In Dillingham, a city with just over 2,000 year-round residents, there are roughly four places where you can get your car worked on. That's including the local high school’s shop class.
On Feb. 26., three Dillingham Middle/High School students were at work on two vehicles, parked bumper to bumper. The first was an ongoing class project that belongs to the teacher, Mike Yingst.
“So the engine was seized up. We put oil in it and broke loose the engine, and now (we’re) changing the oil a second time because there are metal shavings in the oil,” Yingst said.
The students hoisted the car on a large auto lift to drain the oil from below. Yingst helped out when they needed it, but mostly let them handle the job.
They started the engine and then moved to their second project: changing the oil on a 1977 Ford F-150 owned by class member Matthew Kropoff, a junior. He calls it an “old-school classic” and has been fixing it up since he bought it in 2019 — years before he could legally drive.
“I took the hood off and pulled the old motor out with a cherry picker,” Kropoff said. “And then I put this one in.”
He’s also spent hours working on it at home, rebuilding the motor and transmission and replacing the transfer case — a part weighing over 100 pounds. A five-person team helped him lift it by hand. But it slipped and they jumped out of the way as it crashed to the ground.
Yingst says the shop offers a safer place to take on challenging projects.
“Giving the students a space where they can do those sorts of things safely and with supervision, is kind of nice,” he said. “That way they don’t have to worry about dropping it on their head in their backyard or whatever.”
Yingst also teaches woodworking and welding.
The classes are funded in part by the Bristol Bay Regional Career and Technical Education program. It’s a partnership between four school districts — Dillingham City, Lake and Peninsula, Southwest Region, and Bristol Bay.
“Basically it's given us the money to update the shop, like all those yellow welders right there, that all used to be gas welding and no one really gas welds here,” Yingst said. “So all these welders in front here are new, and then one in the back is new.”
Alex Buholm, a senior at the school, isn't in the auto mechanics class this semester. But she was in the shop using her free period to repair a community member's snowblower.
She said she's been repairing machinery with her dad since she was a kid, and she’s been taking shop classes since starting high school.
“It's fun, you get to learn new things, you get to learn how to actually fix your car instead of taking it to a shop and spending, I don't know, hundreds or maybe thousands of dollars on something that you can fix yourself for $50,” Buholm said.
After high school, Buholm says she plans to join the International Union of Operating Engineers' Alaska chapter to be an equipment operator on the North Slope. She says she’s known her career path since she was a kid, and these classes give her the skills she needs.
Editor’s note: The students checked the reporter’s car when she moved to town.
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