Saturday, April 13, 2013

            My father is a welder, and worked as a welder for 30 plus years.  Because he worked in a shop, we had no welder at home.  Fusing metal together was a bit of a mystery to me.  I just knew that when Dad came home, he smelled like welding; that is the smoke from welding.  Just smelling that smell today brings back memories of Dad coming home from work and laying down on the floor while us kids climbed all over him and rifled through his pockets to find a package of peanuts or gum he had bought from a vending machine at work.  I thought it odd to have a skill that we couldn’t use at home because we didn’t have a welding machine.  In the mid-60’s, Dad found a used machine that he bought and brought home.  It was heavy with steel wheels and a tongue to move it like a wagon.  It was a stick welder, and I didn’t know there was anything else at the time. 

For the non-welders out there, stick welding is a common term for MMA, or Manual Metal Arc welding.  By transforming line voltage into low voltage-high amperage current, an arc can be created by touching the hot lead to the grounded lead.  This hot arc can be controlled to melt away the welding rod on the hot side as well as the grounded steel on the other. The rod and the grounded metal fuse together, the melting rod joining and filling in the gap between the grounded steel pieces you want to join.  Oxidation contaminates the welding joint, so to avoid oxidation, a flux is used to keep oxygen out of the weld.  On a welding rod used in stick welding, the rod is coated with flux.  The other common type of welding at home is MIG, or Machine Inert Gas welding.  In MIG welding, wire on a spool is fed through a hose to a “gun”. The hose is pressurized with an inert gas flux that surrounds the wire as it leaves the gun.  The “gun” is electrically hot while the work is electrically grounded and the arc is created and maintained as the wire is automatically fed into the arc. MIG welding is generally cleaner and doesn’t leave you with a cooled chemical flux coating on the weld as the gas just dissipates during the process. Very similarly, some welding wire is supplied on a spool with a flux core and can be used in a MIG machine without the gas.  MIG welding is generally much easier to learn and machines for home use became common in the 80’s and 90’s. 

Growing up in the home of a welder, one might have thought that I would have been well trained in the art, but I didn’t get to do much welding at home, apart from observing and a few basic lessons Dad gave me.  In those years, he bought a machine that his shop was getting rid of and sold the old one to my uncle, Dick Shires.   After I joined the Army and we moved to Japan, I decided we needed a swing set in our back yard, so I began frequenting the dump and soon collected enough pipe to construct one.  There was a metal shop on post that let me use their equipment and all the rod I could burn, so I put together a swing set with a chinning bar on one end, and Robert and Jennifer endlessly played on it. 

We moved to Fort Huachuca in Arizona after we came back to the US, and one of my first acquisitions was a Lincoln “buzz box” stick welder that I could plug into the dryer plug and weld in the back yard.  With even more children of swinging age, I put together another, even bigger, swing set complete with an overhead ladder.  Hours of welding galvanized pipe taught me the basics of stick welding.  I took that welder with us to Kentucky and Germany and finally to Alaska. 

While we had been gone, Dad acquired a MIG welder.  I had to build a rack for the top of our Suburban, and laid all the pieces out on the worktable at his house when he brought out the MIG.  With about 2 minutes of instruction, I learned to use it and quickly decided MIG was MUCH easier than MMA.  When we got to Alaska, I began looking for a MIG welder and finally found a Hobart Beta-MIG 200 which I have used at least weekly for many years. 

I suppose you could say that it is in my blood and certainly part of my heritage, but I truly enjoy welding.  Creating something useful from a pile of steel is stimulating and rewarding.  My children got to weld as much as they wanted to, but never wanted to very much.  Robert now has his own MIG machine so he doesn’t have to borrow mine, and Jonathon has taken welding as part of his course of study in Mechanical Engineering and enjoys it.  It seems that I have a never-ending list of projects that are now only waiting for the snow to melt so I can get to the steel.