Ken Winterling
Mechanical, Electrical, Sewing Machines, plus!
Cafes: Middletown, Mamakating, Warwick, Montgomery, Woodbury
If you’ve been to one of our Orange County cafés over the past few years, you have probably seen Ken Winterling hard at work. Ken is an electrical/mechanical repair coach who will try to repair almost anything, including sewing machines, toys and clocks. I asked him if he had any ‘specialty’ items he fixed. His reply? “If I fix it, it is a ‘specialty.’ If I can’t fix it then it isn’t.”
Ken has also been responsible for implementing a lamp parts box at every café where he volunteers. Lamps are one of the items most often brought to Repair cafés and he realized having a well-stocked lamp parts box was essential to a successful cafe. He adds, “With a maintained inventory we can repair almost every lamp brought in.” Ken based his parts box on one he saw at his first Warwick Repair Cafe where Bob “FixItBob” Berkowitz had established a simple inventory system. True to the generous spirit of the repair movement, Ken has even assisted new café organizers in other counties of our network to set up parts boxes and source lamp and electrical parts, and we are eternally grateful for his willingness to share his expertise.
Ken started volunteering with RCHV in 2019 when he saw a notice in his local newspaper about the Middletown Repair Cafe. Ken says at his very first repair café, “A Times-Herald Record reporter spent a lot of time watching me work, asking questions about the repairs, and taking pictures. Imagine my surprise when I looked at the newspaper the next morning and saw my picture in the upper right-hand corner of page 1! Now I had no choice but to volunteer at other Repair Cafes!”
Before retiring, Ken spent 45 years working in the telecommunications field, work he started at just 17 years old when he repaired teletype machines and modems for Anderson-Jacobsen Teletype. During his long career in the field, he worked in many different roles at Timeplex, Western Union, Lederle Labs and Mercedes-Benz, where worked for 31 years.
Now that he’s retired, Ken enjoys spending time riding a hybrid bicycle and hiking. He’s also been an FCC licensed amateur (ham) radio operator for almost 55 years and is a retired volunteer NYS EMT and NYS EMT Instructor. And as so many of our repair coaches do, he has a true passion for repair work. In addition to the many repair cafes he attends, sometimes accompanied by his wife, Terri, who volunteers as a jewelry repair coach, Ken can be found in his home workshop working on electrical, electronic, and mechanical items and toys, new and old radio receivers, transmitters and guitar amplifiers as well as vintage equipment with vacuum tubes.
If you have any questions for Ken, you can reach him at wa2lbi@gmail.com or at his ham radio callsign WA2LBI.
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