Each time I moved, I’d check community colleges in the area to see what they offered. They always offered something, but it was geared at people who wanted to do welding as a career. As much fun as it’d be to take “real” classes, I can’t really skip out on work three days a week from 8am – 4pm to go learn. Something tells me management wouldn’t see the relevance to my day job.

Finally, I lived (very briefly) in Kansas City, MO near Metropolitan Community College and found that they had a Welding for the Hobbyest class. The class was exactly what I needed, a short 15 hours over two days, learning, albeit briefly, oxy-fuel welding and cutting, MIG and Stick welding. It was perfect, and I was immediately hooked.

Welding has proven useful for a number of things I’ve needed to get down around “the farm”. I’ve plasma cut and welded a new bracket for my garage door opener, built a welding table and other things for my shop, and have built a couple of large pieces of furniture.

I needed a new desk for my computer and assorted electronics. The desk I’d bought back in 1999 or so had survived being moved five times around the country, and it while  it looked fine, it wasn’t structurally that sound. I knew one more move and it would be firewood. I found a really nice piece of “IT furniture” for $3,000 that was exactly what I wanted (except for that it was $3,000). I downloaded the assembly instructions which had scale drawings with measurements. Looking at the construction, I knew I could do the welding with a little bit of practice. I bought a new Hobart Handler 187 MIG welder and got started practicing.

After a few weeks, I felt it was time to buy the materials and get started. I used 1″ x 2″, 14 ga mild steel for the most of the main frame and 1″ x 1″, 14 ga mild steel for the shelf brackets.

It took literally hundreds of welds for all of the pieces. I built it out in my shop in the back pasture. The desk is assembled into three distinct desks, each of which has lateral crossmembers which bolt the main uprights together. To say it’s “solid” is an understatement. I did pull-ups on the shelf brackets and they didn’t budge. I spent time with a hammer and a vice testing my welds to make sure they’d hold up. No problems.

I used a sprayer and my large air compressor to paint all of the desk pieces. That was time consuming.

For the work surface, I used 3/4″ MDF with sheet laminate. I was really disappointed with the cost of sheet laminate ($48 per 4′ x 8′ sheet). I tried different ways of treating the underside of the MDF and settled on just using white paint to match the laminate.

I used a router with a special cutting bit to cut grooves for t-molding. It gives the edges of the MDF a nice, finished look.

I have no idea how long it took me to make the entire project, and I don’t really remember what I cost me any more, either, since it’s been over a year ago. But, even considering the cost of the welder, I came out way ahead (and I’ve got a welder).

My next project was another work bench for reloading ammunition. Let me explain for the city boys. Out here in the country we shoot guns. If you don’t like that, you should stay in the city. And we shoot guns a lot out here. Enough that it makes financial sense to invest in presses to load our own ammunition. I needed a work bench for my Dillon RL550B reloader. Since I liked how well my computer desk turned out, I decided to make a reloading bench based on a similar design, although quite a bit smaller.

This desk has turned out quite nicely. It’s also on wheels which makes moving it to clean easy. It’s very sturdy, and I’ve loaded at least 2,000 rounds in it. The shelves and work surface are made with 3/4″ MDF, too. I really don’t like MDF, it’s a crappy product in a lot of ways. I plan on remaking the shelves to not use MDF. The weight of bullets can make the shelves bow in the middle.

I built those projects all with the MIG welding process. I’ve recently bought a Miller Dynasty 200DX water cooled TIG welding outfit. I’ll post some pictures of welding aluminum and steel with it. I don’t have a TIG project in mind yet, but knew I’d find something I want to do, so I figured I might as well learn TIG.

When I started learning BASIC on a Commodore 64 about twenty five years ago, I learned it because I loved computers and was bored with what my computer could do. I had played all of the games we had for it and wanted to learn how I could write my own. (All of my games sucked. But, the learning process made up for it. At least for me.) The Commodore 64 was such a simple machine. Turn it on and you’ve got a prompt right there, ready to receive your BASIC. A number of magazines had code listings each month, all of which had to be short enough to fit in the magazine, by definition. You could look at the examples, tweak them, make them display in color, whatever. You could write the simplest of programs in just a few lines and gradually build up from there, at whatever speed you felt like.

Kids these days all want to write web applications because the web is Facebook and Google and YouTube and whatever else. What sucks for them though is that to do anything which isn’t completely trivial requires learning so much that, I think, a lot of potential programmers give up before they’ve even gotten a form submission working. There’s not a way to build up slowly. Some of the programming languages like PHP are simple enough, but you also have to learn some HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and maybe some Apache configuration and Linux system administration that. Each one of those categories is at least a month long journey. It’s all a far cry from starting with 10 PRINT “HELLO”; 20 GOTO 10 and moving on from there.

I’m hoping my son will take interest in programming, too, when he gets older. I’ve seen books like Learn to Program (using Ruby) and Learn to Program Using Python. Both books claim they’ll teach you to program using Ruby or Python, both of which are nice enough languages, but both of which are not well suited to a first programming language. Python or Ruby require you to at least scratch the surface of topics like string interpolation, duck typing, and classes and methods. That’s pretty advanced stuff for someone who doesn’t know what a for loop is yet or that the computer will strictly do what you tell it.

I think a perfect first programming language is Logo. It’s graphical, which I think helps motivate you when you’re first learning. Being able to see a visual representation of what your program did isn’t only exciting, but if you do something wrong, the visual difference between what came out and what you expected can often help you figure out what went wrong. Logo is just a stepping stone, but it’s a great one.

For the kids out there wanting to learn to program today, things like Logo are still around, but they’ll probably never know about it. The only reason I knew about BASIC was because the Commodore 64 prompt was staring right in my face, and I wanted to see what I could make it do. Kids these days have a web browser staring back at them, and they want to find a way to make their application fit inside of it.