8 ways to weld yourself into a vocation.

[El Jefe]

vo·ca·tion vo-’ka-shen noun
1. specified occupation, profession, or trade;
2. a special urge, inclination, or predisposition to a particular calling or career
3. work pursued for personal satisfaction first and personal gain second

It’s easy to paint the term “welder” with a broad brush. We usually use it in reference to those professions in which the machine is synonymous with its user, such as the pipeline welder or the iron worker. But there are others for whom the welder is a vital, pivotal tool used in the pursuit of the user’s passion-turned-business. These are the craftsmen, the artists, the builders, the makers – the vocations for which welding is a means to an end, but not the end itself.

The following pages celebrate a select few of these “vocational” welders. Their chosen paths are diverse, but the passion to create — with welding as part of that creative process — is the common thread that turns their vision to reality.

 

[El Jefe]

Photo © Justin LeVitt Photography
PRICE DAVIS

Owner, Price Davis Studios
@pricedavisart
Denver, CO

Davis is best known for his large-format installation art, crafted primarily from metal. The most recent and largest is a 28-foot-tall, three-piece, three-story steel sculpture entitled “Denver Lily,” which is on display at Denver International Airport.

Early dabbling in welding and encouragement from his shop teacher, whom Davis describes as the most influential person in his life, has led to a full-blown career as a metal sculptor. It didn’t come easy, though.

Davis began his career in furniture and loft design and spent several years as a successful real-estate developer. He bought and gutted dilapidated apartment buildings, transforming them into trendy, upscale places to live. This period of time helped him hone his artistic and fabricating skills until he could devote himself to his passion full time.

Because of his skill level with tools and using the fundamentals of business he learned, Davis’ ventures were profitable. He could and did most of the work himself, saving a substantial amount of money. “The real avenue of success came from the custom welding I did to make the apartment building hip, which drew a young, vibrant community of tenants,” Davis says.

He is now in a position to fulfill his long-term dream of building large-scale sculptures. He strives to make his art conceptually simple, accessible and interactive. “The purpose of art is to inspire, and I hope my work contributes to global inspiration in some way,” he points out.

His experience has given him a unique perspective and has made him determined to help like-minded artists. “We have to fight for the artist and support creative thinking,” he says. “Artists should be paid for their work and shouldn’t be kept poor. Everyone wants art; they just don’t want to pay for it. The idea of a starving artist is no joke.”

Davis knows the difficulty of trying to build an artistic career. He would like to write a book that draws on his own experiences to show up-and-coming artists how to navigate the potentially rough roads that lie ahead. He insists that artists could help themselves greatly by learning marketable skills to fall back on. He encourages high school students to seriously consider a career in the trades. “It’s a wonderful feeling to know you can fix or make anything you want. You will be proud of your abilities.” He would like to see parents encourage their children to follow a vocational career, if it’s what they want. “Though the path may not be easy, it is theirs to conquer and to thrive upon,” Davis says.

 

[El Jefe]

Photo ©Dominic Ricci
ERIC UNDERWOOD

Special Projects Manager, Ghostlight Industries
@GhostlightUS
Los Angeles, CA

The “need for speed” has become the cliché to describe an adrenaline addiction that can only be appeased by more miles per hour. As the guy in charge of fabricating a huge assortment of custom vehicles for movies and TV, when Underwood talks about speed, he’s referring to his daily race against the clock.

Underwood is never sure what might be in store for him when he shows up to work on any given day. Whether he’s building a vehicle designed to absorb a high-speed collision with a brick wall (and keep going) or prepping 1920s- and 1930s-era cars for a Ben Affleck movie, the only thing that’s consistent is the pace. “Someone will come to us with an idea, and we have to figure out how to design and execute that idea,” he says. “We do crazy builds in an accelerated, ridiculous time frame.”

Underwood’s passion fo cars began when he was a child. His father had some fabrication experience, enough to spark Underwood’s interest. To keep him out of trouble, Underwood’s dad bought him a Baja Bug (an original Volkswagen Beetle modified to operate off-road) when he was 18. He worked on the Bug whenever he could, doing whatever he could “on an 18-year-old’s budget.” It’s where Underwood began to demonstrate a talent for putting things together. “I had to figure it out on my own,” he notes. Through trial and error, Underwood built a turbo kit for the Bug and found a passion for himself.

Like so many, Underwood graduated from high school wondering what direction to take with his life, though he was pretty sure he didn’t want to spend four years in college. He focused his energy on learning skills in the workplace. To him, this path was just as good as sitting in a classroom. “I think of myself as going to college, only I got paid for it,” he stresses. “I put in a ton of my own hours trying to learn and better myself.” To Underwood, it comes down to investing in yourself.

