In an earlier entry I chided folks who advise people to seek out welding and metalworking classes at local trade schools and community colleges. I still stand by my earlier statements that I have yet to find a -trade school- or -community college- that allows people to come in off the street and learn welding with no prior instruction. However, just today I found that Seattle’s Pratt School of Fine Arts does in fact offer oxy-acetylene and MIG welding classes to people with no prerequisite! Further they offer TIG welding instruction and have advanced classes which allow students to pursue their own projects. The only trick is you have to look in the sculpture section of the class offerings.
My interest in Pratt began last year at the spring NWBA conference where I met a gent who eitehr instructs there or has taken several classes. The basic jewelry classes seem more the speed I’m looking for. The scuplture classes appear on their face to be geared more toward people who want to reproduce another Lenin statue for Freemont, as opposed to folks who want to make pretty sword and knife furniture. I will probably take their blacksmithing 1 class simply so I can do their damascus/pattern welding classes later on. Plus I might -learn- something in the process 
I haven’t had time to read every word of their course offerings so I haven’t seen any wood carving (which would be the next step in the evolution of my handle-makling efforts.
Currently I’m deviled by the desire to carve braided hair for a knife project. It sounded easy enough and I even considered doing something harder. But trying to freehand eight equally spaced spirals onto the practice piece has proven to be almost too much. That’s to say nothing of bringing the spirals back the other way to start gridding out the braid itself. I had one sloppy start that I erased and while I’m not kicking myself for it, in retrospect I should have maybe started carving -that- and then gone back and done another. It’s not like I couldn’t do another once I did the first. Oh well. I guess I keep at it.
I readded the chisel tutorial at the request of a gent from the carving path. I was suckered into thiking that it might be helpful for him. Rather, I think the technical discussion at that forum piqued his curiousity. Once posted, he proceeded to send me some “tips” about how to improve it. I won’t be responding, but I look forward to his free-for-everybody tutorial, with pictures, written for people who’ve likely never heated and shaped metal. I’m interested to see the critics of this particular page find a balance between good technique and usability for the rank novice. At the level it’s written for discussions of time/temp curves, austentite/martensite/pearlite/cementite, six different normalizing/quenching/tempering methods only serve to -confuse- and scare people away. That’s what engineers do, and that’s why I dropped out of the aerospace enginerring program at UW. I make knives that I would be confident in carrying as my main tool if I were to be dropped in the middle of nowhere but I don’t spend -any- time thinking “gee, I wonder how much austentite I’ve formed.” But I’ll let it sit, for now. If it goes another year without being viewed I’ll retire it indefinitely.
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