BajaRon
Well-known member
#9 - Fiddling with Disaster!
When Lamont went out on his own as a mobile welder, he approached it like everything else. He was never satisfied with things as they were. I remember him getting a several thousand dollar, brand new Miller welder. He was very excited about it. He installed it on his truck and started using it. I dropped by his house one day to find it with the panels off and him digging into the guts. He was soldering on circuit boards, messing with the wiring, and who knows what all.
‘What are you doing?’ I asked horrified. ‘You’re going to destroy a brand-new, top of the line welder! At the very least, you’re voiding the warranty.’ Though I knew that was an empty statement as Lamont was never concerned about warranties. He altered everything right out of the box, most of the time. I suppose he just couldn’t help himself.
‘I don’t like the way it works’, he said calmly, without even turning his head away from what he was doing. ‘I want it to do things that it won’t do; I’m fixing it.’
‘You’re fixing a meticulously crafted machine engineered by a team of highly skilled experts with degrees, working for the best welder manufacturing business in the world…’ I asserted. Thinking of Lamont’s dropping out of school in the 10th grade.
‘Yep!’, he said. And that’s exactly what he did. Because, according to him, it did what it couldn’t do when he was finished. Miller found out about it and wanted to know what he had done to it. Then Miller started sending him prototypes to use and alter any way he liked. I guess you could say these things just fell into his lap. But I suspect there was a great deal more to it than luck.
How he knew what to do with that welder is beyond me. Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised. But after all these years, it still amazes me.
When Lamont went out on his own as a mobile welder, he approached it like everything else. He was never satisfied with things as they were. I remember him getting a several thousand dollar, brand new Miller welder. He was very excited about it. He installed it on his truck and started using it. I dropped by his house one day to find it with the panels off and him digging into the guts. He was soldering on circuit boards, messing with the wiring, and who knows what all.
‘What are you doing?’ I asked horrified. ‘You’re going to destroy a brand-new, top of the line welder! At the very least, you’re voiding the warranty.’ Though I knew that was an empty statement as Lamont was never concerned about warranties. He altered everything right out of the box, most of the time. I suppose he just couldn’t help himself.
‘I don’t like the way it works’, he said calmly, without even turning his head away from what he was doing. ‘I want it to do things that it won’t do; I’m fixing it.’
‘You’re fixing a meticulously crafted machine engineered by a team of highly skilled experts with degrees, working for the best welder manufacturing business in the world…’ I asserted. Thinking of Lamont’s dropping out of school in the 10th grade.
‘Yep!’, he said. And that’s exactly what he did. Because, according to him, it did what it couldn’t do when he was finished. Miller found out about it and wanted to know what he had done to it. Then Miller started sending him prototypes to use and alter any way he liked. I guess you could say these things just fell into his lap. But I suspect there was a great deal more to it than luck.
How he knew what to do with that welder is beyond me. Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised. But after all these years, it still amazes me.
