ARC MAGAZINE

Despite the challenges of the Covid pandemic, Lincoln Electric marked its milestone anniversary in 2020 in a number of ways throughout the year. Among the celebratory initiatives was the Lincoln Electric 125th Anniversary Project Contest, a competition that put the spotlight on welders who use our equipment to build items that are innovative, practical and visually compelling all at the same time.

By early October 2020, nearly 2500 competitors from around the country had submitted specs, photographs and other information highlighting their builds. Over the course of the month, a team of three industry influencers – Jimmy DiResta, Cynthia Gauthier and Chris Zeppieri – whittled the entries down to a handful of finalists.

Votes posted on Lincoln Electric social media led to the selection of a winner at the end of October. Brandon Rodriguez of Boerne, Texas, took the top spot for his Two-Ton Smoker project, built with a Lincoln Electric Power MIG 350MP welder.

In this issue of ARC, we throw the anniversary spotlight on Brandon and some of our other finalists.

FINALIST: Brandon Rodriguez | PROJECT: The Two-Ton Smoker

Brandon Rodriguez built this upright smoker during his junior year at Samuel V. Champion High School in Boerne, Texas. The design, which includes a 42-inch-diameter smoking chamber, is a patchwork of ideas and elements he’d found elsewhere, but the result is something entirely unique. And yes, it does in fact weigh two tons.

“It was a collaborative eff ort between the welding instructor, myself and other students. The goal throughout the project was to create something you couldn’t find on the internet, something you’ve never seen. Because if you can find it on the internet, then it’s already been done.”

The 1,100-hour project involved an immersion in physics and engineering as much as welding. The first step was a CAD drawing, “because it’s a lot cheaper to make changes on the computer than it is in the middle of the build,” says Rodriguez. By plugging data into an online calculator, he and his collaborators determined the optimal airflow and sizing, the proper height for the stacks, and various other dimensions and specifications.

“The entire pit is scientifically calculated so that the airflow comes completely into the inlets and through to the outlets,” he says. “Everything is the correct size, which maintains an even heat throughout the entire cooking chamber. This isn’t just a generic pit that you just throw together.”

The cooking area is located behind the two top doors, and the grates are circular so the user can spin them for easy access to the food during the cooking process.

All of it – the main cooking chamber, grates, airflow ducts, stacks and more – came together with the help of a Lincoln Electric 350MP welder. “That entire project was actually pulse MIG welded with a Lincoln Electric machine and Lincoln Electric wire,” says Rodriguez.

He also started his own custom fabrication business, Certified Best Welding Solutions, during the same year he was building the smoker. Since graduating from high school, the venture has become his full-time job.

“I do custom fabrication, structural welding, mobile welding, pipe welding...” he explains. “Bottom line, when people ask me what I do, I tell them, ‘If it involves metal, I can cover you, at least to a certain extent.’ I don’t limit myself to anything. Some days I’ll be in the shop working on something as small as firewood log racks to something as large as a complete metal staircase for a building, fencing an entire warehouse property, fabricating a railing, putting up a metal building, or whatever else.”

Despite the obstacles and challenges that Covid created for so many 2020 high school grads, the Two Ton Smoker has helped set Rodriguez on a path that appears to be a promising career track.

“I would say I developed my interest in welding right there in high school during my sophomore and junior years,” he says. “That’s where it really took off. I realized, ‘Wow, not only do I like this, but I’m really good at it.’ It was something that came second-nature to me.”

FINALIST: Andy Garcia | PROJECT: Goose Neck Trailer

If you have something heavy you want to take on the road, Andy Garcia will get you where you want to go. His agricultural mechanics project during his senior year of high school was the construction of a 40-foot gooseneck trailer. Using an Ideal arc 250 stick welder from Lincoln Electric, Garcia built the trailer for his local chapter of Future Farmers of America, so other students like him could haul their large-scale projects to and from regional FFA competitions and expositions.

“I built it in the ag shop of our high school,” says Garcia. “It took about 750 hours. I had two friends helping me, but I was the only welder on the project. They pretty much held parts for me while I was welding, and they helped get things lined up so I could take measurements.”

His design for the trailer incorporates various elements he’d seen elsewhere. “We looked at other trailer designs online,” he recalls, “and we sat down and figured out what features we liked, and then we looked at all the measurements. We consulted with an engineer and he approved of our measurements, so that was the green light for us.”

Garcia recalls burning through about five tubs of rods to complete the project. “That’s a lot of welding,” he says.

