My CNC Story - Brian Warren

Brian Warren has been involved in machining for much of his life, with the past 17 years as Program Coordinator for Precision Machining at Meridian Community College in Meridian, Mississippi. His passion for CNC is passed along to his students - instilling pride and offering life-changing opportunities to future machinists.

hireCNC spoke with Brian recently about his CNC Story and what the educator side of CNC looks like.

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hireCNC: How did you get started in CNC machining?

Brian: It goes back to my childhood. My dad worked for what they call a “parts house” for automotive. They had an automotive machine shop on the back side of the building. I was always curious what went on in the shop. As I got older, I had the opportunity to spend more time there.

When I went to Community College after high school, I had no idea what I wanted to do. This town was synonymous with machining. There was another machine shop that I grew up seeing called Soule Steam Feed Works, and it had been around since 1890 something. They still had that same tin sign hanging outside the door that said Machine Shop.

I thought, “I want to be a stockbroker”, or something like that. But the problem was I didn't come from the kind of family that could just send you to university, and my grades weren't good enough for a full ride.

I got sent over to a career tech advisor, and I was just looking for something to get into. She said, “we have a machine shop program”. I didn't even know that was a program in the school. When she said machine shop, I was like, “yeah, I know about that”. But I only knew about the automotive side of it. I didn't know anything about the industrial manufacturing side. So, I came down and talked to an instructor and ended up getting in it.

The first semester, I was able to get a job after school working in that Soule machine shop that I grew up seeing because I just wanted to go in there and look at it. I started out as a manual machinist, which I did for my first four years (all manual). It was a lot of old Bridgeports and a little conversational type CNC. I was about 19-20 years old and the guys who were 40-something would often say “CNC is not real machining”. But what I noticed is as the 90s came to an end, a lot of the old shops that never went CNC were no longer around. So, I started to learn CNC - quickly. I went to a night class at the same college I'm working at now and I was able to pick up some stuff and get a few jobs here and there.

And honestly, now this is no disrespect to manual machining at all, but it bores me. It's too slow. All I really want to do is CNC because I got into the programming side after we started doing the Skills USA competitions.

The students had to write the program, no software. We really got heavy into hard coding and the parts started out fairly simple, but towards the end it got really complicated. We had to back off and start finding a balance between hardcoding and CAM. We ended up getting really good at writing programs.

I eat, sleep and breathe CNC machining … for the last 21 years. I'm constantly involved in it. Everything from Project MFG to Skills USA. We have a lot of work for CNC and we’ve actually hosted training for other instructors to come here.

hireCNC: You talked about hard coding versus CAM, and maybe you found a good balance. In your program today, it sounds like there's still some hard coding that you do because you think it teaches the foundational skills and then you transition into CAM?

Brian: They've already completed a year manual (machining) before they start seeing CNC. They understand the fundamentals of machining. What I found is if I started them with CAM, they saw how much easier it was and they never really wanted to learn how to hard code. I start out with the hard code basics; drilling, peck drilling, tapping and bolt hole circles. And then we go into some profile milling using G150 pocket and G13 pockets. On the lathe side, with two axes we do the whole run by hard code because it's just X and Z with the canned cycles. You can put your finished coordinates in so it makes a lot easier. We’re doing NIM's (National Institute for Metalworking Skills) testing, and they test G-Code and M-Code knowledge, so we can make sure they have a good understanding of everything there. Then we can start introducing them to CAM software.

We end the year with a lot of modeling … importing the model and then building in the CAM program without having to print. Because a lot of the special projects we get that come from engineering, all we get is a model. We don't have any prints for the models.  

hireCNC: You talked about Skills USA and I know you’ve had excellent results. Why do you think Meridian (Community College) and your team did so well there?

Brian: We put a lot of time into it, and that was the thing that set us apart. We would do two nights a week just working on Skills USA projects. Skills USA prints are easy to find online. I was able to go back into the 90s just studying the prints. We started seeing the trends in them, so we really started focusing on the type of features that they put on there.

The first time we tried CNC, our group went in and didn't place, but after that we came back next year and won first place in all of the CNC (categories), and we continued to win first place in all the CNC’s up until COVID hit.

When you start winning every year, you get a lot of positive attention from industry but you get a lot of negative attention from the other schools. In 2015, I made a goal. By 2020 I wanted to get somebody on the stage at Nationals. I didn't care if it was third place, we just wanted to get on the stage because there's a lot of stigmas attached to Mississippi.

In 2019, I had a CNC technician place second in the nation and that was our crowning achievement. But little did we know that COVID was coming. After that we started transitioning to Project MFG and we're just now getting to where we're ready to compete in that.

hireCNC: You talked about Mississippi - not the biggest manufacturing state in the country. In terms of filling enrollment for your program, is there anything that you do to recruit? Or is the draw now good enough from your reputation that students are signing up?

Brian: The high schools do come here and take regular tours. But I am known for recruiting. I'm constantly recruiting. I carry cards around with me. If I'm at a gas station or a restaurant or something, I see somebody that’s got a great attitude and they're a hard worker.

There is a ton of people around here that's in their 20’s and they‘ve got children at home. They're working low paying minimum wage jobs just because that's what they have to pick from. I have recruited people that change the oil in my wife's car. I've got a couple from service stations, restaurants. One of the biggest recruiters we have is our students. We had a record enrollment of 35 students start this fall.

