Salesman turns entrepreneur, artist, welder

Figure 1 Metal artist Kirk Yazel specializes in realistic-looking steel flowers. In addition to making accurate leaf shapes and proportions, he found that weld beads do a good job of simulating the veins that many leaves have.

Kirk Yazel wasn’t quite fed up with his career, but he was ready for a change. He had spent almost 20 years selling fence products and systems, and while he had made good progress in his career, it wasn’t panning out quite the way he wanted it to. At 40 years old, he wasn’t anywhere close to the traditional retirement age, but he had a plan. His new job would involve sales, but it would be much more than that. It also would involve a welding unit, a plasma torch, some forming tools, and a lot of steel.

Welding 101

Yazel’s father was a rancher and a farmer, so Kirk’s first lesson in welding was typical for a youngster in that environment. The young Yazel had seen the elder Yazel welding a time or two, so when he saw some discarded rebar lying next to a welding machine, he asked his father if he could try it. Adhering to the stereotype, his father didn’t teach Kirk to weld; he taught him to be self-sufficient.

“He put the helmet on my head and walked away,” Yazel said.

As Yazel recalls it, he was a bit too young to weld by today’s standards—he was 6 years old—and his first welds weren’t good at all, but that didn’t deter him. He continued to weld at home, then took some welding classes in high school, and his welds had improved to the point that he did some welding work while he was attending college.

After graduation, he took a sales job, and it seemed like that was the end of welding for him. He didn’t pick up a torch for nearly two decades.

Steeling the Garden

By the time he was ready to give up the steady paycheck, Yazel had been working at a hobby that was gradually turning into a part-time job. When his wife saw a steel flower in a catalog,

Yazel mentioned that he could make something similar (see Figure 1). Working from hand-drawn templates of flower petals, Yazel used a plasma unit to cut the petals and some ingenuity to form them.

“My tools are similar to the tools you’d find in an autobody shop,” he said. He rests the petal on a sandbag and shapes it with a plastic mallet.

Yazel didn’t know it then, but placing one of his steel flowers in the front garden would change everything. A neighbor asked him to make one, and before long he was taking large numbers of steel flowers to a wholesaler’s expo. They sold well, and Yazel also took a quantity of them to an artist’s show. The big difference was the price, so Yazel decided to focus on retail sales and he hasn’t looked back.

Two Metals, Four Flowers, Many Sales

To get started, he copied the leaves from four flower species he found in his garden, enlarged them on a photocopier, and made cardboard templates. Specializing in sunflowers, coneflowers, lilies, and poppies, he originally worked only in mild steel, which develops an appealing, rustic look when corrosion sets in. However, more than a few customers expressed an interest in rust-free flowers, so Yazel switched to stainless steel for the petals. This opened up some additional possibilities.

“I add a patina to the petals by adding heat,” he said. Common industrial gases, such as MAPP, acetylene, and propane, burn at different temperatures and therefore develop different colors, which Yazel uses to add variety to his creations. He even found through experimentation that acetylene from one supplier creates a slightly different color than the acetylene from another, so he keeps a tank of each. He also enjoys experimenting with

joining dissimilar metals to see how the welds turn out.

Figure 2 In addition to a variety of flowers, Yazel makes critters from found objects.

An Evolving Entrepreneur

Yazel has made a few changes since the early days. He doesn’t cut the petals on a plasma cutter, but outsources them to a shop that cuts them on a laser machine, and he creates other garden decorations in addition to flowers (see Figure 2).

The only thing that hasn’t changed is the satisfaction he feels when he looks back to the day when, at the ripe young age of 40, he left the workaday world to make his own way as an artist and an entrepreneur.

Kirk Yazel Metal Sculpture, N5635 Skunk Hollow Road, Ripon, WI 54971, 920-748-5397, kirkyazel@me.com, www.facebook.com/kirkyazelmetalsculpture