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Chamber of Industry and Commerce “Best Apprentice Project” Award

Chamber of Industry and Commerce “Best Apprentice Project” Award

Chamber of Industry and Commerce “Best Apprentice Project” Award

On 20 June 2013, WOERNER apprentices were awarded the Chamber of Industry and Commerce Heilbronn-Franken Initiative Prize for the best apprentice project in the region. There was great delight as the apprentices learned that their project had been awarded the prize as the best of the 31 companies that took part in the Initiative Prize.

The project was launched over a year earlier by trainers Helmut Ballweg, Stefan Tiederle and Nicole Fabig. The aim was to reconstruct and reassemble the WOERNER bike as a joint project by the trainees (industrial clerks, industrial mechanics and DHBW students). The WOERNER bike was to be built like a “normal” product by the company in a joint trainee project, parts bought, produced and assembled so that it would end up like a proper bike based on the inventor Eugen Woerner’s patent. It was particularly interesting for the trainees to learn in their research that the racing version of the WOERNER bike was excluded from official races on grounds of fairness as its riders won too many medals.

To get ideas for the construction of the “new” old bike, students Kira Scheurich and Fabian Malek as well as industrial mechanic trainee Florian Müssig visited the Neckarsulm Bicycle Museum to take the measurements of an original exhibit. The reconstruction of the gears was particularly difficult and so the trainees has to rely on the old advertising documents and calculations. The examination of another original WOERNER bicycle, which is treated as a collector’s piece today, in the Winkler bike shop in Eichenbühl, was also very helpful. The trainees were allowed to open the drive case to measure the gears. Frank Winkler also has a small private museum as well as a bike shop in which he keeps one-off pieces, such as the WOERNER bike. Old drawings and the original parent specification served as a template for the redesign in the 3D CAD system. Once the trainees had developed the basic concept of the bike, it was sub-divided into four assemblies by the trainees. The apprentices now had the task of defining the machinery to be used for production in Work Scheduling. Parts lists and manufacturing lists as well as operating orders were produced in Production Scheduling and Production Control, as is the case with a “normal” WOERNER order to actually track and process the WOERNER bike as a real product. Actual production started once the external components had been bought by the apprentices in Buying. The raw material was cut to length by the two apprentices Lukas Ortolf and Henrik Kempf. Sebastian Michel then began to bend the down tube. The welding work was completed by him and Maximilian Thoma and the struts for the pedals were milled by Tim Theis. Tim Theis assembled the bike together with Pascal Rodemers. The trainees were particularly proud of the incorporation of an original Fichel-Sachs Torpedo freewheel-hub dating back to 1936, provided by Jürgen Baumann, owner of the specialist bike shop in Wertheim. The trainees were also grateful to Mr Baumann for his expert assistance and for identifying alternative possibilities during production. The apprentices were also proud when they rode on the bike for the first time around the training workshop. The documentation kept in parallel by trainees Eva Herrmann and Sophia Matten to register the project for the Heilbronn-Franken Chamber of Industry and Commerce Initiative Prize was also very helpful. The WOERNER bike was then presented to the entire workforce at the company’s traditional BBQ party. Filled with pride, the trainees talked to colleagues about the origin of the bike, as they had learned on the day before that the project had in fact won the “Best Apprentice Project” Chamber of Industry and Commerce Initiative Prize. The prize was also a reward for the massive commitment and teamwork exhibited by the WOERNER trainees.

Photo: Werner Palmert, Fränkische Nachrichten

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