Museum interns re-enact precision past
Toolbox
By Josh O'Gorman STAFF WRITER - Published: July 11, 2009
WINDSOR — Alexander Cesari looked up from a machine that cuts notches into a disk to make a gear.
"About one out of three people have more to tell me than I have to tell them," he said.
The 18-year-old, with shaggy hair hanging around his safety glasses, was being modest. He is one of six interns who are showing the evolution of manufacturing as part of American Precision Museum's program "From Muskets to Motorcars: Yankee Ingenuity and the Road to Mass Production."
Cesari, a Chelsea resident who recently graduated Northfield Mount Hermon School in Mount Hermon, Mass., moved back and forth between antiquated machine shop presses and lathes and a modern, computer-guided milling machine and demonstrated the links between the past and the future of manufacturing.
"They're really more like historical interpreters than interns," said Ann Lawless, the museum's executive director, of the six students, who range in age from 16 years old to 20 years old. The program is a collaboration between the museum and the River Valley Technical Center in Springfield, which has loaned the modern manufacturing equipment to the museum.
The museum and RVTC also collaborated on the grant from the Department of Labor to fund the program. During the past two years of its existence, the Department of Labor's Next Generation program has distributed about $1.3 million in grants, enabling 773 internships across the state, said Greg Voorhies, a senior grant administrator.
"The American Precision Museum is really an example of a successful program in our eyes," Voorhies said. The program was created to address the problem of young people leaving the state in search of work, but the grant recipients should not be dependent upon the grant money every year, he said.
Voorhies applauded the museum's intern program, which reduced the amount it asked for from $33,532 in 2007 to $18,745 in 2008, while expanding the program from two interns last year to six this year.
Cesari, who will enter Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute this fall to study automotive engineering, said he enrolled in the intern program because there has been a breakdown in communication between the engineers who design the manufacturing tools and the machinists who use them.
Tuesday afternoon, Clarence and Helen Hopkins of Thompson, Conn., toured the museum. Clarence Thompson worked as a machinist for 28 years and continues to operate a Bridgeport lathe — just like one on display in the museum — in his garage as he restores classic cars.
"It's like he died and went to heaven," Helen Thompson said of the exhibit, which runs until the end of October. However, the demonstrations will likely end before September as the interns go back to school.
The museum is open 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily. For more information, visit www.americanprecision.org or call 674-5781.
josh.ogorman@rutlandherald.com
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