There were a lot of things to be mentioned during the Christian Brother Academy Opening Day Flag Raising Ceremony on Friday, Sept. 9, but for members of the Watervliet Arsenal, it was a chance to be honored for completing a very intricate project.
It was the celebration of the opening day for students at CBA and there was also time dedicated to remembering the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001. The main event, though, was the unveiling of the newly restored cannons. Before the cannons were restored they were sitting on cinderblocks instead of their original wheels. Thanks to members of the Watervliet Arsenal’s Apprentice Training Area, workers were able to manufacture replicas of the old wheels and Green Island Auto Body sandblasted and painted the cannons to give them their original look.
When CBA moved its campus from Albany to Colonie, it took the cannon’s with them. The first thing Colleen Ward, director of Institutional Advancement at CBA heard from alumni when she joined the school a year ago was the need to fix up the cannons.
“The first thing the alumni said to me was, ‘We haven’t seen the wheels on the cannons, can we get them restored?’” she said. “There’s such great alumni pride here and it’s really important that everything is the way they remembered it and there’s a lot of tradition and history. The school just celebrated its 150th year and the cannons were sitting on cinderblocks and they just didn’t want it that way.”
Ward decided to speak with the arsenal, the original owners of the cannons, and the arsenal’s machinist gave the project the go-ahead.
“We pretty much begged them because I thought it would be such a great thing,” she said. “When they found out that these cannons were made at the Watervliet Arsenal, they came and verified them, the rest is history from there.”
It was the perfect project for the apprentices at the arsenal, said Jack Henry, an industrial specialist for the arsenal, as the project took them from February till the night before the actual ceremony.
“It takes into account a lot of the manufacturing techniques they need to know in order to be a journeyman machinist,” he said. “There are a number of processes they need to know and the project offered a lot of those processes, so it was quite valuable.”
The process the arsenal used was called reverse engineering. This meant the crew had to take the measurements of an existing part and fit the piece to that part. Henry said because they knew of the particular features they were able to make original measurements and do the manufacturing through there. The work was done at several locations such as the arsenal, the CBA campus and even their own homes. They got some help in transporting the cannon from John Wojtowicz, Inc.
“The opportunity to see all the different working s and how it can come together in the end for a deadline and come together so they’re going to be here forever,” Brant Mert, an apprentice on the project, said.
John Zayhowski, the apprentice training supervisor, said it was a great opportunity for a new and creative task for the apprentices at the arsenal. He said it was some non-conventional training for the apprentices to put everything they had learned to use in one project.
“It included reverse engineering, tolerance, print drawing and the actual manufacturing and fabrication of the actual project,” he said. “The machinist and tool makers that supervised the apprentices and the apprentices that worked on the project outdid themselves ten-fold. The amount of accuracy and tolerance put into these cannons were phenomenal.”
Terry VanFranken, who trained and led the apprentices, said the project was a fulfilling one and that it was great to help the apprentices learn how things are done.
“It’s really nice to see them [the cannons] back in operational and working order,” he said.
Brant Mert, an apprentice on the project, said every aspect on the project was a great learning experience for him.
“The opportunity to see all the different working s and how it can come together in the end for a deadline and come together so they’re going to be here forever,” he said.
