Between the Olympic and Paralympic Games, France has been full of the spirit of competition this summer, and it’s about to welcome one more big event this week, but this one won’t be on a sports field.
Members of Team Canada, including Ethan McCallum, who's a mechanical technician-precision skills student at Georgian College in Barrie, are heading to Lyon, France this weekend, where they will compete at the WorldSkills Competition.
After winning a gold medal in the Computer Numerical Control (CNC) Machining category at the Skills Canada Competition last year, the 21-year-old Orillia resident is excited to represent Team Canada in the same category on the world stage.
McCallum was set to fly to Montreal on Friday evening, where he was meeting up with the rest of Team Canada and their trainers and catch a plane to France. The group is scheduled to land in France today (Sept. 7), after which they will take part in two days of orientation before the competition begins in earnest next week.
The competition itself is a timed event where each participant is given a project, explained McCallum.
“You’re given a blueprint and you have to recreate the blueprint in the CAM software, produce a program and then produce a part within the timeframe,” he said, adding that the time frame typically ranges between four and seven hours depending on the module.
CAM stands for computer-aided manufacturing.
“We have three separate modules, so three separate days of competition while we are there and each component is different,” he said. “There are 24 competitors from countries all over the world who are all producing the same thing.”
As for how it’s decided who the winner is, McCallum says that it's based on measurements.
“Everything we produce is measured to very, very accurate numbers with the metric system using machines called CMM’s (co-ordinate-measuring machine). Those effectively take readings off of the part’s surface and relay that back to the operator to tell you what the measurement is," he said. "That’s how they’re marking and determining the winner is who has the most accurate part in the least amount of time.”
To prepare for the competition, McCallum says he has been spending a lot of time training after school and work. He even travelled to Austria last month to work at DMG Mori to learn his way around the machine, which he will be using in France this week.
“It’s been a lot of work and it’s been a long time coming, but overall I think it’s been a good experience. I would definitely tell other students to pursue it,” he said.
Seeing one of his students succeed on an international level is a bit “surreal,” admitted Brett Austin, an instructor at Georgian College, who has been working with McCallum to prepare for the event.
“It’s building on some great work we’ve done," Austin said. "This will be the fourth year in a row that Georgian College has won the Ontario portion of this competition and the second time that Georgian is at the national level."
Austin says McCallum has done "extraordinarily well in an extremely short period of time."
“It’s great to see everybody get behind him to support him in what he’s doing and raise awareness for future students about our program and the opportunities that exist within trades right now," he added.
In addition to the excitement of competing, McCallum says the whole experience has been a great way to network, and get him ready for a career in his selected trade.
“Having the ability to create international relationships with people from the same industry is huge,” he said. “This is a competition and about who is going to win, but it’s also about relationships and networking and the betterment of everyone as a whole — as a society and as a trade.”
