Quote Originally Posted by spindrift View Post
Please don't assume anything. In this particular case you're dead wrong. If you have something constructive to add to the discussion then by all means continue to follow the thread. And how did you arrive at the conclusion that he wanted to make big bucks...jeez.

Neither one of us is a professional welder; obviously. My thinking was that the sooner he gain some skill the quicker he would be able to land some kind of a job. What I do know about welding it's that practice, practice, practice is the only way.

Cruizer, if I thought I had all the answers, I wouldn't have looked for this forum in the first place. I'm trying to help a kid that has no idea as to what direction to go in. Constructive advice would be greatly appreciated.
From your first post you asked it there is a crash course in welding. Really there are no such things except the rip-off career schools that advertise the world but deliver nothing but debt.

Some people never get welding. And if you force it on them they hate it. You have to build up slow and in some cases beg for guidance. A lot of the tricks of the trade are inbred in experience. I can teach a monkey to weld but I have to supervise like a school marm all day long. And do you think they repay the favor some day? Most likely not.

I hire them young and cheap. I go through a fair share of posers before I get one worth bestowing my experience to. And even then a lot of the time they hire on down the street for a couple of dollars more an hour. That is their biggest mistake because now they are on their own. I see bunches of them giving up a few years later because they get burned out on the production line of greed.

Still I believe it is best to continue school and work welding nights earning minimum wage garnering those golden nuggets of knowlegde working beside a veteran of the industry that knows how to turn a rusty chunk of metal into profit. Then the work will be rewarding in itself, and the money will come.