I found that with any program, the instructor is always going to make or break that program. And if a student has a bad experience in a program, he'd probably tell a couple of dozen people about it. If they have a good experience, they may tell four or five people about it. But those four or five, you may get one of those people. I say right now we are rolling really well with enrollment and that's mostly because of our student success.

hireCNC: Is there any guesstimate as to how many students you've taught in the program over the years?

Brian: I’d say it's in the hundreds. I've been at it since 2001. I started at a different school before I came here. I say there's been at least a couple of hundred. We've always had at least 15 or 16 students, even in the bad years. I think my lowest year (my first year here) might have been twelve. But we've been over 20 for three or four years. I didn't quite know if we were going to be able to manage 35, but the college brought in a part time assistant to help, for safety reasons. We have been able to handle it well. Inflation is not helping because material costs and tooling is going up, but we're managing.

It's just staying on top of all of it, managing the people now. The way I look at it with a lot of these students, I'm their only chance. A lot of kids here come on a federal Pell Grant. They have roughly three years of Pell Grant they can use. And if they're willing to give me two years of it, I cannot fail them because that is their chance. I take it very seriously because I've got to teach them everything I possibly can to get them ready to be successful. If I don't, I know that they may not get another chance to learn anything new, and they may be stuck in one of those dead-end jobs for the rest of their life.

I've had guys in their 20’s- 30’s come here, and some of them have had past problems. They're living in places that are not the best places to live. You see them five years later and you ask them how they're doing. Well, they bought a home, they got married, their kids are in a good school. It changes their life. And it's like a generational effect because they're able to give their kids a better start in life. It's going to snowball. That's how I like to think about it.

hireCNC: Have you noticed any key characteristics among those who really overachieve in your program or in CNC machining in general?

Brian: I always had a phrase for it. When somebody “buys in” … buys into the philosophy of the program. We have a little sign saying “excellence is expectation”. And from the first day I'm telling them how great CNC is - what a good career this is … but that's just somebody telling them. But when you start seeing them coming in and they're wearing the Titan (Titans of CNC) shirts, they now know what Modern Machine Shop is and Practical Machinist. They're online, they're watching, they're getting involved. I have a new student this semester, 18 years old, but you would swear that he's at least 40, just by the maturity level. He is already making tools and putting them on LinkedIn. I encourage all of them to make a LinkedIn account because it's a good networking tool. Then they really start to be able to talk machining, and they come in with more questions than I gave them, and they come back the next day ready to do something else.

I challenged them all this semester to finish the NIMS level one certifications. Let's get all of them done. We are well over halfway with most of them done well ahead of schedule. When the students start to really believe in the program and believe in you, they start investing. My first-year students are working with second-year students, so they know those students personally. When the second-year students start getting job offers and the first years see their peers getting $32 an hour or $25, they want that for themselves. They really start taking it up to the next level because they want to get to where that guy is. Everything is a competition. Each class wants to outdo the class before them. You come up and you do it faster, do it better. Everybody makes a class project to leave behind.

hireCNC: Are there any preconceived notions about the CNC trade that we need to set straight? What would an outsider think about CNC machining that simply isn't true?

Brian: I wish CNC could gain the popularity like 3D printing has among the masses. Because when we have the high school tour groups come in, they all see the giant Haas machine sitting there and it's, “oh, that's a 3D printer”. We're the opposite of that. Another thing would be we're not just “button pushers”. You don't just simply push a button, and everything magically happens. Even operators have to load and unload the parts, adjust wear offsets, check coolant. And when somebody says “shop”, they’ve got a picture in their mind of a dirty, greasy, hot, dusty place. Most of the shops I'm sending my guys to are air conditioned, humidity controlled, clean. One thing the administrators really like about our layout here is that it's always clean. I tell students we're a work room, but we're also a showroom. We're going to clean up every day.

The program name is Precision Machining, but the students call it Precision Cleaning because every day we have a clean up when we get done. We're not ever leaving chips on the floor. We're not ever leaving oil, grease, anything out. We're going to clean the tables off. And then once a week we have a major cleanup at the end of the week. Even when I was growing up, I thought the shops were just something dirty. Some of these medical shops, I mean, they're wearing shorts and sandals to work and it's nothing like what the general public thinks it is anymore. That's probably what we need to get out more as a collaborative industry. But we're so secretive because a lot of our stuff is proprietary, so a lot of the people don't get to see what the actual work environment is like.

hireCNC: Is there anything you're particularly excited about from a technology perspective over the next 5-10 years?

Brian: The advancements in CAD/CAM I'm looking forward to because my first Mastercam copy was on an actual floppy disk. I've seen it from early, early stages up to what it is now. What Adaptix is doing with workholding on the jaws. I'm excited for the next generation. I mean, I've been in it for over 20 years now. I’ve probably got another 20 years left, but I'm looking at my son and grandchildren. What is it going to be like when they come through? Eventually we will have the ability to program a lot more complex parts much easier than we can today. I'm excited for the future and I think in 20 years CNC is going to be mainstream. The general public is going to know who and what we are. I like that.