After taking a few classes at a community college and working for a company that built studio equipment, Underwood was hired by Ghostlight Industries about five years ago. He describes working at Ghostlight as the completion of a search to match the skills he has learned and the love he has for cars into a vocation that is gratifying and rewarding. In many ways, Underwood is doing today what he did when he was working on that Baja Bug, only with a bigger budget. Whether he realized it at the time, the hands-on experience he learned as an 18 year old – coming up with ideas and figuring out how to make them work – prepared him for his life’s ambition. He might find himself working on a project that has him throwing away the original chassis of a car and building another one in a “custom-weird” way. “We might have to do something that has never been done before,” he says.

 

[El Jefe]

Photo ©Taylor Jewell
TAYLOR FORREST

Owner, Taylor Forrest Furniture
taylorforrest.com
New York, NY

Taylor Forrest started out in fashion design but eventually transitioned to furniture. It was a leap that’s not as drastic as people might think. She believes that furniture, like clothing, should strike the perfect balance between functionality and style. Creating pieces that capture that balance is the most exciting part for her.

She describes her work as “time-worn and modern” at the same time. “A lot of time, when we think of modern, we think of plastic, and really shiny, polished materials that look really new,” she says. “But I make things that, while they’re new, also look like they’ve been around a while.”

Forrest is not far removed from the institutional learning track that most twenty-somethings follow, but the shift from fashion to furniture taught her that the ideal educational experience is the one that’s more active than passive.

“I always thought school was going to change me,” she says. “I was expecting something to happen to me, instead of looking at it as though I was creating my experience from day one. From the day you’re born, you’re creating your experience. You think you’re going to go to school and come out a lawyer or something. But really, you go and you just have to figure out what you can put into it, and how you can work within the system. I think if you go with that idea, college can be really good for you. But a lot of times it’s just not necessary.”

For example, when she realized that welding was a necessary step in the furniture-making process, she merely went online one day and found an instructor in her area. “He spent a half-hour just showing me how to TIG weld,” she says. “I went in with two of my friends, and at the end of the half-hour, I said, ‘Alright, this is easy.’ Then we went out and bought a TIG welder the next day, and the day after that I was calling myself a furniture designer. It all happened in a week.”

That same philosophy of “don’t wait, don’t overthink, do it now” makes its way into Forrest’s work. “You catch an idea about a piece and you can just sense that it’s super-alive, and you just have to make it, and there’s no way that it shouldn’t exist,” she says. “And then you make it, and you just think, ‘Gosh, I love this so much.’ I don’t make anything that I don’t love, or that I wouldn’t want in my own home, or that I wouldn’t want to see all the time. I make things with the intention that I want to see them twenty years from now and still be in love with them. I think that’s what the concept of timelessness is all about. I want to make timeless things.”

 

[El Jefe]

Photo ©Jessie Hodges
RANDY HODGES

Owner, Manteo Blacksmith
manteoblacksmith.com
Kill Devil Hills, NC

Seventeen years ago, Randy Hodges left behind two decades of civil engineering to pursue his passion for blacksmithing as his medium to create decorative metalwork.

“I traded in my vocation for my avocation,” says Hodges, whose blacksmithing skills were primarily self-taught. “Because I was living in a tourist area and a tourist-based economy, I knew I could make things to sell to tourists and create enough income to make a living.”

The juxtaposition of the old and the new is a common theme throughout Hodges’ work. “I think of myself as taking the leftover stuff from the industrial era – old tools, railroad spikes, used horseshoes – and making art out of it,” he says. “In particular, you’ll see a lot of old hammers and wrenches shaped into something new. I use leftovers from the industrial age to comment on how the digital age has taken over.”

While his work is primarily in blacksmithing, it does involve some measure of welding, a trade that he admits to learning retroactively – only in the last several years, after being around it for several decades.

“It was kind of backward,” he says. “As I pursued my engineering career, I got a professional engineering license and at one point was running a structural inspection company. So I was trained in welding inspection, but I was never a welder until after I started blacksmithing and started the business. I realized then that I needed to be able to do it myself to create these sculptures that I was beginning to imagine. So in spite of being around welding my whole life, I didn’t actually know how to weld until sometime in the last thirteen or fourteen years. I wouldn’t be able to create the things that I make now if I hadn’t developed the ability to weld.”

In addition to crafting metal, Hodges also teaches basic blacksmithing workshops to anyone in the community who might be interested in the trade. “I have two to two-and-a-half hours of curriculum for whoever wants to try it whenever they want to come in,” he says. “I don’t keep a regular teaching schedule. In the summer I’ll have two or three students in a week, but less in the winter. The economy in this area is up and down, because of the tourism schedule. We’re crazy busy in the summer, and in the winter we’re doing much less.”

