From highways to quilts: KDOT employee uses engineering skills to design and create

Joyce Muhlenbruch meets with customers at her quilt shop, Birds of a Feather in Dodge City.

By Lisa Knoll,

Southwest Kansas 

Public Affairs Manager

Joyce Muhlenbruch, KDOT’s Area Construction Engineer in Dodge City, was recently featured in the Dodge City Daily Globe, but it wasn’t for her ability to highway engineering skills  It was for her ability and talent for designing and engineering breathtaking quilts.

Muhlenbruch says there were always quilting and sewing projects in their home when she was growing up in Hanoverton, Ohio.  She learned to sew by the time she was five and was quilting with the church ladies by the time she was in middle school. 

However, she didn’t make her first quilt until she was expecting her first child.  She decided to make a Raggedy Ann and Andy quilt with a denim back, which she hand-pieced and quilted herself. 

“I wanted to give him a gift that was part of me.  That denim was so hard to quilt.  My fingers hurt,” she remembers. 

When her second son was born five weeks early, she had to hand tie his quilt to finish it for him.  Muhlenbruch continued quilting as her boys grew up, primarily making baby quilts for friends, but always found herself changing or adding something to the pattern to make it uniquely hers. 

A quilt designed by Mulenbruch is
on display.

In 2010, Muhlenbruch accepted her current position at KDOT and moved to Dodge City.  Her boys had grown up and her husband, Michael remained in Winfield for two years wrapping up business.  With time on her hands, Muhlenbruch spent evenings at the sewing machine in her Dodge City apartment.  She joined Miss Kitty’s Quilt Guild and eventually began spending her Saturdays helping at Country Quiltin’ By Design, a quilt shop, in Plains.  When the opportunity to buy the shop became a possibility, Muhlenbruch and her sister, Leslie, began to consider how this could work, eventually buying and moving the shop to Dodge City.

Now located at Eryn’s Downtown Center at 509 N. 2^nd Ave. in historic Dodge City, the shop has been re-named Birds of a Feather Quilt Shop and is home to over 800 bolts of high-quality cotton fabric, thread, notion, patterns and a longarm quilting machine. 

 The shop also features quilts for sale and plenty of room for quilting classes and retreats.  An inviting seating area overlooks Second Avenue, offering customers a comfortable place to sit and contemplate the next quilt or just share tips and tricks.

Muhlenbruch stands in front of her storefront in Dodge City.

Leslie handles the store during the week while Muhlenbruch is busy with her KDOT job.  Muhlenbruch joins Leslie in the evenings and on the weekends and can usually be found at the longarm machine working on customers’ projects. As the only Quilts of Valor shop in Dodge City, Muhlenbruch hopes to be able to make one Quilt of Valor quilt each month.

Muhlenbruch says, “The best part of quilting is the engineering of the quilt. It’s more fun than engineering roads.  I get to use my creativity to adapt and design patterns.”

Stay curious: How STEM opportunities can change the world

By Mallory Goeke
Communications Specialist

Our country and our world are experiencing technological advances at a rapid pace. We often hear stories about the next new invention that improves lives makes headlines.

The roads we traveled on, the water system that we drink from, and even items like our smart phones had to be invented and engineered by someone. Who knows? maybe someone who reads this article could create the next big invention.

Any new discovery or piece of technology requires knowledge and the critical thinking skills to create change. And that is where Science, Technology, Engineering and Math comes in. 

According to the U.S. Department of Education, STEM programs help us understand the world by preparing students with the knowledge and skills to solve problems, make sense of information and interpret data to make decisions and choices that will lead us into the future. 

In an article by the PEW Research Center, STEM occupations have grown 79% since 1990. That means there are 17.3 million jobs related to these fields today. Jobs in scientific and technological fields pay well and those who work in those jobs are making a big difference and saving lives.

Students today may not realize it now, but the choices they make and the classes they attend will have an impact on the world around them. Now is the time to begin thinking about how they can create change.

Students had the opportunity to attend a STEM Camp sponsored by KDOT at Washburn University earlier this summer.

The Smithsonian Institute presented this scenario: There are four billion people on the planet who use a mobile phone. In the past two years, 90% of all of Earth’s data has been generated. The future is already here and citizens of the world who are fluent in STEM are needed.

In January 2018, The PEW Research Center found the U.S. placed 38/71 in math and 24^th in science. One reason could be that some students do not expand past what is familiar and comfortable.

Change and growth takes time and it means stretching past our comfort zones to learn and improve. We should be expanding our limits and learning new skills.

After all, if we had never looked to the stars and felt unsatisfied with not knowing what’s beyond our atmosphere, would we ever have made it to the moon and beyond?

Changing the world knows no age limitation. A recent story from NPR featured Nora Keegan, a fifth grader who wanted to make a difference for children who were overwhelmed by the noise that hand dryers produce. Using a professional decibel meter, she visited more than 40 public restrooms between 2015 and 2017. She discovered that public hand dryers do produce noise that exceeds 100 decibels, which can lead to hearing loss, learning disabilities and ruptured ear drums. 

Nora is 13 now, and her studies were recently published in the Canadian Journal Paediatric and Child Health.

So, whether you are a student, entering the work force or you’re already have a career it’s never too late to learn something new.  

We encourage everyone to stay curious and look for opportunities where they can change their world.

