North Island Secondary School (NISS) students Thomas Symons and Kenton Browne have been working hard in shop class on a custom bike rack for the Village of Alert Bay. The bike rack is being designed as a memorial for a long-time Alert Bay community member who passed away.
Scherer “did a lot of biking around Alert Bay, and he passed away about a year ago,” said NISS Shop Teacher John Bramham. “He was also a big donator to the library, so the library wants to put the bike rack in front of the library with a plaque on it.”
NISS Principal Jay Dixon added that it was a “community service project. They pay for the materials, our students create it, and then the students give it back to the community.”
The project mainly involved a lot of “welding, bending the pipes and the tubes, the seat is actually cast aluminum, and a lot of machining processes went into the drilling of the pipes,” Bramham said. Symons, who’s been welding for two or three months now, is the welder on the project and Browne bent the wheels.
“There’s still a few little fix ups left,” said Bramham, adding that the project should be finished in a week or two. Ultimately, the main reason the students chose to work on the project was “for the memory of him,” said Browne, adding that the shop class’ motto is to “have a plan and do something.”
Symons said you “can’t be afraid to make a mistake, theres no reason to be afraid,” and that he’s most proud of the fact that the custom bike rack is “going to be around for a while with our names on it.”