as the second paint department for TMMK.

I was a little nervous about coming back for my second co-op because I had set the bar pretty high for myself during my first term. I was told by my supervisor at the end of my first term that I would be treated a lot more like a true specialist than a co-op. I would have assignments that were really vague just to see how I would react and what problem solving methods I would use. But it didn’t take long to get into the swing of things.

My major project for the semester was the A-Zone Humidification project which is part of the wall enclosure project. The two combined are intended to lower particle count in the paint department resulting in fewer paint defects. This is a multi-million dollar project and I was very excited to get started.

My task was to investigate the effect of humidity on the number of air-borne particles. To do so, I needed to set up a trial plan. Someone already had a set of misters set up in one of our assembly HVAC’s. My plan was to use the set-up to humidify the air, and take particle counts before and after the air passed the misters. For the trial, readings were taken at four different levels of relative humidity: 60%, 65%, 70%, and 75%.

After completing the trial, I came to the conclusion that 70% relative humidity was the ideal humidity for our application. At 70%RH the particle count is very low and there is no condensation.

Unfortunately, I will not be at work for the completion of the project. The work will probably continue until well into September 2006. Once completed, the walls and the modified HVAC will give us the ability to pressurize the enclosure and control the humidity to our specifications.

This project made me feel like I was actually doing meaningful work. Basically everything I had to do for the project was exactly the same as what any specialist would do. This made me feel like I was benefiting the company and its processes. The entire time I was doing the project I was treated as a professional. Anyone that had any comments, concerns, questions, or problems came to me first. This gave me a lot of responsibility and helped me to build the skills to be a leader.