Before researchers and students could create custom pieces at a campus 3D printing facility, they described the parts they needed to a machinist. The machinist would create the piece with whirring saws and spinning lathes, using expert skills to create the piece down to its finest detail. It's a method still used today. One of those expert machinists, a man now retiring with more than five decades of experience, is David Simmons.

Simmons worked for Poly Scientific, which eventually became Moog, for 26 years. He decided to make a change in 1999 at the age of 45, setting his sights across the town of Blacksburg on Virginia Tech.

“I asked myself if that was what I wanted to do, or did I want to do something else?” Simmons said. “I put in for two jobs at Tech and didn’t get either one. I finally got an interview with engineering science and mechanics and was hired by Ed Henneke.”

Edmund G. Henneke, the head of the Department of Engineering Science and Mechanics (now merged with the Department of Mechanical Engineering), hired Simmons as a machinist and promoted him to shop supervisor the following year. With Simmon’s background in industry, Henneke also tasked him with a new challenge.

The first open machine shop on campus

“He [Edmund Henneke] told me he was pouring a lot of money into the machine shop, and he thought the shop might be able to become self-supportive,” Simmons said. “I worked with the financial team to come up with a cost structure that would buy new equipment and furnish the shop with whatever we needed.”

Simmons also opened the machine shop up to the rest of campus, offering the service to “anyone who came through the door with money.” For a time, theirs was the only such facility. After the third month of the new model, the shop was cost-positive by $230. The shop was able to replace machines as they broke or became obsolete, keeping the pieces they created at premium quality. Over 27 years, he replaced each of the more than 40 machines in the shop except three: a band saw, a surface grinder, and a lathe.

The lathe, incidentally, is still the most precise piece of equipment in the shop. It was manufactured in the 1940s and taken off a ship that deployed in World War II, remaining in constant use through this year. Like Simmons, it brings a wealth of experience that its peers can only dream of.

Another legacy

After his final day of work was May 2025, Simmons said the things he’ll miss the most are the people he worked with. This especially includes longtime friend and colleague Paul Siburt, and fellow machinist Darrell Link.

While his last day in the office marks the end of a legacy of professional service, he will turn his attention to another legacy from which he will never retire: his family. Simmons and his wife Bonnie have a son, a daughter, and six grandchildren. He looks forward to teaching them the principles of gardening, hunting, and living a good life.

“Paul and Darrell helped me pack up the office, and I had my old toolboxes from machining through previous years,” Simmons said. “I really do miss all the folks that I work with, but I stay in touch with them.”