[jhe.1973]

Hi Everyone,

I'm new to this forum but not to metal shaping.

I'm 64 years old & grew up in my Dad's machine shop in Milwaukee, WI. I first ran a lathe at 12 & by 13 I had stared arc welding.

In 1965 I graduated from the auto trade course at a trade & tech high school and in 1972 I took a couple of night semesters of auto body sheet metal repair at a a local technical college.

At that time I was the experimental machinist for Harley-Davidson's Racing department.

In early 1973 I started my own machine/fab/welding shop which I still have.

For the rest of the 1970s I was contracted to H-D to build experimental & prototype motorcycles & parts, plus some racing items along the way.

I've also worked as a tool & die maker for West Bend Co. (cookware) & gained a lot of metal forming experience there.

We left Wisconsin for the mountains of Virginia/West Virginia in 1984 to build a homestead for ourselves & young family.

After moving to Arizona in 1993, I worked as an instrument maker for the Physics & Astronomy department of one of our universities. This allowed me to hone my welding skills for Ultra-High Vacuum (UHV) & microscopic welding.

In just the last couple of years I learned how the auto body repair methods I had learned and practiced were not necessarily the best/easiest way to shape metal from scratch.

So, ............ I'm looking forward to picking up new tricks & contributing some of my own.

Thanks for reading this & for your being members here.

Jim