Sunday, October 2, 2011

Welding

For all my manly skills, from felling trees to building barns and other complicated things to fixing broken equipment and farming for a living, I have a few skills that I need to hone and one of them is welding. I can cut steel with the best of them....that's easy, but even my very best welds (according to most of my kin and friends) look like chickens--t !

The reason behind my lack of welding ability isn't related to technical knowledge. I've got that down pat. The problem is that a good welder needs every bit as steady a hand as a good surgeon. I confess it. I have wobbly hands and very poor hand/finger dexterity. According to Melissa, watching me try to thread a small bolt/nut combination is like watching a normal person attempting to do the same while they are wearing ski gloves.

My wobbly hands are biting me in the rear right now. I snapped a stud off when I was tightening a wheel lug on the tractor yesterday and I don't posess enough enough steadiness in my hands to hold a nut in place long enough to spark up an arc and weld the damn thing in place to extract the remainder of the stud. So I'm going to have to pay somebody fifty bucks or more to drive to my farm to do thirty seconds worth of work which is very frustrating.

Oh well, could be worse I guess. At least I've got extremely pretty weather to stand around and wait for someone to show up to "rescue" me. :)

3 comments:

Owd Fred said...

Jason this is my hands

Burnt and scalded, cold and frozen, they are electrocuted on the fencer, and are ripped on the barbed wire, they scratch when you itch and they comb ya hair, they write your cheques, and are put forwards to receive, they lift your pint, and they feed you, what more could you expect from a loyal pair of hands.http://yewsfarm.blogspot.com/2011/09/hands-of-old-or-old-hands-i-had-skin-on.html

Fred
last few lines from

RuckusButt said...

I like what Fred said! It's true, your hands are skilled at many things, surely they don't have to be skilled at everything.

Way back when, in high school shop class we were graded on everything we made, of course. In welding I made some kind of shelf brackets. I was pretty decent at welding but impatient because the torches kinda scared me. I didn't let my metal heat up enough on one join and got a nice big bead of solder. Not good. I took a pair of pliers and, with all my might, pried that thing off. Got a pretty good mark on it, too.

Sometimes being smart (like having someone else do it, or "fixing" mistakes) is better than being skilled ;-)

Jason said...

RB; You're hired as my new welder ! :)

Of course you are right, but I'd like to be a jack of ALL trades, not just some of them !