Frank taught me to weld. . He threw a few pieces over, stuck them together, handed me the welding gun, strutted around the shop, and smoked a cigarette and that was that. Within a few weeks, Frank either moved to a different job or got fired or quit and so it was just Neil and I.
Neil was the first person to really teach me much of anything in the shop and I still don't know if I have ever seen someone more capable at throwing metal together. Neil was country. He talked about his dad hunting moles by shooting dynamite and had a rope for a belt. He would go down to somewhere in Mississippi during the weekends and get tore up with the wild hill country folks. Everyone could see how smart and talented he was but dude was an early drunk and had that general air of a fuck up. Just the right person for me to emulate.
Though I grew up in a blacksmith shop, I did not really start doing steel work until I turned 18 and could work in the shop at Keeler Iron Works.
Rob would bring a set of drawings for the catwalks and then our two groups would split up which ones we were doing. We worked as teams across from each other. The angle iron we needed was bundled on a set of horses between us . We would flip of two pieces, one for each long side of the catwalk, measure them and then cut them down with a torch. I will never be good with a blow torch but was plenty capable for this type of work. While one of us did that, the other started gathering end pieces and flatbar cross pieces.
If you ever look up at your standard interstate billboard and see how it is built, you will see walkways go around for the lower part of the outside, as well as ones that run through the inside. On the stacked sign, there could also be upper catwalks. If a sign is a 14x48, then the walkways run the 48 foot length. Many of the signs were two sided, either a back to back or a V. We didn't build 50 foot long sections, the longest were usually 20 feet. The frames where made from angle iron, either 4x3x1/4 or 3x3x1/4. Angle iron is has a profile of an L. It is one of the most common structural shapes around because it is a useful shape for building and simple. One end would be clamped to a horse and that would be where we would pull our measurements from. The two sides would squared up and then tacked down. The other end would be measured in place and then tackled down. We would weld up the inside of the frame and then lay down the expanded metal. Expanded metal is that open grating that will catch on anything and will slice your hands wide open if you are not wearing gloves. You have to maneuver it like a 6 foot metal springy noodle. There is a method to picking them up off the stack and the sooner one learns it, the better. When I started, we were working with a bunch of galvanized expanded metal and that is worse in every way. Galvanized steel has been hot dipped in zinc so it can handle weather better than painted. I have never been to the galvanizer but I gather that is a shop you work at when you can't function most anywhere else. My experience with the stuff was always awful. Welding melts the zinc and pops hot fire everywhere and fills your welding vision with toxic fumes. The best way to get through that is to set your welder on max hot and burn straight through it. I would crave milk when I got home. It counteracts the zinc somehow. The shop did supply us with respirators but it was 95 in the shade so we wore the minimum of protection like the dumb men we were.
Once the sheets were set, we would put pieces of flatbar across the walkway where two sheets met. We would then tack down the expanded metal, putting a weld every 4-5 spaces down the sides and all across the ends. Neil liked to divide the walk in half, he would start at his end and stop halfway down. No matter how fast I could do my part, he would still finish his part.
After these were welded in, we flipped the catwalk over. He had no patience for waiting for the crane so we did it mostly by hand. After some time, we worked really well as a team and could flip one in a breeze, weld up the back side and then use the crane to stack it in the door so Zeke could come get the stack and spread it out for quality control and painting.
After a few weeks, we got to be plenty fast and mistake free. Neil would then spend as much time as possible making grills. The shop let you use scrap for personal projects and making smokers was the thing to do. Pitbull made the coolest one that looked like a pitbull, big Wes made a big trailer one, and Neil made a bunch. He would scrounge up parts from dumpster and scrap piles and while I finished up welding my half (remember, he was fast) he would assemble it on the floor beneath the catwalk. He would have that done before the day was over, along with getting his share of the work done. Not only was it fast, but it was right.
Periodically, Zeke would come flying in on his forklift with a catwalk and crow about us fucking up or Rob, the foreman, would be frantic to get us to slot a hole or cut it shorter so he could load his trailer and send out the sign.
I worked with these men and a several others and they were influential in a stage of my life but I know now more than ever that I really only knew them through work and periodically getting drunk together away from work. That being said, we often show our most pragmatic and effective selves at work so the good lessons were valuable. One thing that I have always recognized is that you can always learn something from someone and it helps if you can identify what they do best and pay attention.
Neil got made stuff fast and right. The speed came mostly from doing it right. He had the heavy heart of a man who fucks up at life on the constant basis but not in the shop. Whenever Zeke or Rob came in either gloating or cussing us out to fix what was wrong, we all innately looked at the catwalk to see if we did it. It was either us or them. Most of the time, it wasn't us but John, who worked with AC, was eager to assign blame. I followed Neil's lead on this and he never argued, even when he knew John was wrong. He would just look and see how it was going to get done and what steps we needed to take to do so. Neil would spit out some sunflower seeds, our side of the area looked like a bird house neither of smoked so we hate handfuls of sunflower seeds throughout the day, cuss under his breath and we would be done before it had happened and we moved on.
Pointing the finger and blaming others for mistakes makes us powerless. It is, almost invariably, us that messed up.
One time I mentioned about how I didn't like making mistakes in my work, and Thomas, who is a fabricating savant, said, "If you ain't fucking up, then you ain't working." We all mess up, I moreso than anyone I know, but have become so deeply ingrained with assigning blame that we dismiss our involvement both in the problems and solutions. Our relationships with each other and society are far more complicated than some ugly catwalks but from the senate down to the custodian, people are so focused on accountability they let the bath keep flooding. The tragedy in Flint is a great example. People should go to jail, not for the initial big screw up. They fucked up from an oversight and how that happened needs to be recognized but if they responded immediately with the resources to properly fix the problem with expediency, then the world would be a much better place.
New realities occurs with each birth and end with each death. They react the with the others to create the total timeline
We have reached strange point where the right to speech does not mean that one responsible for the content of his or her words. Innocent till proven guilty is not a protection of right until proven wrong.
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