30 Under 30 Honors Program: Engineering Leader Born from Exploration, Mechanical Inclination and Self-Reliance

Nick Kellogg was born with a mechanical aptitude and a strong, self-reliant attitude. He was homeschooled until early high school, so a significant portion of his childhood was a little more freeform than what would be experienced within a traditional school environment. This was a perfect match for Nick's personality and learning style.

His early education focused on exploring topics he was interested in deeply rather than memorization or rote learning. He got decent grades in high school, typically receiving As on assignments. When not in the classroom, Nick was active in audio-visual support for theater—he even taught himself to write programs on the 1980s lighting control equipment. Outside of school, this eagle scout spent much of his time backpacking and camping. He attended college briefly for physics with a desire to go into engineering. However, Nick’s visual, hands-on learning style encouraged the pursuit of educational opportunities that provide real-world applications and problems to solve.

Perhaps greater than his problem-solving skills, is Nick’s ability to take criticism and learn from failure. He looks at every problem and critique as a call to improve.

Nick bounced around jobs, including working at a group home for adults with disabilities and then landed at YakAttack, a leader in the kayak fishing industry in Farmville, Virginia, where he continues to “figure things out” as he goes along. I think it goes without saying that Nick is a genuine self-starter, making him a perfect match for mold manufacturing, which often entails working long hours to learn a new skill while completing the project at hand.

Nick has always strived to quickly learn so he can start “doing” and produce results. For example, he took two courses in C++ in high school and college but never felt that he learned enough to do anything useful, so at the start of his career at YakAttack, he taught himself Visual Basic inside Excel when the company needed to create a management system for the CNC router department.

“Before my system, we had to spend a lot of time figuring out how to balance our rough cutting of nested sheets efficiently. I figured out a brute force programming approach that tried every combination until it identified the most efficient one for our current stock of produced parts,” Kellogg says. “It was far from elegant, but I didn't have to spend 45 minutes calculating yields anymore.”

He also learned enough Java code to rewrite the shop’s post-processors so that they could machine a kayak hull out of MDF without crashing the cutters on retraction. He also learned code to generate a machine tool setup sheet that alerts the user if they exceeded the machine’s rpm limits or work envelope.

Perhaps more remarkable than his problem-solving skills is Nick's ability to take criticism and learn from failure. He looks at every problem and critique as a call to improve. “Like accidentally burying a tool holder after which I rewrote the post-processor, or when I misread the Robodrill VMC tool positions and then changed my process, so I step in front of the turret to verify the right cutter. I broke a ¼-20 tap on the very first technical project I was assigned, then bought one of every tap at a supply store and pushed each one until it broke to ensure I didn't make that mistake again,” Kellogg says. He says he’s made a lot of mistakes, but rarely the same one twice.

The company started injection molding about the time Nick came on board. Realizing quickly that the cost and lead time of tooling was a significant barrier with our low-volume market, the company ventured into making its tooling on a Robodrill VMC and created a modular mold base with which they could build simple molds in less than a day for a few hundred dollars.

Four years ago, Nick fully transitioned into engineering. Within a year, he assumed the engineering manager position and has advanced the primitive tooling system significantly. He has designed and built over 200 molds and manages a two-person team that currently builds 75-100 molds per year—a simple line of draw molds, action molds and hot sprue molds.
Nick also purchases the shop’s heavy equipment, handling the selection, installation, startup and training. His work in this area is helping to take YakAttack's moldmaking capabilities to a new level. Last year’s equipment included two Milacron Roboshot molding machines, a third Robodrill (with a fourth axis), a resin recycling line and a CNC EDM.

When Nick started at YakAttack, the owner presented him with two career paths: (1) work in engineering as a technician and pick up skills as you go along or (2) take the faster, more challenging path and learn quickly by doing. “Option 2 was referred to as boot camp. It was the tougher path as he would immediately point out flaws and mistakes, so we could work out the solution or correct way of doing something right away,” Kellogg says. He was told that at any time he could “tap out and relax” until he was ready to grow again. To this day, Nick has never asked to slow down.