I love this poster from WomenTech.  This is exactly the message that we’re trying to get across to our readers:

Gender doesn’t matter.  Skill does.

To see more posters from WomenTech’s Think Women Can’t Be Poster Series: Think Again, go here.

Last week, I went to the San Diego zoo, and near the front gate were these scrap metal statues. Big ones. Tall, tall statues of people with strange apparatus on their faces. One with the head of a camel who was holding a stand-up bass. Inside the shops were more statues of different types of animals. Some birds. I think there was a giraffe somewhere…

But my favorite had to be a life-size statue of a gorilla that I found in the one of the shops near the primate exhibits. I almost wanted to reach out and touch it, but the cashier was standing right behind me.

These amazing statues are all the work of one Kenyan artist, Kioko Mwitiki.

An art student turned welder, one day Kioko was practicing welding bits of scrap metal together. A passerby asked him, “How much?” and the rest is history. An artist was born.

Today his sculptures are featured internationally. He has an installation of a life-size herd of elephants at the Nairobi Jomo Kenyatta International Airport and his work has been purchased by art lovers the world over.

For information and to see a selection of Kioko’s work:

Kioko Mwitiki’s art for sale

An article by the Kenyan Daily Nation

A Flickr account with several of his works

We first “met” Marcia Sommer when she called in to Arc-Zone.com looking for some equipment for a laser welding application. A welder for 25 years, Marcia is a technical consultant and teaches at two local colleges.

“Crowder College and Missouri Southern State University has an Alliance that does consulting and instruction in industry. They needed a combination welder who could teach and consult. It snowballed from there,” she says.

She wasn’t sure about the teaching part of the job at first. Marcia learned a lot about tools and troubleshooting from her father, a skilled craftsman, but got on the job training as a welder’s helper for a pipe crew where she worked for two years and took night classes at the local trade school. She learned by being a good hand for the “old welders.” Marcia says you just have to “be still and listen. So that is how I teach now that I am the old welder,” she jokes.

That way of teaching seems to work for Marcia– on a lot of levels. “After I finished [teaching] my first class I knew this was something where I could get all the best things you look for in a job. Great people, important work, paying back, and feeling blessed.”

Her favorite projects are making something for the Agricultural Department’s large, working farm at Crowder College. “My students enjoy doing real world projects,” she says.

Though GTAW with stainless or titanium is what she loves best, Marcia says that in the last few years she has enjoyed GMAW as well. “I put together a large deer made of ¼” round stock. The GMAW let me move as fast as the ideas.

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These sculptures come from all over the U.S.A. Big ones. Small ones. Lots of Tin Men. A couple of Tin Women. A veritable zoo of animals including elephants and… lobsters? I concentrated on those that are welded, but beyond that, you could look for days.

These are some of the finest specimens of folk art in the country as per this fantastic site.

Fire Hydrant Jack
Location:
In shelbourne on the east side of Rt 7 north of Church Rd.
Chittenden Co – VT
Latitude: N44° 22.77
Longitude: W73° 13.67
Notes:
Photo July 2005

Lincoln Electric Introduces the Chip Foose-Designed
Vista(R) Hemisfear(TM) Auto-Darkening Welding Helmet
Legendary Car Designer Models Helmet After His 500-HP Hemisfear(TM) Hot Rod

Cleveland – Lincoln Electric has teamed up with Chip Foose – award-winning custom car designer and die-hard Lincoln Electric enthusiast – to introduce Vista(R) Hemisfear(TM), an auto-darkening welding helmet inspired by Foose’s 500-HP Hemisfear hot rod.

The latest edition to Lincoln’s Vista(R) series of welding helmets, the Hemisfear welding helmet captures the essence of Foose’s limited production hot rod, a classic car that gave Foose one of his initial claims to fame in 2006. The helmet features the hot rod’s three distinct colors: neon green, black and orange with a custom silver stripe on the side. Other embellishments to the helmet include Chip Foose’s signature and the Foose Design(TM) logo.

