BlueRidgeMark

I just took the first day of a two-day welding class at a local fab shop. Great class, great people. Had a lot of fun burning metal with two different MIG setups, and did a bit of cutting with a plasma unit and an oxy-acetylene rig.

Tomorrow we do tubing notching and welding.

They keep the class down to 12, max, so you get good hands-on time. We had 9 in our class. All beginners.

Fun stuff, but see below. I was pretty happy after the first evening when I posted this. After that, things went wrong.

http://chaosfabshop.com/classes/

XJNVA

I've heard a lot of good things about chaos. I've been meaning to check them out one of these days.

Michael952

I'm also taking a welding course at a local tech school.
smaw, mig, tig etc

BlueRidgeMark

You'll get a lot more at a tech school than a weekend class, of course. This is just enough to get you making useful stuff for offroading.

Really great folks, and a great time.

Michael952

I'm going for a possible career. But I'll be doing jeep stuffs obviously lol.
I can't wait to get a good grasp on tig

BlueRidgeMark

I have to give an update that does not make me happy, because I really liked these people.

It seems we misunderstood the pricing of the class. We thought it was $175 for the weekend, a two day class.

Sunday evening, for some reason, my wife was poking around the Chaos site and said it looked like the class was only ONE day, and that Sunday was a separate class at another $175.

So, wanting to do the right thing, I emailed them and asked what the situation was, were we supposed to pay for Sunday?

I got a rather nasty note back from AK's wife emphatically saying yes, they expect to be paid for Sunday and complaining about not making any money on the class and all the expenses and the $300 tool my sons broke.

I sent a nice note back and we paid (ouch!) online for the extra day, though I really can't afford it. Had to take it out of emergency money. I also asked about the $300 tool, and said I wasn't aware of that.

No response yet. I don't think any such thing happened. There weren't enough people in the class for me to not be aware of a $300 tool being broken. I do know that AK was not happy about somebody trashing two sanding discs, but sanding discs don't run $300, and I could see they had been that way for a while. The foam backing gets a weathered surface to it after a while when it's been torn up, and these definitely had that weathered look. The torn edges were NOT fresh. I know the older welder jammed at one point, but AK just cleared the jammed wire. And I know that some of the other students did cut the edge of his welding table with the plasma cutter. That's not good, but it's not $300, either. And somebody wrecked a welding tip (a consumable, a couple of bucks) and AK mentioned it. So, I was aware of some minor issues, and I can't see any way that a $300 tool got trashed and I was not aware of it. In fact, the only tool that we used that would have been in that price range was a chop saw, and I was the last person to use it. It was fine.

At $175 for two days, it was pretty steep. At $350 for two days, it's ridiculous.

That's almost the price of a semester of welding at a local community college.

As for not making any money, let's do the math. 9 students the first day, and 5 the second. That's $1575 for the first day and $875 for the second, for a total of $2450. We used about 20 feet of 4" wide 3/16" steel stock, and some scrap he had laying around. Add some welding wire, of course, and maybe a tip or two. That's WELL under $500 for materials.


I'm pretty bummed about it. The money hurt, of course, but that can be chalked up to me not reading carefully.

The attitude is what hurt.

Gary Briggs

Huge rip off, I got paid to learn to weld.

XJNVA

Damn that sucks. I've always heard positive things about Chaos, I guess not. That sort of attitude though is downright unacceptable. Luckily for me I learned how to weld in school for free. That kind of price is plain ridiculous.

BlueRidgeMark

Yeah, I really, really liked AK. He's a great guy, and really knows his stuff. The email almost certainly came from his wife, but still, it's his shop. There was just no reason for the nastiness. I contacted them about it! Nothing was said about it when we were there. I would not be surprised if they hadn't even noticed it before I emailed them. (A few things made me think from a business standpoint they're not really well organized. Not that that's a big deal for a small family business.)

I'm not mad about it. I'm sad, like I lost a friend.

Hammered

they could learn to sand, maybe you could charge them to have a SANDING CLASS 101 ... pfft.

nowhres

Better to learn who people are now than later. Be thankful.

BlueRidgeMark

They like the look of raw welds. It's not my style, but to each his own....

They can also make it smooth as a baby's behind, if that's what the customer wants.

They know how to put stuff together so it stays together, and they know how to design it so that you don't have single points of failure, or have welds taking the brunt of the forces.


They had a chassis in the shop from a nationally known builder, and showed us the flaws. Not just poor welds, but insanely stupid design. No strength in the design, let alone the welds.

They do good fab work.

XJNVA

LOL!