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Still Building America—Conversation leads to new career for Ed Littlefield
“You don’t get maximum rewards with minimum effort”
- By Josh Welton
- August 6, 2018
Meet Ed Littlefield, a combo welder specializing in TIG welding. He quit his hotel job in 2013, drove straight down to Florida, and enrolled at Tulsa Welding School in Jacksonville. He’s had opportunities to weld in a shipyard, pipe weld in power plant outages, work as a maintenance welder for a university, and work in a shop as a fabricator/welder.
JW: Share with us what kind of work you do.
EL: I’m currently a welder for a valve repair company. Most of my work is overlay and hardfacing the inside of valves and their components. The company follows the outage schedule for our list of customers, and we are on the road at power plants for eight months out of the year, tearing down valves and overhauling them like new. Honestly, there is a lot of millwright work involved as well. I’m not just a welder here; I’m also a valve technician.
JW: What got you started in welding/fabrication? How did you decide on your career path?
EL: I’ve always had a desire to learn how to “do things.” I got into welding after a late-night conversation with a guest at my previous job. It turned out that the guest was a pipe welder. He was on the Ingalls shipbuilding travel crew and was in town to help build submarines. He told me that his job was tough but fun. He played with fire. He helped to build things that will last longer than he will be alive. I was sold. He was also drunk as a skunk, and it was going on 2:30 a.m. when he finally said, “It pays better than most s*** too.”
That very same night, I got an email from my mother, who lived in Jacksonville at the time, asking if I’d be interested in welding school, because she kept seeing commercials and billboards around town. The next day, I had my car packed, and by the time I was supposed to clock in at the hotel, I was cruising through New Jersey on the way to my new future!
The pipe welder was called “Scooby.” I never got his real name.
JW: Who were your influences, and who has impacted your life?
EL: Today I’m influenced by people like Jody from Welding Tips and Tricks, Josh from Brown Dog Welding, and really, every craftsman who puts his name and work on the line every day.
JW: What type of background and training do you have?
EL: I like to see people succeed, and I like to see people learn valuable skills. I grew up poor, and I was uninformed in high school about being an adult in the real world. I’m at the early edge of the millennial generation, and I grew up kind of at the same pace with technology. As a child, I was a tinkerer in my spare time. For my first taste of manual labor, I joined the Army as a helicopter mechanic—basically a sheet metal worker. I hated sheet metal and riveting. I got out after my contract and realized I enjoy working with metal rather than doing any other job. As a traveling pipe welder, there are no annoying customers, no Carol from HR, no bulls***.
I enrolled at Tulsa Welding School and learned how to pass a pipe weld test. Some people don’t put in any effort to learn the trade. They coast through the school like it’s high school all over again. I took it so seriously. My class was 7a.m. to 12:30 p.m. with a 30-minute lunch break. The school also ran a 1 to 5:30 p.m. and a 6 to 11:30 p.m. class.
I would stay in my welding booth for 12 hours a day practicing what I was shown. I came in on optional Saturdays. I was “the top welder” in five out of the nine phases of the course and received a perfect attendance award. I busted my ass. I got good. That’s how I learned the processes of welding and the technical aspects, like setting up machines and various troubleshooting.
Learning how to make quality field welds is a constant lesson, though. There are always situations I run into that seem so ridiculous at the time. A spool needs to be welded in a boiler room, on top of the boiler, way in the far back corner of the pipe rack, with 4-inches of clearance on the “easy side.” That is where my skills come from.
JW: What is your favorite part of your job?
EL: My favorite part of my job is actually doing my job. I am having the most fun while I’m welding.
JW: What is the most challenging part of your job?
EL: The most challenging part of my job is that there are many different perspectives when it comes to planning a project. I find that the welder and the engineer do not see things the same way in most cases. It can be hard trying to build someone else’s idea into a reality.
JW: What's your future goal for your career?
EL: I’ve always wanted to be a teacher—a history teacher at first—so I plan on getting my CWI and eventually teaching the next generation of welders. Whenever I have a spare moment on jobs, I always try and teach people who are willing to learn how to weld.
If I were giving advice to anyone considering welding as a career, I would say don’t stop there. Learn how to weld, but also learn how to fit, how to plan, draw, read blueprints, turn a wrench, run a lathe, wire a switch, etc. You don’t get maximum rewards with minimum effort.
All photos provided by Ed Littlefield.
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The Welder, formerly known as Practical Welding Today, is a showcase of the real people who make the products we use and work with every day. This magazine has served the welding community in North America well for more than 20 years.
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