Welding Tips and Tricks

My youngest son has been working with me for the last week. He's been showing promise and is finding out in short order, that welding is much more challenging than he could have imagined. There's a whole other realm of thought process that is hard to impress on a young person without actually throwing them right in it. Layout mentality, the math, a real perception of time and efficiency and absolute, intense focus.

On this particular fence part, he burned part of the cast finial off and I told him to move on and come back to it and et it cool off. He was sure it was stuffed. I went over and made him watch me rebuild it with little pulsed weld beads to where it wasn't even noticeable just as the part stands in the photo. Now my boss wants to keep him around. He's done all that has been asked of him this past week.


And he welded all the interior framing of this.


And here was a pretty difficult weld he pulled off using a walking technique. Not bad for a cub.

Fantastic! I'm looking forward to my boys being old enough.

Both my boys are joining the welding ranks and it's nice to have something in common to talk about. It may be nice to have a fab shop someday where we could all work together, providing we didn't kill each other in the meantime.

Oh and don't think your tools will be where you left them once they enter your space, just a warning.

Len

i envy you guys a have a garage (shop) full of welding, cutting, machine tools
and all my kids want to do in it it drop off what thy need fixed or built.
none of them are interested enough to stick around to learn, just drop and run.
craig

Good on ya, TamJeff, and good on your son! Cool that you get to work with your son, and that he gets to work with you.

I spoke with a woman (some years ago now) who had moved in with her parents and was a little reluctant to admit it. I pointed out that she was able to get to know her parents as adults, on an adult/peer level, and could put aside the parent-child relationship (in the sense of parents telling the kid what to do and how to do it). I worked with my Dad, some of my best memories of my Dad are of those days.

Seconded. Lots of good times to be had when you don't have a upper/lower relationship going on.