I Made One 'A' At Auburn

Yes, in the two and a half years that I spent at Auburn, I managed to make an ‘A’ in one course.

It started eight years earlier, in 1959. That was the year I went to work at Miller’s Garage. It was the summer I turned twelve. Miller’s Garage was one of those country shops where you were just as likely to be working on a farm tractor or a pulpwood truck as to be repairing an automobile. Trailers, motor graders and one river ferry were also included in the list of things that we repaired, or ‘patched up’ as my dad would say. There was only one type of machine that was prohibited and that was the chain saw, but that is a story for another time. Often the repair involved welding, especially if the subject of the repair was a farm tractor or pulpwood truck. Since there was a good bit of welding to be done, the shop was well equipped with welding apparatus. It had an oxygen/acetylene set up for cutting, brazing and welding. A Lincoln ‘buzz box’ for electric welding and a Hobart DC welder mounted in an old bread truck for mobile work.

At first I just observed what the other mechanics did with the welders, but I was itching to try my hand. About this same time, my grandfather was building a farm pond on his property. One of the mechanics told me that you could make an ‘excellent’ boat out of two 1948 Chevrolet hoods welded together. Miller’s Garage kept a considerable number of donor vehicles parked on a lot near the shop. Just so happened that there were two fairly decent 1948 Chevrolet hoods available. After some discussion, it was decided that I could learn to weld and make a boat at the same time. A suitable piece of sheet metal was located to fill in the Vee where the hoods came together and I started welding. Very soon into the project, my father began to have reservations. Not about the boat itself but about the amount of oxygen, acetylene and steel rods the project was consuming. There wasn’t much he could do about the gases, but he did substitute wire coat hangers for the mild steel rods. I couldn’t tell much difference. Finally after several days work, the boat was finished. We put about a quart of tar on the seams and took it to the pond. It held together and worked pretty well. I was now a welder, at least by Miller’s Garage standards.

Somewhere along the way I graduated to electric welding. I was allowed to apply hard surfacing to plows and other wear surfaces and once I even fabricated a trailer hitch for a local painters pickup truck. My welding had a style of its own. My dad characterized it as being “like a bull’s ass sewed up with a grape vine, it ain’t much on looks, but it is hell for stout.”

I continued working at Miller’s Garage during the summers, Christmas holidays and AEA. By the time I reached Auburn in the fall of 1967, I had done my share of rough welding. That first year at Auburn, one of the courses that I had to take was called Welding Lab. It was taught over in one of the old shop buildings and while it was called a ‘lab’ it was actually a course of its own. A graduate assistant taught the course. A pleasant guy whose name I do not recall. There was very little lecture. This was a hands on class. The first day, he took us out to the welding shop to show us what we would be doing. As a group, we followed him from one station to the next. He would set up a project (spot welding, brazing, etc.) and do one as an example. Then he would call on some student to try their hand at it. Of course he made it look easy and the student, not yet knowing what they were doing made a mess of things. Finally we came to the electric welding station. He took a couple of pieces of flat steel and told us we were going to attach them with a lap weld. Then he started to demonstrate, but someone had been using the electric welder and changed the settings and when he struck an arc, there was very little welding and a whole lot of sputtering and popping. It took him a few adjustments and false starts but eventually he got the machine set just right and made his weld. Then he turned to me, as I was one of the students standing nearby that had not had a turn at a project and handed me the gloves and the rod holder. You want me to weld, I asked? He said yeah, just run a bead on this flat piece of steel. Well I put on the helmet, hollered “eyeballs” so that everyone would cover their eyes, and proceeded to lay as pretty a two inch flat weld bead as anyone could ask for. When I finished, the lab instructor looked at the weld, looked at me, looked back at the weld and said. That is good, that is very good, in fact that is better than most of you will be able to do after you have finished this course. There were still projects to do and tests to take, but that day, I had made my ‘A’ at Auburn.