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Minibike building classes give students hands-on experience in construction

Volunteer Aaron Williams, left, shows Centennial High sophomore Roman Grebelnik the finer points of placing the chain onto the main sprocket of his minibike.

It has no formal affiliation with any trade group, company or organization, but a fabrication and manufacturing class created last year by a pair of retired high school teachers in east Multnomah County is giving students a real-world look at machining, welding and other potential career paths.

Dubbed the minibike club, the class is a joint effort of teachers Mark Watts and Tim Gutfleisch, as well as a handful of parent volunteers. Students who already are taking part in metal shop classes at either Centennial High School or Reynolds High School are eligible for the course, which allows participants to build their own minibike from the ground up. Once up and running, the functional minibikes, each complete with a 3.5 horsepower engine, can be used by the students recreationally.

“I think it’s an important thing that these kids have input into,” said Aaron Williams, a volunteer whose son graduated from Centennial more than 20 years ago. “We used to make electric go-carts here and that program was dying, so it was like, let’s see what else we can do then.”

Two years ago, the switch to gasoline-powered minibikes was made.

Centennial High School sophomore Roman Grebelnik uses a grinder while working on the frame of a minibike he built as part of a welding and fabrication night course. (Photos by Josh Kulla/91��Ƶ)

“Last year we had about 10 kids,” Gutfleisch said. “We combined forces and started making the minibikes and it took us quite a bit longer. This year we got our act together a little bit more, and I think we’re going to do it another year. There are a lot of students who are very interested.”

Students in east Multnomah County suffered from the closure in 2016 of ACE Academy, a charter high school that provided training and education in architecture, construction and other trades. The school was a joint venture between the Centennial, Reynolds and Gresham-Barlow school districts.

Now, more modest efforts are filling in the gaps in the area. The minibike club is just one way of providing automotive and metalworking instruction – something that hasn’t existed at Centennial since the 1980s at least.

“That’s the idea,” Williams said. “The schools have run off the vocational tech classes, so this is what little I can do to have the kids learn real-life stuff.”

Once youths realize they enjoy metalworking, Gutfleisch said, the odds of making a career out of it increase markedly.
“Once they realize they like doing it, they change a hobby into a career,” he said. “That’s our goal, is to get students interested in this more as a career than as a weekend hobby.”

Brothers and Centennial High School students James and Yair Barrera took a fabrication and manufacturing course to improve their metalworking skills and build their own minibikes.

The opportunities are there in the workforce. Oregon right now imports about 30 percent of its welders, even for union jobs that require in-state labor.

“Even with that we’re still hiring 30 percent out of the state,” Gutfleisch said. “It’s one of those things when they talk about increasing the number of products built in the U.S., it sounds good, but if we don’t have the workers, we can’t increase the products they make. It’s great to bring jobs back, but nobody knows how to do them.”

The minibikes created by students are crafted from one-inch steel tubing. Watts explained that while he creates some of the parts from metal tubing, students learn to bend the tubing to specification, and then machine and weld the entire frame together.

Then a Predator two-stroke gasoline engine is installed, and the transmission, brakes and throttle are hooked up. Students are even required to sew together the upholstery for the seats, as well as powder-coat the frames in the color of their choosing.

As a result, students get valuable lessons in a host of skill areas.

“It’s an evening thing for our metal shop students,” Watts said. “And when they’re done they get a minibike out of it. For $200 they have an old-school minibike with brakes and everything. That’s the motivation – to say they have a minibike.”
It’s also competitive.

“I was the first to finish my bike,” Centennial sophomore Roman Grebelnik said during a spring session as he watched his friend and fellow student, Dennis Cherchenko, give his bike a test ride around a rainy school parking lot.

That came after Grebelnik discovered he would have to grind off the edge of a bracket that had been impacting the drive chain. A few minutes and plenty of sparks later, his minibike was operational again.

While Grebelnik said he has learned plenty from the class about problem-solving, machining and metal inert gas welding, he actually is more interested in software programming as a possible career. Nonetheless, he will take away valuable experience from the course – and, of course, an operational minibike.

“Last year as a freshman, I saw the older kids building minibikes, and I wanted to do it too,” Grebelnik said. “I joined the class last year and I took it again this year just to build a minibike. That’s all I wanted to do. I eventually want to be a programmer, but this is just a hobby for now.”

Reynolds student Josh Blegen said he heard about the course in summer 2017 after chatting with Gutfleisch. It immediately drew his interest and his father’s – Jim Blegen is a motorcycle enthusiast. Eventually, both started attending the weekly sessions.

“I started going to the class, but then he started coming more and got really involved with it too,” Josh Blegen said. “And I learned that he knew a lot more about bikes in general than I thought, so that was good.”
Jim Blegen said they even pursued opportunities to tackle homework.

“We’ve taken it home, we’ve taken it to his uncle’s trailer repair shop, where (Josh) welded it and painted it and did the upholstery work,” Jim Blegen said. “Just watching him put it together and helping oversee it, it’s been fun.”

Josh Blegen said the experience has motivated him to look to welding for a future career. It’s the part of the building process he’s found most agreeable. Getting the engine to work properly – well, that’s another can of worms.

“Probably learning about how the engine and the throttle and how that works,” he said when asked which part of the process was the most difficult. “With the welding and stuff, I like that stuff and I’m alright with it, but with the throttle, he (Jim) helped me a lot with that and I didn’t know he knew so much about it.”

Gutfleisch laments the loss of once-ubiquitous vocational programs at both the middle and high school levels. Despite students’ enthusiasm, he said, they often lack basic knowledge of tools and other fundamentals that used to be taught even prior to high school. That is what he’s working to change, one student at a time.

“A lot of the kids I found don’t even know what a lot of the tools are, much less the skills involved,” he said. “People say you can teach this stuff at college, and it’s true. But what used to happen is the middle schools used to teach what I’m teaching now – and the product and end result was a lot better. Now the colleges are getting kids with a light knowledge compared to where they would be if they had the middle school programs.”