Practical Competencies: Power Welding

Caution: Be sure to learn dangerous skills from qualified teachers and practitioners, and to use top quality equipment, eye protection, shielding, and protective clothing.

Welding metals together to produce a strong joint, is an extremely useful skill for the dangerous child to master. Ideally, the dangerous child will learn to weld with both a torch and with electrically powered welders between the ages of 12 and 16, depending upon the rate of maturation and the judgment of parents and teachers. Here we will take a quick look at some aspects of electric welders.

Popular Mechanics

Wire-feed welders are great, but there's a lot to be said for stick welders, which use a rod-shaped electrode held in a clamp. Here's how it works: A ground lead runs from the welding machine to the workpiece. When you touch the stick electrode to the metal, you make a welding circuit and create a high-­temperature arc that melts the rod. As the electrode melts, the flux coating on it is gasified, shielding the molten metal from the air. When the metals cool, they are fused together. A major advantage of stick welding is that you can easily switch among various electrodes. For example, some achieve high-strength joints; others repair cracked cast iron or fill in pitted areas. Also, there are stick electrodes designed to deal with rust or dirt, a good thing when you're repairing a machine outdoors where achieving a clean weld surface is impossible.

The downside to stick welders is that they are more difficult to learn to use, especially if you're teaching yourself.

Wire-feed welders are more mechanically complex, but they're simpler to operate. These machines drive a thin wire electrode off a motorized spool and through a cable to a welding gun.

And wire-feed welders can join metal ranging from automotive sheet steel all the way up to ½-inch-thick plate. _PopularMechanics

Tests of best wire-feed welders

Arc welding tutorials

Making your own spot welder using a microwave oven transformer. Such projects are for those who have already mastered high voltage transformer safety.

One of the things that makes dangerous children so dangerous, is that they learn to master skills which would be deadly to the untrained and unskilled. The safe mastery of several dangerous skills tends to set persons apart from the herd.

Most modern parents tend to treat children like precious trophies or jewels -- to be sheltered from all possible danger or practical use. And to top it off, they want to instill these helpless incompetents with an abundance of self-esteem!

Do your children a favour, and make them truly dangerous, competent, and deservedly confident. But don't tell anyone you don't trust. These days, raising strong, competent, independent and truly dangerous children is often enough to get you locked up, depending upon where you live and who runs your local social services department.