From the Web: Big pay raise; Smart, but not rich; 3-D breakthroughs; welding—a worthwhile career?

Let’s begin with some feel-good news, at least for those entry-level Ford Motor Co. workers who are set to receive pay raises of more than $19,000—nearly 50 percent of their current wages—this year.

The United Auto Workers union agreed to a $19.28 hourly wage for new hires in 2007, when automakers were losing money—about $9 an hour less than veteran autoworkers. This will be the first group of entry-level workers promoted to the traditional wage.

Ford said the two-tier wages enabled the automaker to invest more than $6.2 billion in its U.S. manufacturing facilities in the last three years and hire more than 15,000 workers.

Contracts between the UAW and the Detroit automakers are due to expire later this year, and UAW officials already are on record as saying they will seek to eliminate the two-tier wage structure in the next labor deal, bringing all the entry level workers up to the veteran pay scale.

A reporter for argusleader.com set out to see if welding really is a career worth pursuing. Steve Young wondered why more young people don’t go into skilled jobs, like welding, in a blue-collar state like South Dakota.

“Is it the pay? Is it some long-held belief that welders are dirty and grimy all the time, drenched in sweat and laboring in uncomfortable conditions?

“If so, that's not the reality at all, says Jeff Holcomb, president of Southeast Technical Institute in Sioux Falls.

“His school graduates welders who start at $20 an hour. They work with equipment that's much more advanced than it was 25 years ago.. And they work in environments—at Marmen Energy, at Egger and Sioux Steel, at Raven Industries—‘that are clean and nice and much more modernized,’ he says.”

Young is skeptical: “Really? I’d be interested in hearing from this generation of welders to get their take on whether this is an occupation that a person could make a decent career out of in South Dakota.” If you want to share your opinion with Young, his contact information can be found in his article, or you can comment to this post, and I will see that he receives the comments.

If you’re keeping up with 3-D printing developments, you might interested in news from Japan that a unique manufacturing technology for metal powders to be used with 3-D printers has been developed by Zecotek Photonics and its strategic partners.

The development centers around a new generation of hydrogen-containing materials, including those based on refractory metals, nano-modified alloys, and certain inter-metallides groups, which are said to key for additive 3-D printing technologies.

In July 2014 Zecotek contracted LT-PYRKAL to assemble and test its first compact, high-speed 3D printer, which uses high-performance metal alloys. The company reports that s number of key technical challenges have been solved, and LT-Pyrkal is proceeding with the assembly of the new 3-D printer, which will be used for both prototyping and distributed manufacturing with specific applications in electronics, aerospace, automotive, mechanical and healthcare industries. A working prototype of the high-speed 3D printer is schedule for the third quarter of 2015.

Groups of Northern Michigan students recently demonstrated six hand-built wind turbines they’d spent weeks crafting at the Wexford-Missaukee Career Technical Center in Cadillac, Mich.

Every Saturday during January, the 12 students worked with CTC instructors in the areas of engineering technology, metal fabrication, and electronics in designing, developing, and assembling their wind turbines.

There was plenty of room for creativity. Designs included bacon-shaped turbine blades and shark-inspired turbines.

Kaylee Lerma, 15, a member of team Ricky Bobby, said the project taught her a variety of metal fabrication skills, and that fabricating the hub of the team’s Will Ferrell-inspired wind turbine was the team’s most difficult challenge. You can see photos of the turbines here.

Finally, here’s the answer—or not—to a question we’ve all formed at one time or another: If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?”

Forbes contributor Roger Kay described how his father once explained—through personal stories from his own career—how being rich didn’t mean you were smart, and being smart didn’t ensure that you’d be rich.

Among the stories he used to illustrate this premise is his experience as an engineer fabricating the feed for the Arecibo radio telescope, a huge stellar observatory plunked down in the middle of what had been a valley of virgin jungle in the northwest interior of Puerto Rico.

“His company, Technical Research Group (TRG), made, as a subcontractor, the large metal feed that was to be suspended above a thousand-foot-diameter dish. The dish would send and receive radio waves to and from outer space. Back at a time when these types of calculations were done on a slide rule, he made an error, and the feed was off measure. That is, its dimensions weren’t right. Its accuracy was impaired by several orders of magnitude, and the feed had to be done over.

TRG offered to redo the work, but, the contractor threw it off the job in anger. However, perhaps because the project was part of the whole post-WWII military spending geyser, his firm was paid handsomely for their work anyway. This was an illustration of how you didn’t have to be smart of get rich.”

Young shared many other interesting stories and concluded by saying, “And it’s good to remember that luck—of the draw, of birth, of timing—plays an extraordinary role. The correlation between intelligence and wealth is tenuous at best. And wisdom—as distinct from intelligence—might at some point lead you away from riches.