Fabrication and Welding Apprentice, Quad Metal Works

>> My name is Katie Lynn Ellis. And I am a metal fabrication and welding apprentice for Quad Graphics. I build things. We take prints from the companies or we go out and measure things up and we build all kinds of different things that go into the plants: catwalks, bumper guards, different types of safety guards, just about anything you can think of, we build. And a lot of our stuff goes into our plants right in West Allis, Sussex, Pewaukee, and all over the country. I work with all kinds of different gauges of steel, plate, sheet metal, angle irons, box tubes. A lot of things can either be plasma cut or they come in big sheets or sticks and then we cut them down to size per the prints. And then we make them into what we need them to be. You basically take your two pieces of metal, fit them up, clean them up, and you use a welding gun. And you are going to be basically laying an electrode into the two pieces of metal to fuse them together. First thing you have to do is look at the print and decipher what you're making and what each component is, what items are. You look at it bill of materials or if you don't have one, you have to make your own bill of materials. And you go and you collect what you need. You figure out how you're going to fabricate it. So a lot of times it's figuring out how to fit it up in the best way possible. We have fit up tables that are really nice where I work so it makes fit up a lot easier and then you start building. You start to tack things together, maneuver where you need to maneuver it and then weld everything, finish everything. The nice thing about my job is it can change everyday. Some days I can be working on a very small project and maybe it's 100 pieces. And the next day, once that job is -- or once that job is done, I could get an order for, you know, a quantity of two eight-foot bumper guards. So it's always something different.