Thank you to the Bluejacket Career Academies for partnering with us to build a test sauna!
Last year Mikal Brown (Bluejacket Career Academies Coordinator) reached out and set a date to tour our facility. Mikal was very interested in learning how we operate and how he could share this knowledge with HCA students. We stayed in touch and, this year, decided it would be beneficial to work on a sauna together. We plan to equip this sauna with at least 16 thermocouples to monitor data electronically. We’ve been building saunas very nearly a century but have yet to have a sauna on-site to test. Mikal put us in contact with Anthony Abate (Industrial Technology Hibbing High School), and we moved forward with the project. Dale Horihan (General Manager) went to the school on multiple occasions early so that everyone could be on the same page with the project. We then continued to work together remotely.
Fast Forward to May 31st, and we (Dale, Chad, and Garrett) went to Hibbing to pick up the sauna and participate in the end-of-school BBQ. It turned out to be quite an event loading the sauna, and it felt like we had half of the school assisting us. I highly recommend researching before loading and hauling a sauna weighing thousands of pounds!
“Here is a photo of a third of the class. The rest did not show up for the last day of school. This project was challenging with mostly freshmen and sophomores. Although it was not much different than a shed, it proved to be a big learning curve with the added steel wall and the steel siding. The students really hit hard at first. The initial building phase went really well, but when it came to the finishing touches, they started to falter. With them being a younger class, they like big milestone processes. They do not see the satisfaction in the finishing process. All in all, it went well, and they delivered a pretty good product. They definitely learned a lot of do’s and don’ts when it comes to the planning, ordering, layout, and building process. Thank you for the partnership!” Anthony Abate
I love the whole concept of what Bluejacket Career Academy is all about! Partnering with local businesses to give kids real-world experiences is a fantastic way to broaden their horizons with meaningful work experiences.
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