Did you ever wonder if anybody actually wins something at the annual American Welding Society Convention? My name is Kenneth Karwowski and this is my story.         

The day started out like any other day. Get up, make coffee, get dressed, drink coffee, check the TV news station, drink coffee, check the weather, drink coffee, check the business station, drink coffee, head out to the mailbox with coffee in hand, walk back to the house fumbling and balancing a large coffee cup and a stack of mail, trashing the ads and junk mail, sipping coffee…aha! more AWS-related mailings from the American Welding Society Convention I had recently attended in Chicago in 2006. I sure do get a lot of mail from all those companies where I had left my business card or signed up for golf balls or a free demo this or a demo that. So I open them all with my “free” letter opener that I got at the show and sit down to read what was sent to me. I marked some of them with one of my “free” pens from the show to “read later” and others got deposited in the round container kept discreetly near the kitchen table. Then I opened a mailing from ESAB, whom I have always had an interest in as one of the leaders of manufactured welding equipment in the USA.

This one looked like the same type of marketing form letter one would expect to get until I read the first line…“Congratulations! Your entry card was randomly selected as the winner of the Jesse James Multimaster 260 from ESAB.”

I started to choke on my coffee, as I couldn’t believe what I had just read. Then reality set in. Sure I won that welder…just like I won the $20 million Power Ball. It must be some marketing ploy, I thought. But upon reading “the rest of the story,” I discovered that it was true. My ship had come in. I was a winner. I sent the signed and notarized form back to Jenny Dennis, Marketing Specialist at ESAB and then I waited.

 In the meantime, I anxiously went to www.esabna.com to check out the welder. On the Internet site I found not only all ESAB’s equipment but  Jesse James himself looking back at me with “my welder,” the Multimaster 260 with MIG, TIG or Stick capabilities in a complete package with Mig torch, undercarriage and cylinder rack on wheels, regulator/flowmeter with hose, ground cable and clamp, electrode holder and connector and primary plug-in, samples of 0.035 86HP Mig wire and 5# variety pack of stick electrodes, and even a book to tell me what to do and how to do it:“The MIG Welding Handbook.”  All I had to do was add as much electrode cable as I could afford and a shield gas cylinder, and I was ready to become the next Wild Bill Hickok or even Wyatt Earp. The possibilities seemed endless! ESAB had gone overboard in the packaging of this one machine that does it all for the backyard guy to the production professional. And there was Jesse himself looking out at me…his next nemesis!

A few days later, the freight company called me with my prize, the welder that would take me to into history. When could they deliver it? After agreeing on a date and time, I was wondering how I could get it off the truck. The truck driver called me from a few miles away and within a short time he was pulling his Big Rig down my road. Lucky for him he had a lift gate or he would have had to back down into the ditch to get the welder off his truck. We slid the machine onto the lift and let it slowly ride down to the terra firma that was to be its forever home. After removing a few bolts from the packing crate, it was on wheels and mine…all mine! Thank you, ESAB and Jesse. I rolled it gently down my driveway and into my humble abode.

I reluctantly had to get to work, so the set-up of the machine was put on hold for a day. The next day, my teen grandson, Nick Crifase, came over to the house, and I said to him, “It’s time for you to meet Jesse.” So out to the garage we went. We opened the boxes and I handed him, who had no welder set-up knowledge and little to no welding experience, the GMAW, GTAW and SMAW parts and watched him set up the complete unit. Thank you, ESAB for providing such clear directions that this non-experienced young man could set up this machine for all functions. Now, with no encouragement from “Wild Bill” Gramps but a little weld direction, Nick fired off the GMAW.

Interestingly enough, Nick, with the help of the stable arc delivered from the ESAB machine, did an excellent job welding. His first time single and multi-pass fillet welds are the envy of all the many welders I have proudly shown and these people all weld for a living! So with that process under our saddle blankets, we decided to try another. GTAW won the coin toss and before you could skin a rabbit that tungsten was flicking its flame across a couple of 14 ga. plates. “Smooth, very smooth,” was Nick’s reaction to the concise arc melting the edges of the material. “Almost too easy!” he said. Thanks again to ESAB and their electrical engineers.

The last process was now available for us to try. The old standby “stick” (SMAW to you purists.) The smoke rolled away from Nick as he flirted with the nuances of the arc length, angles and speed to watch the fluid molten metal form the fillet and butt joints necessary for the strong welds he produced. Again, a five-gallon hat off to the ESAB engineers who developed the smoothness of the arc so that a virtual beginner could, with a little side coaching, produce excellent welds in such a short time.

 “Well, partner, it’s time to hang up our spurs (torches) and head to the house,” said Grandpa. “This here ESAB welder will do us very well for generations to come”

“By the way, when is your birthday?” he asked with a thought in his mind as they walked.

 “Pretty soon, Roy Rogers,” Nick replied.

“OK, Hop-A-Long,” Grandpa Ken chuckled, all the while thinking…“I actually won! I actually won!”

 

Kenneth Karwowski is a 40-plus year welder with 19 years teaching welding at GatewayTechnicalCollege in ElkhornWisconsin, and 10 years field construction as a boilermaker and pipefitter/welder and the remainder in production shops. Ken is an independent CWI operating ARK Welding Inspection Services LLC for 15 years. He is also a State of Wisconsin Structural Weld Tester, Chairman of his local AWS Section and an AWS member for 15 years plus.