Sheridan Brings Home Four Medals from Ontario Technological Skills Competition

Sheridan Apprenticeship program grads have won an unprecedented four medals at the 26th annual Ontario Technological Skills Competition held May 4-6 in Kitchener-Waterloo. Three alumni swept the Precision Machining competition: Kasper Lasecki (Tool and Die Maker, 2012) took Gold, Kyle Dixon (Tool and Die Maker, Advanced, 2015) won Silver and Geoff Turner (Tool and Die Maker, Advanced, 2015) received Bronze. An additional Gold medal was earned by Alexandar Bozinovski (General Machinist, Advanced, 2015) in the Computer Numerical Control (CNC) competition.  Kyle, Kasper and Geoff are pictured above from left.

The Ontario Technological Skills Competition is the largest of its kind in Canada, with over 65 skilled trade and vocational contests, attracting 1,900 competitors from high schools and postsecondary institutions across the province. For the Precision Machining event, competitors were tasked with manufacturing two projects with a time limit of four hours each. They used a traditional Centre Lathe and Vertical Milling Machine to produce the parts to the required tolerances from a given blueprint. Our winners “showed that they had put in the necessary practice time, both at school and at work, and it really paid off,” said Michael Reid, their professor and coach.

The CNC competition took place over two days, and required competitors to apply a CAM software to write programming codes to machine the supplied material to a high level of specification and precision. “I was very impressed by Alexandar’s ability to quickly access the requirements of the task and figure out a way to program the required toolpath to efficiently get the job done,” said Craig Charlton, Bozinovski’s professor.

Winning Gold at the event has qualified both Kasper and Alexandar (pictured bottom) to compete at the Skills Canada National Competition, which takes place in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan May 27 – 30.

Learn more about Sheridan’s Apprenticeship programs.