Anyone have opinions on the various options? I don’t have a friend with a shop who does TIG. For the East Bay, it seems to be either a very high time commitment course at Laney (6 hours a week for several months, can’t manage this one with existing commitments), or the short courses at the Crucible.
Is the right answer here just to get a cheap welder and table and some stock to practice with? Are there some local resources that I’m not finding via search?
Laney is great, I would strongly recommend taking a TIG course there. They might have it condensed into a shorter amount of time over a summer session. When I took welding courses there while they were under covid protocols it was 6 weeks of 3 hours per day 4 days a week.
If you can find a time where you’d have the availability to attend it’s a great way to learn to weld, get a ton of feedback, and learn how to assess your welds to improve them in the future.
I would definitely like to! You’re definitely not the only person who speaks well of it. But unfortunately, like a lot of middle-aged people, I don’t have enough control over my own schedule to do anything like the Laney course any time in the foreseeable future unless it was genuinely critical to do so.
I did mine at UC Davis, they have a craft center where they give welding classes (amongst other classes), I took both the beginner course and the “advanced” one a few years back, I don’t remember how long it took but it wasn’t too long (2 months? maybe 3?) and it was once or twice a week in the evening (like 5pm-9pm) or something like that.
I did a little bit of everything, started with brazing, then torch welding, MIG and TIG and we touched a little of plasma cutting as well.
I know they changed things now so maybe there is something more TIG oriented.
Looks like the Davis ARC classes no longer do TIG, and there’s no other welding there. In any case, commute traffic makes getting to anything in Davis on time a non-starter (in a car at least, the train might be an option if there was something that fit the schedule).
College of Marin does a lot of CAD and CNC but no welding.
CCSF does a generalist class but doesn’t seem to get into TIG until the advanced class.
I started looking into CCC community colleges, but then had the same thought about the awful car commute.
Fellow framebuilder Zach of https://www.zabrinacycles.com/bikes teaches TIG at the Crucible in Oakland.
Next best thing is, imho, taking an intensive 5 day class from someone, I have seen a few options in like Nevada or Arizona, not cheap all considered but it may be worth the investment.
Emphasis mine, is this true? This info sheet about their machine, metals technology & welding program indicates that they offer welding courses: https://academics.marin.edu/sites/default/files/documents/Pathway-MACH-2023.pdf
I learned how to weld in a COM course in 2015, it would be a shame if they no longer offered welding.
Yeah, their page indicates that they do, too, but all of the course offered in that program are CNC and CAD oriented, taught by a single person. Makes me wonder if they’re between instructors for their welding program.
Maybe you can pay a framebuilder in the Bay to teach you.
I took a welding course that was okay for doing thick stuff. But welding thin wall tubes is a totally different beast. It wasn’t until I worked in person with a few other builders that everything clicked. Watching them and then getting direct feedback after making my own attempts was a game-changer.