By Joe Wagner
Each year, Minco awards a recognition trophy to individuals and teams recognizing their efforts making Minco successful and a great place to work. Each week the trophy recipient(s) sign the trophy and hands it off to another group or individual where the cycle of recognition repeats throughout the year. At the end of the year, the fully signed trophy is awarded to one individual who has demonstrated outstanding achievements over the year. In recent years, the trophy has been sports related, previously including a baseball, football, and frisbee.
Last February, Minco organized a table-top curling event inspired by the Winter Olympics. This “food and fun” event was held in celebration of National Engineers Week to recognize and congratulate Minco Engineering on their instrumental role in acquiring new capital equipment, developing and launching new products, improving our processes, delivering a record amount of new custom prototypes, and many other significant improvements in 2017.
Since this event was so much fun, and keeping the tradition alive, Minco decided to 3D print a full-scale replica curling stone as the 2018 recognition trophy utilizing our new printers. The curling stone was printed via FDM (fused deposition modeling) technology in two colors. This was a fun opportunity to test and dial in settings for relatively large objects on recently acquisitioned print equipment, as well as making the recognition trophy a little more personal for its recipients. During this time, Minco has acquired and calibrated a variety of printers, allowing quick-turn fabrication of both large parts and high precision difficult (or impossible) to machine parts for mock-ups, prototypes, and fixtures at low cost.
We are excited to use our capabilities in providing our customers with quality engineering solutions and guidance; using them to show appreciation for our employees in a fun and interesting way is just a bonus. 2017 was a great year for Minco that wouldn’t have been possible without the strong work ethic and high energy of our team. 2018 is on pace to be even better, way to go Minco!
