With its exceptionally artfully milled model of a mine car, a team from the Manufacturing Technology department at the Fachhochschule Dortmund took second place at the “Mind Meets Metal Award”(Opens in a new tab) during the leading trade fair AMB 2026 in Stuttgart.
The company Emuge-Franken (EF) provided each participating team with the same set of tools and clamping equipment. The challenge was to craft an object from a solid metal cube measuring ten by ten centimeters that would surpass all others in terms of ingenuity, expertise, creativity, and technical complexity.
Jury: “A wealth of expertise”
The FH team decided on a miniature model of a coal car. This presented the greatest technical challenge: machining—that is, removing—a large portion of the material. According to the jury, the FH team demonstrated “a great deal of machining expertise” and also impressed with “delicate details.”
As a result, the FH team finished just behind the first-place winners from Röltgen GmbH & Co. KG, who created a “luxury-class birdbath,” and ahead of the team from Kratos Precision GmbH with a “distinctively carved EF logo featuring complex contours.”
"Pushing Tools to Their Limits"
“It’s always nice to be challenged,” says Robin Schuchardt, a laboratory engineer at the University of Applied Sciences, in his team’s introductory video. “As a team, we wanted to show what we’re capable of. The biggest challenge was the volume of material to be removed. You really have to push the tools to their limits to get the mine car out of the block.” Removing that much material—especially within the allotted time—was “extremely demanding,” confirms Prof. Dr. Hesterberg: “An outstanding team effort.”
Participating in a competition like this, says Robin Schuchardt, is a valuable experience for students. Because the award brings students and industry together, students can “try their hand at being an engineer.”
"Huge Success"
Prof. Hesterberg also considers the university’s participation to be valuable. “This was an international competition with a large number of participants. We were the only university to make it onto the podium and were able to present our work to numerous industry partners at the trade show. That’s a huge success.”
In addition, the competition offered an opportunity for self-assessment, allowing us to better gauge “where we stand technologically as a manufacturing lab compared to other universities and industrial companies”—and with a second-place finish, we’re very far ahead. “On the other hand, the competition gave us the chance to work even more closely together as a team and to continue developing our skills.”
The Team at Fachhochschule Dortmund
- Student assistants Gabriela Goncalves Rodriguez and Ruben Hesterberg provided support with 3D modeling in CAD and CAM programming
- Laboratory engineer Robin Schuchardt carried out the CAM programming and production optimization
- The machinist apprentices Ole Quint, Simon Hoppe, Lennart Krug, and Titus Hochsprung took on different tasks depending on their year of training
- Skilled worker Max Steinmann and technician Tobias Peirick provided counseling and guidance to the apprentices
- Prof. Dr. Stefan Hesterberg developed the concept and motivated the team for the application