The Ideal arc 250 kept the occasional bumpy stretches of the project under control, says Garcia. “Honestly, I’ve always liked welding with Lincoln,” he says. “We had the competing version of the Ideal arc on hand, but to me, it was rougher. I liked how smooth the Lincoln was, and how consistent the arc was. It just provided deeper penetration and made a better finish on the weld.”

Garcia, 19, has been welding for about five years, since the eighth grade. “It was a challenge when I first started,” he admits. “I struggled with it, and I wanted to get better at it, so I just kept pushing myself. I just kept going, all the way through high school.”

He currently works in the gas industry in nearby San Antonio, where he does some occasional welding jobs in the yard until he can get the proper certification to weld on a more regular basis in a rig environment. Until then, he maintains his own welding business on the side. “I build fences, car ports, a lot of small structures,” he says. “I’m learning that there are a lot of ways to make a living as a welder.”

FINALIST: Mason Haynes | PROJECT: “The Curious Octopus”

Mason Haynes spent about 65 hours putting together “The Curious Octopus” with nothing more than a Lincoln Electric AC-225-S and a healthy dose of patience and persistence. The eight-armed creature is two feet high, three feet wide and 3.5 feet long. At 250 pounds, it would have trouble staying afloat, so it’s definitely a decorative piece for dry land.

“I follow a lot of different metal artists on Instagram,” says Haynes, “and I saw that a couple of them had put an octopus together. I liked theirs, but I thought they were a little simpler than what I envisioned doing. I just decided that I wanted to try my hand at it.”

There were stops and starts along the way, but he finished the project in the fall of 2020. “I worked on it a lot,” he recalls. “I probably put 30 hours into it in 2019. I didn’t have a welding table or anything like that to work on. I was working on the floor. I got really sore from doing it, and I put it down for almost a year before I picked it back up. It was sitting in the garage before I finished it.”

The octopus is just one of many pieces Haynes has crafted in recent years. He tends to find his creative muse in animals and other aspects of the natural world. The fascination with welding, both as a form of artistic expression and as a professional trade, started in a high school art class when he was 16.

“I really enjoyed it, and I kind of had the itch to do it ever since,” he says. “I’d wanted to do it for a living – more than just building sculptures with it – but I didn’t. I went out and chased a different career for about ten years.”

After burning out on a decade’s worth of drafting reports for the oil and gas industry, Haynes hit the reset button near the end of 2020 and went to work in a specialty welding shop in Northeast Ohio that provides fabrication and repair services for aluminum and other alloys. But he plans to continue sculpting on the side, just to see where it might take him.

“I do better just making what I want to make,” he says. “If somebody wants to buy it, that’s fine. I struggle with the idea of specific commissions. I just want to keep honing my skill set.”

Clearwater, Florida

FINALIST: Sean Lowery | PROJECT: “The Life Tree” drum cage and riser

Musician, audio engineer and metal fabricator Shawn Lowery has spent his adult life banging on more than just his drum kit. He also cuts, hammers and welds metal into a variety of decorative pieces – including “The Life Tree,” one of the most ornate drum cages in the rock touring circuit.

Lowery used a Lincoln Electric SP100 – a hand-me-down from his father that has been in service for more than 20 years – to craft this intricate yet functional sculpture that consists of more than 1300 feet of steel and weighs in at more than 500 pounds. It breaks down into more than 50 pieces, and can be reassembled by one person with a wrench in as little as 20 minutes.

“I had already fabricated the top portion, which is the actual drum cage, back in 2005,” he says. “I didn’t do the full design because I was traveling so much that the riser wasn’t necessary. In a lot of places we played, either the ceilings were too low, or we already had risers at the venues. I used the cage for a good five years, then I started work on the riser. I finished it more than ten months later.”

The idea first came to him when he was only about six years old. He saw the cover of a Kiss album and started drawing his own costumes and stage designs. Among these were the initial drawings of “The Life Tree.” All of this happened at least a decade before he started playing music in his teenage years. His father, who welded in a factory for as much as ten hours a day, taught him some welding basics, and he ran with it.

Like most touring musicians, Lowery was sidelined for most of 2020 by Covid – which opened up more time for him to spend with Sawbladehead Designs, his fabrication shop in Clearwater, Florida. Operating under the alias of “Mr. Sawbladehead,” Lowery makes furniture and decorative pieces for homes, microphone stands and other gear for musicians, and more. He recently upgraded to a Lincoln Electric Power MIG 210 MP, but “my entire business has been built off that SP100.”

“The Life Tree” is currently on display at a music store in Clearwater, but Lowery insists that “it will hit the stage once again as the music venues open back up!”