Seniors win top 2 places in state Auto Maintenance competition

Mingus Union High School senior Cameron Walker said students from the Western Maricopa Education Center, a vocational school in Surprise, have won the SkillsUSA state competition for Automotive Maintenance and Light Repair for the past few years in a row.

So, when he, senior Jordan Watson and a West-Mec student, Aiden Mohs, were called up for the top three awards presentation, Walker said he assumed Mohs won and was excited to maybe place second.

“Then they called the West-Mec kid first, and we were like, ‘oh, one of us is going to nationals,’” Walker said.

Watson came in second and Walker earned first.

“I’m excited to go to Georgia,” where the national competition will take place over the summer, Walker said.

The state competition in Phoenix on April 7 came after the regional competition in Prescott at the end of January.

Most of the competition was different tests on engine knowledge.

“One of them was an engine on a stand, and they just had little tags on it with numbers and asked, ‘what is this part?’” he said. “Or some of them were spread out on a table and had tags that says, ‘what is this part?’”

Auto Past

Walker has been working on engines since he was little, and has helped his dad, who’s a mechanic at BMW, with a bunch of his projects.

“I started working on my BMW, and he was like, ‘Yeah, I know BMWs,’” Walker said. “I’ve loved them ever since I was a kid, too. … Then I worked on my sister’s Honda for a while. Then I worked on his BMW with him, and it just grew into me loving cars.”

His classmate, Watson, said he’s worked on engines — particularly dirt bikes — since his freshman year.

“I didn’t have any of my own, but I’d always help my friends rebuild theirs,” he said.

Auto Class

In the three-year auto class at MUHS, students have an option of taking Auto 3 again their last year, but it isn’t required.

This year, “I decided to do welding instead,” Walker said. “But I’d say, comparison wise, we didn’t really do too much parts identification in this class. It was mainly just like working on the parts itself, where I was like, ‘OK, I know that part because I worked on it previously.’”

While MUHS auto teacher Tyler Bowers is new this year to the program, he said learning about engines and how they work is the core of the class.

He opened a box full of lawn mower engine parts the first-year students had disassembled.

“They bagged all the parts up, and they took a bunch of pictures of how to get them back together,” he said. “Hopefully they can get them back together, and they should start up at the end of the year.”

In the first year, the emphasis is on shop safety while working on engines.

Second-year students begin working on larger car engines. In year three, they begin learning the next steps of auto maintenance.

“We’ve got electrical trainers, training boards,” Bowers said. “We cover everything [we can in] three years, and try to touch base on every aspect of the car, how it works and how to fix it.”

Auto Future

Walker and Watson see themselves as mechanics past school. Watson wants to be a technician for Ford vehicles and Walker plans on attending Universal Technical Institute in California to become a BMW tech, like his dad, who lives and works at a BMW facility in the Golden State.

The pair went to the UTI’s Top Tech Challenge, a scholarship competition, earlier in the school year.

“One of the labs was a straight edge bar, a … on straight edge bar that had a cover on it,” Walker said. “And we both thought it was more of a grip and not a cover, so we measured it with the wrong end, and they gave us a zero all the way down.”

Even with the mistake, the two placed in the top half of the competition.

“We think if we took off that cover and measured it with the other side, we probably would have gotten top three at least,” Walker said.