A group of students at CCTI are using the skills they learned in school to help honor deceased veterans at their final resting places.

Of all of the technical education programs at CCTI, precision machining may be the least well known. Students work to build tools and hardware from blank metal using complicated machinery.

“Being a machinist, nobody on the street can just do it,” said Kevin Kuehner, who heads the precision machining program at CCTI. “And they are using their talent for something worthwhile.”

Over the summer, junior Donivan Dailey met John Poko, a veteran who repairs broken grave markers for veterans’ graves. The markers are ubiquitous at graveyards across the country — they stick about a foot out of the ground and hold a small flag. Many of them reference the major conflict in which the veteran served. Dailey thought he could help.

“I wanted to raise awareness for veterans, and to make sure that they had proper plaques on the graves,” Dailey said.

Oftentimes, the markers fall down because the a weak metal mount on the back breaks off. Poko has made it his personal mission to repair the markers, and over the year he’s done hundreds.

When Dailey met Poko, he told him he thought he could use what he learned in the precision machining program to help fix broken grave markers, which would have been headed for scrap.

“On the back of the plaques, the tabs were broken off. The solution was to make brand-new ones to have welded on the back,” Dailey said.

Dailey teamed up with his classmates, junior Tanner Strohl and senior Edward Anglemyer, to build the tabs. They wrote a program for a ProtoTrak Mill to craft their own tabs. Then, an instructor from the welding program brazed the tabs onto the backs of the markers.

The project had its challenges. The tabs are smaller than what the precision machining program normally works on, so they had to build a fixture which would hold the part firmly in the machine.

“We had to make a template, because the parts are so small. We almost had no way to hold them in order to do our radiuses,” Anglemyer said.

Some of the markers are made of brass. To make the finished product look as original as possible, the students had to work with brass, which happens to be one of the hardest metals to machine because it is soft and retains heat. If they weren’t careful, they could damage not only the part but the tool they were using to cut it.

“We tried to make them as much what they looked like when they got here,” Strohl said.

Poko says the students’ method is an improvement on how he had been fixing the plaques. While they may not get to do as many as he has, he’s impressed with their new method.

“It’s a benefit out in the field, to try to put them back together,” he said.

Poko said the students have gotten a thumbs up from Carbon County Veterans Affairs Director Henry Desrosiers, in an effort to preserve the grave markers. And he’s personally proud of the deed that they have done for deceased veterans.

“It’s the very least that we can do to keep their memory alive,” Poko said.