‘Like son, like father.” is a refrain often repeated at the Harbeck house.
For two years, Brian Harbeck has held a steady job that he loves and plans to build a career around. He’s won two statewide precision machining competitions and, at 18, is confident he’ll spend his life using computer-operated machines to craft screws, bone plates and other metal parts.
Jim Harbeck’s future is less certain. He taught special education for 20 years, became a real estate agent, then quit it all to follow his son.
Now he’s taking night classes at the school his son attends in the morning, Sno-Isle Tech Skills Center, while looking for jobs like the one his son landed.
On Wednesday, Brian Harbeck will graduate from Snohomish High School with a steady job, two state titles in his tool belt and a precision machining apprenticeship on the way. He was named the Sno-Isle Tech Skills Center precision machining student of the year and plans to compete soon at a national event.
Though he’s won scholarships, Harbeck doesn’t want to go to college. He’d rather be in a shop, using trigonometry and computer codes to make metal parts with a journeyman machinist. That’s more interesting than sitting in a lecture hall, listening to a professor, he said.
“It’s fun,” the lifelong Snohomish resident said. “The whole academic side doesn’t really appeal to me. I like this stuff here — and it’s a respectable career.”
It doesn’t hurt that machinists in Washington can make about $21.30 an hour.
Harbeck is ready for hard work.
He currently attends class at Sno-Isle in Everett and at Snohomish High School from 7:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. Then he heads to work at Advantage Manufacturing Technologies in Monroe, where he makes medical screws that hold bones in place.
Sometimes he doesn’t get home until 10 p.m. On the weekends, he sits at the kitchen table with his dad, 58, and helps him learn the codes and machining secrets he’s mastered.
Jim Harbeck looks at his son and is proud.
The younger Harbeck has what the elder is still looking for: a career he loves.
— Kaitlin Manry
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