10/30/2025 Debra Levey Larson
New student machine shop allows students to take their designs all the way to the finished product. Ashley Sawa and Amber Parker took Dustin Burns' machining class and are the first two student shop managers.
Written by Debra Levey Larson
Amber Parker has been making things all her life—first, using clay with her hands, then polymers with a 3D printer. During her first three years in aerospace engineering in The Grainger College of Engineering, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign she used composites to fabricate fins on a two-stage rocket, worked with high-pressure die casting of molten metal at SpaceX and is one of the first managers of a new student machine shop at Illinois.
Parker got her first 3D printer when she was just eight years old.
“My dad bought it, probably more for him,” she said, “but I ended up using it more. I started with TinkerCAD software program. It gives you basic shapes you can manipulate. I used it for my fifth-grade science fair project to build a bridge, then did material testing.”
Being from Draper, Utah, Parker had an opportunity to work one summer at the University of Utah doing 3D metal printing in a multi-scale materials and manufacturing lab. This past summer, she had a summer internship at SpaceX’s Starlink factory in Austin, Texas working with high-pressure die casting.
“You take molten metal and push it really fast into a mold to create a part. I was on the tooling engineering side where they make the molds and engineer the parts so they don’t have any defects.”
Parker worked on thermal design. The hot metal being injected needs to uniformly cool. Defects are created because of inconsistent thermals—one part gets too hot or cold. To combat this, she added cooling lines to selectively cool those areas.
“I got to redesign an entire section of the mold. I was able to do things I’d never done before with their simulations and I wrote procedures and guidelines for them to do it in the future,” she said.
This year, Parker, a junior, and Ashley Sawa, a senior, are the first two managers in a newly established student machine shop—a reality due in part to the vision of Ana Bojinov, BS ’25. Bojinov had experience in machining from working in her family’s shop, International Revere Machining Corporation in Chicago. When she came to Illinois, she was hired to work in the Talbot Machine Shop for three of her four years at Illinois. She shared her dream for a student machine shop in Talbot with her supervisor, Dustin Burns and AE Department Head Jonathan Freund.
Burns teaches a course on machining which will be offered in the spring to sophomores so they’ll be trained and can apply to be a shop manager the following year when they are juniors. The overlap will help maintain the knowledge base. This summer, the new shop began to take shape when a new lathe and mill were installed in a room adjacent to the main shop space.
Parker took Burn’s course last spring.
“We started off with the computer-aided manufacturing software, which programs the machine,” she said. “You design your part in CAM software, telling it everything you want the machine to do. I made coasters, inspired by the grid fins on SpaceX vehicles. I CAMed them and thought the machining would be easy. It was a bit harder than I thought it would be, but I did it. It’s so cool to come up with an idea for something, design it, then create it in real life.
“Using the actual machines is scarier. When it’s all just simulated, the computer software tells you that something is going to mess up. Nothing actually breaks. But when you work with actual machines, they make loud noises.”
Parker appreciated Burn’s approach to when things go wrong.
“He knows mistakes happen. He says don’t be afraid to mess up but when you do, be safe about it. Stop the machine. He looks at our designs before we machine them and points out where there might be a problem, such as being too thin in an area.”
Parker said, because she is a creator, she has enjoyed learning how to design something to be manufactured.
“I like seeing the differences between designing to 3D print a part in metal to machining a part. It's very different. But it's still unlocking new possibilities of what you can make.”
Although making things is where her heart is, Parker is also diversifying. She is doing computational fluid dynamics research with Andres Goza.
“It's the only thing I do that isn't making things. It's entirely computational, which is not at all what I'm used to, but I wanted to expand my portfolio. It's helpful to know how to make things, but also how to simulate things and understand the reasoning behind your designs.
“Pretty much anything in aerospace will be influenced by computers and machines, right? The software I used at SpaceX used CFD to simulate the thermal issues. I felt like it was making a connection for me. I can use my knowledge of simulation and manufacturing to make a better part.”