The Vista Hemisfear is the company’s first using a new lightweight shell design, bringing the total helmet weight to 20 oz. or less depending on configuration. All Vista helmets feature:

•  Solar powered auto-darkening, eliminating operator error and alkaline corrosion
•  Grind and TIG modes, as well as variable delay settings for greater operator control
•  Four independent arc sensors to ensure reliability
•  Different view sizes for user preferences, including the 3000 series, with one of the largest views in the industry

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It’s really a pity that Women Unlimited is not a nation-wide organization.  If it were though, it would kind of undermine this mission statement: 

Maine has the best contractors, workers, and Department of Transportation in the nation.

Our job at Women Unlimited is to bring these three forces together to build a diversified, well-trained road-and-bridge construction industry that continutes to be the envy of the other forty-nine states.

Women Unlimited provides on the job training to “minorities, women, and disadvantaged persons” to help them move up and branch out in the world of construction by helping them to attain “journey person” status.

Read about Terri Peaslee-Steinmeyer and how Women Unlimited has helped her and other women like her to achieve their dreams below:

Conference affords options for entry into building trades

BY MECHELE COOPER
Staff Writer

03/29/2009

AUGUSTA — For Terri Peaslee-Steinmeyer, hooking up with Women Unlimited meant a $4-an-hour difference in her paycheck and the potential for advancement in the construction field.

The 40-year-old Waterville woman is a traffic coordinator for Pike Industries. Based in Fairfield, she and her crew are responsible for erecting and removing signs, cones and barrels at construction sites.

Peaslee-Steinmeyer was among many women who have benefited from the organization and attended the Maine Tradeswomen’s Conference on Saturday at the Senator Inn & Spa in Augusta.

The two-day conference provided information on the trades and nontraditional career options. Beginning with a career-options fair Friday, the event continued Saturday with workshops and keynote speakers.

Peaslee-Steinmeyer said she worked in retail all her life. Her hourly wage in the last job she held was $12.

“This is my sixth season (with Pike Industries) and I’m making over $15 an hour,” Peaslee-Steinmeyer said. “I was married, then divorced. We have six kids — yours, mine and ours — and (I) was told and told to go to Women Unlimited. I finally did in 2004 and put my application in for jobs. I was hired and had on-the-job training for highway construction and continue to grow with the company.”

She said President Barack Obama’s economic stimulus package is getting her back to work early.

“I start Wednesday,” she said.

CONTINUE READING ONLINE ->

Today is all about the know-how or the how-to, or really, any compound word with a hyphen in between.  But I’ll let your imagination run wild with that.  

We have found another group of sites made specifically for women, by women all about mechanical know-how: one for motorcycles and two for cars.

The first is Garage Girls, “An Intuitive Guide to Motorcylces for Women” and I absolutely love it.  They have how-to info, advice, news, personal stories, pet stories, and just-for-fun articles all related to motorcycles.

The second and third, the ones related to automotive “know-how” are actually interrelated.  Ladies, Start Your Engines is a site created by Lori Johnson who conducts car repair classes specifically for women in the Pennsylvannia area.  She is also a go-to expert on Ask Patty, an interactive website where women can give and recieve automotive advice through blogs, webcasts, forums, and the like.

Women workers in Utah have recently discovered that by simply switching their field of focus from professions in childcare, healthcare, or waitressing to careers in plumbing, welding, or drafting and the like, they can actually sometimes double their salary.

Trading pink collars for blue ones

By NANCY VAN VALKENBURG

Local women are learning they can pursue careers in trades and technology, and gain respect for their training and performance. Not only that, they can take home considerably fatter paychecks than they would as waitresses, clerks or child-care workers.

“The rule of thumb is the more traditionally male a job is, the more it pays,” said Licia Langston, a regional economist for the Utah Department of Workforce Services. “When you look at jobs with the same amount of experience required, male-dominated jobs have much higher pay than those that are female-dominated.”
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