“Reverse the polarity!” instructs Jay Stryker, facilitator of industrial-era educational workshops held in the Arts Bank Friday evenings.
Stryker is speaking to 9-year-old Tavo Vincent-Warner, who’s holding electrical wires connected to a d-cell battery to the positive and negative terminals of a siren.
“It’s not enough juice,” the 9-year-old comments, after switching the wires fails to activate the siren.
He sets the siren down and tests the wires on a light bulb to make sure they work. Immediately, the bulb lights with a dull red glow.
“With higher voltage, we could really make it scream,” Stryker comments, a spark of curiosity in his blue-grey eyes.
The two, huddled over a small table inside the converted bank, are working on a drivable robot. Tools are strewn about on the table — old screws rust inside plastic containers stacked in neat order next to them, and more tools wait for use inside metal boxes resting on the floor.
“This is science fair, show-biz, hands-on,” Stryker describes enthusiastically during a break in instruction, “and then sometimes we get into architecture.”
It’s a familiar site for those who know the classes exist. Each week for about the past two years, Stryker has taught area youths trade skills, such as how to swing a hammer, soldering and the correct way to use power tools.
Of all the useful information he presents, Stryker says the classes are mostly about expanding the curiousity of his students — and teaching them valuable life lessons.
Right now, Vincent-Warner is his only student, which Stryker says is about average for the class.
“It’s a very nice way to start out,” the 9-year-old explains, looking up from his work for a brief moment. “It shows the fundamentals of engineering.”
Vincent-Warner says he’s very interested in engineering, and so far has finished two work tables and a stand for a soldering iron at the workshops.
Stryker guides the learning workshops with a gentle hand, allowing plenty of room for mistakes, offering instruction only when it’s requested.
So far, Vincent-Warner has designed and built the robot entirely himself.
“One of the skills with this thing is to squelch frustration,” Stryker comments, while watching his student drill holes in the side of a board. “What you see here is working at a pace that works. Not my pace. The pace that works.”
The tools and equipment Stryker brings to class each week are ordinary: batteries, light fixtures, soldering materials and basic power tools; however, the lessons learned by his students are worth far more.
For Vincent-Warner, the weekly workshop is an opportunity to soak up 60-plus years of trade experience from a man who has done everything from building underwater robots for nuclear power plants, to reviewing water mains with the State Department in Egypt and Southern Africa.
“This is essentially manufacturing engineering, which is a third-year college class,” Stryker, who was born in New Jersey, continues about the class, w
He became interested in how things work while fixing radios his dad brought home. He has a background in robotics, hospital radiation equipment, mathematics, education and computers.
After earning a bachelor’s degree in science education and a master’s degree in radiation physics, Stryker said he joined the Peace Corps, where he taught about 45 math and science classes per week. Since then, he has also taken continuing education classes at a few colleges and universities, including Harvard.
Today, he’s retired, or at least on paper he is.
Aside from holding seats on a few town boards, the weekly classes he teaches are an off-shoot of his involvement with the Greenfield-based Museum of Our Industrial Heritage.
“I’m a guy in the museum who thinks kids should do this,” Stryker says about how the classes got their start, adding that he’s been mentoring kids and young adults since high school, when he became a math and science tutor.
A few weeks before the class with Vincent-Warner, Stryker was in his home in South Deerfield, which doubles as a storage place for a treasure trove of knick-knacks and 1970s-era metalworking machines.
From drill presses to iron tools to 10-foot-long, massive turret lay metalworking machines to every machine part imaginable, it’s a machinist’s dream-become-reality.
“To my mind, manual is absolutely the best, it’s like playing a sport, you have your body involved with the action that’s involved, whereas with a computer-controlled (machine) you just have a green button to go,” he said, when asked why he collects old machines. He added that he also knows how to operate more modern, computerized machines.
Packed floor-to-ceiling inside a white garage next to his house is everything from the turret lay machine that is used to build space parts currently on the moon, to a miniature, scaled-down train Styker built himself using designs from a full-sized train, to a collection of organ pipes.
He’s keeping at least a few of the machines for the industrial museum, until he can have them moved to the museum and housed there permanently.
In front of the half-built train, Stryker had a large diagram of a locomotive. He explained that in order to build the steam-powered miniature, he had to look up and calculate steam tables and dynamics to make sure the internal pipes will build up enough pressure on the miniature model.
Outside the garage, Stryker parks a 1960s-era Volvo that he has kept on the road by repairing it himself. The old Volvo isn’t perfect — the paint is chipping and the interior needs repair — but when he pulled it out from the driveway and opened up the throttle, its engine roared to life.
After five minutes with Stryker, it’s obvious that he teaches trade skills because he’s passionate about keeping industrial-era information alive by passing his knowledge on to the next generation.
“I’m doing this because of my own personal crusade to build up the trades that have been lost,” he said, while walking toward the exit through a narrow path in the stuffed garage. “I’m having the kids experience the agonies and joys of design.”
His crusade is working — the passion he exudes for creating and fixing things has been taken up by Vincent-Warner.
“He’s sort of like a grandfather, and a mentor, and a really good engineer and physics teacher all wrapped up into one,” says Lu Vincent, Tavo Vincent-Warner’s mom, after Friday evening’s class.
According to her, she wasn’t able to find a good outlet for her son’s creative mind before Stryker’s class.
“Tavo was like, ‘mom, how do you plug this solar panel into the wall?’ — that’s where Jay comes in,” she explains. “He’s like a mad scientist in the basement, but now he has a teacher.”
You can reach Andy Castillo at: acastillo@recorder.com
or: 413-772-0261, ext. 263
On Twitter: @AndyCCastillo