KDOT summer interns discuss learning experiences in southeast Kansas

By Priscilla Petersen,
Public Affairs Manager
Southeast Kansas

Two interns in KDOT’s District Four, Stephen “Alex” Link and Will Geary, honed their engineering skills at field construction offices and spent many hours working in the summer sun this year.

Steven "Alex" Link participated worked at
KDOT this summer as an Engineering
Technician at the Area Office in Garnett.

Link grew up in Burlington, and is beginning his junior year as a civil engineering major at Kansas State University. His internship was as an Engineering Technician at the Area Office in Garnett. Link said he appreciated the broad range of activities that KDOT offers. “Lots of internships don’t allow you to see something all the way through,” he explained. He worked on a variety of projects and was able to experience “what goes into making something.”

Among his learning experiences was a surface recycle on K-239. “I didn’t even know they could recycle asphalt,” he said.

Link said he was drawn to engineering since it’s more balanced between the indoor and outdoor working environments: “I’m not confined to the office all day.”

“The people have all been great,” he said of his co-workers at Garnett. Link kept active all summer, “trying to get as much experience as I can.” He said he might look into working at KDOT again, expanding his knowledge next summer with the research and design units at Topeka.

Will Geary, was an Engineering Technician Intern
at the Pittsburg Area Office this summer.

An Engineering Technician intern at the Pittsburg Area Office, Will Geary said engineering is a “very viable” career option. He plans to pursue professional options in football, his first choice, when he graduates from Kansas State University in December. Geary has played football for K-State, most recently during the 2017 season.

His major is mechanical engineering, but Geary said the civil engineering side has impressed him with its roads and bridges that “don’t move” the way machines do. “It’s been good learning as much as I can,” he said, praising the Pittsburg office for its supportive team players.

Much of his summer has been spent gaining knowledge about overlay projects. As it has rained fairly often, Geary has also become familiar with storm water pollution prevention plans.

He said he “really studied up” on the current bridge replacement project on K-126 at Pittsburg, in which the bridge is being constructed one half at a time. Unfortunately, he noted, wet weather has delayed progress.

Geary is from Topeka. His father was raised in McCune, where his grandmother still lives. “It’s been good spending time with Grandma,” he said, adding that “she’s been treating me right” and that he was able to help her out over the summer.

 Are you or someone you know interested in pushing your career further? Contact Debbie Wallace, KDOT Engineering Recruiter at debbie.wallace@ks.gov 

Using resources wisely: KDOT employees work smart to keep Kansas moving

KDOT employees routinely engineer ways to work smarter to save time and resources. They know it’s important to use taxpayer dollars wisely.

Two recent examples of working smarter come from District Five’s Medicine Lodge and Anthony subareas in south central Kansas.

Dewayne Roland, Highway Maintenance Supervisor for the Medicine Lodge Subarea creates a machine that helps him program school zone signals. 

The interesting contraption hanging on the wall to the side of Dewayne Roland, Highway Maintenance Supervisor for the Medicine Lodge Subarea, is one of them. 

Modeled after a similar creation that crews at the Anthony Subarea built, it saves Roland a lot of time programming school zone lights on K-2 in Barber County.

Roland checks the calendar for South Barber High School online, and inputs days that school is out for holidays, in-service days and the like. Then he takes the programmed control box to each of four poles and plugs it in, downloading the data he input so the lights don't flash on days school is closed. 

Now it takes just one person about two minutes per set of lights to program the school zones. It used to take two people.

"One person would read out the dates, and one would program the control box," Roland said. "It saves two people having to stand there and program each light. We just plug it into an identical control box, and it automatically downloads everything. Used to be you'd stand there 15, 20, 30 minutes."

Crews in Anthony recently completed building a storage rack for a hydraulic hammer that will help protect the piece of equipment by keeping it stored upright and out of the elements.

Equipment Operator Jason Wolff and Equipment Operator Senior Paul Thompson built the rack using six retired guard rail posts as H-beams, snow plow backup blades and spare iron.

Anthony Highway Maintenance Supervisor Greg Bayless, left, and Equipment Operator Jason Wolff pose with a storage rack for a hydraulic hammer that crews made with spare parts. 

The rack can be loaded with a forklift or loaded onto a truck. It can be moved to a job site or to storage.

“It’s supposed to be stored in an upright position with pressure on the point,” said Greg Bayless, Highway Maintenance Supervisor. “We’re trying to take care of our equipment.”

The rack with the hydra hammer and attachments on board weighs 1,760 pounds and took a week to make.

“I let them run with the design because they’re good builders to begin with,” Bayless said of Wolff and Thompson.

Hydra hammers are used for tasks such as hammering and breaking up concrete, cutting asphalt and tamping down materials such as dirt.

The hydra hammer fits the subarea’s new backhoe/loader. Crews can take the bucket off the backhoe and attach the hydra hammer.

The Area Mechanic in Winfield found videos about the hydra hammer, and “I had the whole subarea crew watch all of them,” Bayless said.

The Anthony crew estimates it would have cost $5,500 to have an outside company manufacture a similar rack. Anthony shares the hydra hammer, new rack and attachments with the Wellington Subarea. Similarly, the Wellington Subarea shares equipment Anthony doesn’t have.

“We want to be good stewards of KDOT resources,” Bayless said.