Hodges believes there’s still a place for skilled trades in the digital age. “My fear nowadays is that there aren’t many options for learning other than on a computer, and that’s not the same thing as learning a skill or a trade,” he says. “I believe that if a person applies himself to his craft, his education and his pursuit of that lifestyle, he could do just as well as he could do by going to college.”

 

[El Jefe]

ALEX LOOS
Owner, Hans Noble Design
hansnobledesign.com
Cleveland, OH

After 15 years in his father’s heating and cooling company, Alex Loos bid ductwork farewell and launched his custom furniture building business, Hans Noble Design, in the fall of 2013.

These days, he uses state-of-the-art design technology to create traditional furniture for individuals and businesses, with an eye on recycling existing wood, metal and other construction materials.

“I’ll do a 3-D CAD drawing for the client and I’ll build to their specifications,” says Loos. “I’ll do one-off pieces, but then I’ll also do medium to larger size jobs with restaurants, hotels, businesses like that. I’m interested in anything that’s a challenge, anything that’s more than just two frames welded together.”

While his shop is less than three years old, his training in metalwork spans more than two decades. The father for whom he once worked now works for him, and their combined experience and expertise make them highly competitive in the market for custom-crafted furniture.

“There are a lot of people in Cleveland who do what I do, but they don’t have the shop that I have,” says Loos. “And I have it because I am from a sheet metal background. My father has a passion for it, too. He loves the equipment. We do a lot of specialized sheet metal work too…I tell people I can do anything, because we pretty much can do anything that anybody wants.”

And he’ll do it right, because he has at least three generations to answer to.

“I’m a perfectionist,” he says. “I try to make everything just right, because I’m trying to carry on the tradition of my family. Both sides included some very good artists. They weren’t hacks. So I’m just trying to be true to that lineage.”

Even the name of the business honors the legacy. Loos’ middle name is Hans. It’s also his father’s name and his grandfather’s name. His grandfather and great-grandfather Loos were blacksmiths in the German town that his paternal ancestors hail from, so metal work is part of his DNA. Noble, his great-grandfather on his mother’s side, was an abstract expressionist painter during the Depression era.

“I was always artistic when I was younger,” says Loos, “and I had no idea what I wanted to do for a career, but I always did pencil drawings and artistic paintings and stuff like that. So this business was kind of like my outlet. It was a combination of both sides of my family and my ancestry.

Doing right by your ancestors may be a big responsibility, but Loos loves the work. “To see the finished product, I just get this great feeling that I’ve accomplished something with my life,” he says. “It’s so rare for someone to make a career out of doing something that they love.”

 

[El Jefe]

Photo ©Eddie Clark
MATT NUNN

Owner, Samsara Cycles
samsaracycles.com
Frederick, CO

Matt Nunn has been taking things apart and rebuilding them as far back as he can remember, all the way back to the Lego projects of his early childhood. There were forays into construction and metal fabrication in his 20s and 30s, but he eventually returned to his first love – the bicycles of his youth. These days, he builds custom bike frames – nearly 100 a year – for a customer base that stretches from Colorado to New Zealand.

“If I had settled [for those other jobs], I might still have been somewhat happy to this day,” says. “I can tell you one thing for sure, though. I would not be as happy as I am now.”

Much of that satisfaction comes from the personal relationships with his customers: “They love the fact that they’re talking to the guy who answers the phone, writes the order, cuts and machines the material, welds the material, assembles the bike, sweeps the floor and runs the elevator. People are looking for that connection – something they don’t get when they buy from a large manufacturer.”

But they’re looking for something else too, says Nunn. They’re looking for builders who are committed to hiring American labor to make products from American materials.

“In the bicycle industry right now, there’s a push toward going back to the smaller builders and U.S.-built stuff,” he says. “I always ask customers, ‘Why did you choose me?’ And they tell me, ‘Well, because of this and this and this, and because you’re committed to U.S. manufacturing, and I like that. I like the fact that your frame is made here in the U.S., with as many U.S. parts and materials as possible.’”

Nunn does his best every day to honor that commitment from his customers by making an unwavering commitment to them in return. Whatever the request, he’s ready to go the extra mile – literally and figuratively.

“I had a guy come over here with his bike at eight o’clock one night, the night before he was planning to leave for a major race,” Nunn recalls. “He says, ‘It’s clicking.’ So I started adjusting it, and I ended up disassembling the whole bike. I pulled the thing apart, cleaned everything, lubed everything, and put it all back together. He said, ‘Man, I can’t tell you how much I appreciate this. How much do I owe you?’ I said, ‘You know what? Don’t worry about it. Go out there and race you’re hardest. You’re representing my company when you’re on my bike.’ He was just blown away by that. Absolutely blown away.”

He adds: “I think the connection between small businesses and customers, no matter what the business, needs to come back. I’m hoping that the momentum I’m seeing in that regard, and the momentum that some other builders are seeing, is going to continue to grow.”

