Welding Digest

Marc and Adina Levin, cofounders of Welder Underground (WUG), a welding and metal fabrication apprenticeship program, took an audacious approach to entice six young, diverse New York City, N.Y., apprentices into trades career opportunities: They recruited the young adults to fabricate an 18-ft-tall steel statue of Rappin’ Max Robot, a hip-hop comic book character developed by Bronx, N.Y., artist Eric Orr.  

In an even more audacious move, WUG is gifting the sculpture to Paris, France, to celebrate break dancing as an Olympic sport. The program’s efforts have garnered coverage in the New York Times, and WUG is already impacting the lives of the six apprentices. 

“Welder Underground has a very straightforward, simple mission: teach welding and metal fabrication to the next generation by partnering with established artists to build large-scale public artworks,” Marc said. “We do it in this way so people learning a new skill can build something that will live in the world. For the rest of their lives, they will have a portfolio piece that they can point to that exists in the world.” 

Apprentices Earn while They Learn 

Based in Brooklyn, N.Y., WUG is the latest brainchild of husband-and-wife team Marc and Adina, who are self-taught fabricators, artists, set and clothing designers, and community educators. Their initial organization, The Collab-Orators, was founded in 2009 to revolutionize workforce development by offering affordable, scalable, project-based learning curricula as a pathway to job opportunities for low-income communities. 

“In creating Welder Underground, we took everything that we learned about creating apprenticeship programs centered around project-based learning to create a purposeful project where apprentices work together as a means to learn a new skill or a trade,” Adina said. “We also realized that if we were to do something with welding, it would become particularly valuable because there is a shortage of welders.” 

WUG is a paid apprentice program, so students can earn while they learn. Receiving $20 an hour, the apprentices are relieved of the financial pressures often associated with gaining new skills. The program lasts six months, and the inaugural cohort finished their apprenticeships at the end of September. In addition to learning from Marc and Adina, students received guidance from WUG Lead Mechanical Design Engineer Brian Yudin, Instructor and Artist Marie Boone, and Consulting Artist and large-scale metal sculpture experts Jack Howard-Potter (of Steel Statue) and Luke Schumacher. 

Apprentice Mike Gutierrez said he sees a bright future with project-based learning. “It’s fun going to work because I’m learning,” he revealed. “Whether it’s little or big, I go home with something new every day. If you’ve been thinking about the skilled trades, consider that welding is super open-ended because you can pursue a career in all sorts of jobs.”

Hip-Hop Inspiration 

“The development of hip-hop was the spark that started the Rappin’ Max Robot character,” which got its own comic book in 1986, Orr recalled. “I just started drawing the little robot in the streets for kids in the neighborhood. I was a big fan of the robot dance.” Marc and Adina met Orr through a project for the Hip Hop Museum, and inspiration struck. 

“People love hip-hop, comics, and robots, so we thought Rappin’ Max was a really great way to inspire this first cohort,” Adina said. 

“I shared our idea about creating an 18-ft-tall version of Rappin’ Max Robot that we could place outside of the Hip Hop Museum and use it to teach young people to weld and fabricate,” Marc added. “Eric gave us permission to use Rappin’ Max, but he thought the idea was a little nuts.” 

If the Levins are crazy, they’re crazy like a fox. They have created several different project-based learning initiatives and tested various ways of educating and giving people purpose. While they have a 14,000-sq-ft workspace, purchasing welding and cutting equipment remained a financial roadblock for the not-for-profit WUG program. 

“We never had any corporate support for Welder Underground until we connected with ESAB,” Adina revealed. “ESAB understood how we could innovate and work with low-income communities and do impactful work. By coming together, we created something powerful for the welding industry. We all want an opportunity to shape the world we imagine, and that only becomes possible from partnerships.” 

To springboard the WUG program, ESAB provided safety gear, welding machines, and manual and automated cutting equipment.

The Fabrication Process 

The Rappin’ Max Robot sculpture weighs about 8000 lb. It uses I-beams and ¼-in.-wall square tubing for the armature or structural skeleton. Thousands of spot welds fix 11-gauge sheet metal to the armature, forming Max’s body, with a thicker plate and ½-in. round bar used for stiffness in select areas, such as gussets in the feet. Max’s neck is made from a 10-in.-diameter pipe. His boom box measures 10 × 6 × 3 ft and uses 1-in. steel for the box body and 11-gauge steel to create elements such as the speakers, cassette player, play buttons, and Roman numerals for the XXXIII Olympics.  

To appreciate the challenge of fabricating the robot, experienced fabricators need to put themselves in the shoes of a young person with a completely different background. For example, Apprentice Alyssa Valentine was an assistant store manager at a pharmacy chain, and Eric Orr Jr. worked in an office at a storage company. Trying to explain the function of metalworking tools in the abstract makes as much sense as teaching algebra in the abstract. However, using tools to create a sculpture enables apprentices to internalize fundamental mechanical processes and learn how fabrication techniques connect.  

“We provide safety training and then have them jump right in. We then revert to explaining theory,” Boone said. “After apprentices get a feel for the tool, we break down the machines and each component and ask them to explain what is happening.”  

“We also teach a more holistic approach to shop work,” Yudin said. “Students learn how to take a project from inception to completion, making sure they tighten the last bolt, remove all the burrs, and check tolerances. The project also teaches soft skills such as spatial awareness, communication, and working as part of a team.”  

“The most exciting part of this whole project was the collaboration,” Howard-Potter shared. “We were all working towards a unified goal of really realizing this huge public sculpture. That meant that the way we accomplish certain tasks had to be a collaborative effort.”

Visualize Amazing 

Just as the sculpture came to life, so have the six apprentices morphed into welders and metal fabricators. They can admire the final product of their hard work as the sculpture sits outside its temporary home at the Hip Hop Museum. Marc and Adina hope that if there is one thing apprentices take away from their program, it is that they have gained the confidence to take on anything. 

Twenty-year-old Alyssa Valentine disliked working retail and the constant interaction with customers. When a friend of her mother’s told her about Welder Underground, she jumped at the chance.  

“With this apprenticeship opportunity, you get to learn way more stuff, and then you go into actual jobs that make the bigger bucks instead of sitting at minimum wage,” Valentine said. She didn’t even know “welding was a thing,” and now she is considering going to automotive trade school to be a mechanic.  

“Welder Underground is opening up a whole world of possibilities for me,” said Gutierrez, who had previously been an automotive technician. “From using CNC plasma and waterjet tables to just learning how to MIG [GMA] and TIG [GTA] weld to using the other equipment. With the skills I’ve learned at Welder Underground, I could see myself opening my own automotive performance shop as well as a machine shop.”

This article was written by Curtis Jewell (general counsel, ESAB Corp., North Bethesda, Md.) for the American Welding Society.