It feels like this month went by really fast, but I also think a lot happened.

When I got back to California the last week of December, my brother and I drove down to Monterey, and then made our way back up to Sacramento over the next few days, stopping in Santa Cruz and San Francisco on the way. Pictures

After my brother flew back to Minneapolis, it was time to start school. The course I’m in right now, Street Rod and Custom Fabrication, is pretty cool. It, along with most other elective courses at WyoTech, is long enough to have two six-week phases. In a lot of courses, including everything  in the Core, classroom lectures are mixed in with shop time throughout each phase. Street Rod is a little different though, having the first two weeks lecture and the rest of the time in shop.

Lectures are always boring to an extent, but at least in Street Rod they were informative and interesting. I really did learn a lot about basic metal fab, welding, and painting in those first two weeks. Then we got to apply those things in shop. We have a few competencies this phase, and they are all actual practical things we need to be able to do in order to work well in the field. The first comp was on MIG welding, performing various types of welds on small “coupons” of 20 gauge sheet steel. It took a lot of practice for everyone to get the welds good enough to pass, but we are held to a pretty high standard of work so we can be very good at what we do. The next comp was to fabricate a scaled-down roll pan with a scaled-down frenched license plate holder. It involved some cutting, shaping, welding, and a lot of filing, but the end result was pretty sweet. Now I’m working on TIG welding, which is quite a bit more challenging than MIG, but I’m starting to get it. We also did a quick comp on plasma cutting, and we’ll do another quick one on shrinks with oxy-acetylene. With the end of this phase coming up quick, I’m looking forward to next phase and then graduation.

The weather has been pretty good too. It has been rainy at times, but not as much as I had been told. The temperature is 68° right now, and the lowest I’ve seen it get this winter was about 30° in the middle of the night. Not bad at all, especially for someone from Minnesota.

Tags: Fun Stuff, Pictures, Projects, School