 

[El Jefe]

Photo ©Lincoln Global, Inc.
DANI PAJAK

Owner, Disowned Customs
@disownedcustoms
Cleveland, OH

Although it took him a while to figure out what he wanted to do with his life, Pajak never forgot what his father told him: learn a trade. After serving in the U.S. Navy and on a Great Lakes iron ore vessel and toiling at several menial jobs that were going nowhere, this simple advice opened a world of opportunities for Pajak, both personally and professionally. It ultimately led him to found a custom motorcycle shop and to occupy a starring role on a to-be-announced fabrication competition on TV’s Esquire network.

Pajak has always been a tinkerer, which he attributes to his upbringing. His dad grew up in a small Southwest Pennsylvania coal mining community where do-it-yourself was a way of life. If something was broke, you fixed it. What you didn’t do was buy something new. “My dad grew up with this ethic, and he passed it on to me,” Pajak says. “Doing my own maintenance and repairs was something instilled into me.”

Despite this background, when he bought his first non-running bike to work on, Pajak suffered the same anxiety as most people when undertaking a new endeavor. “After cutting my first frame, my biggest fear was that I had no idea what I was doing,” he admits. But Pajak succeeded, eventually selling the bike and starting his own business.

When he’s not filming or working on his own projects, he helps others at Cleveland’s only cooperative motorcycle shop, Skidmark Garage, in the same location that his business is based. Novice bikers with no fabricating abilities or experienced bikers with no place to fabricate can bring their builds to Skidmark to take advantage of Pajak’s knowledge and skills, as well as his garage and tools. “Some members are scared to get into an engine,” he says. “But after working on their bikes, they get the thrill of hearing the engine fire up for the first time. It’s rewarding for them and for me. It never gets old to hear a bike fire up for the first time after it has sat dead for months or years.”

On a personal level, Pajak credits learning a trade with helping him to settle his life down and giving him a second chance at a time when he most needed it. He’s a recovering alcoholic and father of two children. “My skills keep my mind occupied and keep me busy,” he points out. As a father, he plans to teach is children the same lessons he took from his dad: learn a skill and how to fix things yourself.

He tries to impart the benefits of vocational training by example. At the very least, he says, young people can develop a skill they can carry for the rest of their life – even if they ultimately decide on a different occupation. “You can always go to college,” Pajak says. “But you want to learn an everyday skill that will help you succeed in life.”

 

[El Jefe]

Photo ©Lincoln Global, Inc.
JEREMY CUPP

Owner, LC Fabrication
@lcfabrications
Grottoes, VA

Cupp believes there are already enough college-educated people in the United States who would rather work in an office and with computers. He also knows there is a lack of skilled tradespeople. “A person can learn a trade and go to work at a fabricating company and make good money. And they can continue to make good money because their skills are a scarce and valuable commodity.” This bold statement speaks to the value Cupp places on his trade as a machinist.

Growing up, Cupp had a number of family members work in the trades. He was especially inspired by his grandfather. Even at a young age, he was enthralled by putting something together into a workable vehicle. “I felt that was what a man does when he grows up,” he says.

He did not learn life’s important lessons in a classroom or sitting behind a desk. Those lessons were learned by looking over somebody’s shoulder and by making mistakes but sticking with it, always growing and improving. The lessons have paid dividends as he has become an authority on custom motorcycle fabrication.

To Cupp, the excitement comes from creating something functional out of nothing. The finished product, he stresses, is worth more than any amount of money he’s ever made. “You start with a bunch of tubing and metal and finish with a motorcycle you can ride,” he says. “And it is something you’ve done with your own hands.”

When he’s fabricating a bike, a paternal instinct emerges. “Some people might say it’s cheesy,” he says, “but I think the only thing comparable is watching my children being born.” Like raising a child, the “care and feeding” that goes into his builds are evident in his meticulous attention to detail and willingness to challenge conventional thinking. “Every time I have a successful build, I feel the pressure to be successful the next time.”

Cupp is always challenging himself to acquire new skills. For example, he recently added to his expertise by learning how to form sheet metal parts. He says he is at his artistic best when he lacks money, experience and the proper equipment in approaching a new build. Only then, he maintains, is a person forced to be creative.

These traits have earned him the respect of bike builders and fabricators worldwide, as evidenced by his winning of the Builder’s Choice award in the 2015 Handbuilt Motorcycle Show for his bike that featured a Buell Blast motor with a Ducati top-end, mated to a Triumph transmission. The ride featured a hand-built chassis with a gutted upside-down fork with external springs and hydraulics. For those readers that don’t understand what a feat of engineering and craftsmanship this is, take our word for it, Jeremy Cupp has mad skills.