Interview 13: Kate, a Fabricator and Instructor
Kate is a fabricator/welder at Workshop Detroit and instructor with Women Who Weld in Detroit, MI
Arclight is a long-form interview series in which Women Who Weld, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that teaches women how to weld and find employment in the welding industry, showcases women who create, ideate, and collaborate across specializations and trades.
Kate Mooney completed Women Who Weld’s Intensive Welding Training Program in October 2019. She is a fabricator/welder at Workshop Detroit and a co-instructor with Women Who Weld. Below is an edited and condensed interview between Samantha Farrugia, the founder of Women Who Weld, and Kate, a former Women Who Weld participant, in March 2022.
Where did you grow up?
Just outside of Philadelphia.
Where else have you lived?
I was born in Gainesville, Florida. I left there when I was five years old and moved to Moorestown, New Jersey, which is just on the other side of the Ben Franklin Bridge to Philadelphia. Then, when I was 19, I moved to Brooklyn, New York. I was there for almost four years. After that, I travelled around and briefly lived in Asheville and West Oakland. Briefly here and there, nowhere for too long. And then I settled in Philadelphia when I was 23; I was there until I moved to Detroit in 2018 and bought a house here.
What drew you to Detroit?
I moved here because I realized that Detroit has a lot of opportunity to offer. If you want to be a homeowner, you can buy a house here through the Land Bank for very cheap. All of my friends here are homeowners and there's a huge scene of working-class people who all have skills in the trades, and it's not just, you know, people my age working in restaurants or working at a bar. Everybody has a lot of talent and is very artistic. So that's what drew me here, and I saved up my money to buy a house.
The house you bought needed a lot of work, what type of work have you done on your house?
It was a very long, blood, sweat and tears process. But it's nice to have friends who you can talk to about it because they have been through it as well. I didn't necessarily have an interest in learning plumbing, HVAC, or electrical, or the mechanics of a car or motorcycle, but I didn't grow up with money so these are things I was kind of forced into learning how to do. But now, luckily, I enjoy doing these things. And I grew up without a dad, so I think that's where my desire to learn how to fix things, or change a flat or jump a car, came from. Just simple things that my mother had no idea how to do as a single- mom.
So, with my house, I didn't have plumbing for a year and a half and I just got my furnace kicked on after three years. A lot of people ask, “Why don't you just call a plumber?” but, unfortunately, I don't have the funds to hire somebody to do the job for me. So if I'm not working, I'm still working on my house. But this is my fourth year here, and I've finally gotten to a point where my house is very inhabitable and very comfortable, and I have heat and electricity and plumbing, and now I have a greenhouse and a chicken coop. It's just nice that this is mine and I don't have to worry about making mortgage payments and I feel safe and happy here.
If you didn’t have plumbing in your house, how did you shower or have access to water?
Running PEX, the in-line, is really easy when you want water to come into your house, but the outgoing drainage is very hard. When we first moved here, the first thing we did was run PEX lines into our house so we had running water after a couple months. I would do dishes in my backyard by heating up a kettle. And we built a little outdoor shower, which is really nice in the summertime when it’s warm out; we made it out of pallets and a little shower head and we had hot water hooked up - you can buy a very small tankless hot water heater for a couple hundred bucks.
It's great that we had water, but we didn't have the drainage because we had to dig a very, very, very deep long hole in the backyard and knock out all of the old cast iron. And then we had to jackhammer the basement and knock it all out. Neither me or my partner are professional anything, so we did a lot of research and a lot of work trade with friends who have done similar things in their homes. Then you go to their house, and help them with something you know how to do. That's just kind of how the city of Detroit works; everybody kind of does work trade and helps each other out.
How did you stay warm through the winter?
We were chopping lots of wood. We have a wood burning stove and it gets scorching hot once you get it going. But when you wake up and you have to get ready for work at 6:30 in the morning, you don't have time to get kindling together and start a fire and stoke it while you're not home all day. So, a lot of the time, I would just stay in my bedroom with a space heater, and when I was in the rest of my house, I would have to bundle up and wear a hat and a Carhartt jacket while I was cooking dinner. Now that I look back at it, I thought it was bad at the time, but I believe in having to put in work in order to receive the effect of something. If you put in hard work, it'll pay off eventually. And it’s great to understand how things work; if something breaks and I can figure out how to fix it, I get really excited and it's really inspiring to try to solve the puzzle of how to make something work. It's what I live for.
Where did you work before becoming a welder?
When I first moved to Detroit, I had my own little painting company. I would make flyers and post them around town and try to find jobs word-of-mouth or find people on the internet who needed houses painted, doing interior and exterior painting. It’s also what I was doing in Philadelphia with a company called The Bearded Lady, a trans-queer-women run company and it was just four of us painting the city of Philadelphia. So I was a painter for quite a while, and before I was painting, I was walking dogs.
Why were you interested in becoming a welder?
I dropped out of high school, and if you don't go to college, you sometimes fall into trade work. And I was so inspired by Lily and Sarah who participated in Women Who Weld’s intensive welding training program the year before me. When I found out about Women Who Weld through them, I was just in awe, I was in shock, it seemed like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I was interested in welding because I like bikes and working on cars. And years before I moved to Detroit, I toured a welding program in Philadelphia, but it was very off-putting; there were no women there and the guy running the program was grumpy and didn’t seem very welcoming. He said, “There’s no women’s locker rooms here.” It didn’t seem like a good place for me to learn welding, so I decided to let the idea of learning how to weld go.
You participated in Women Who Weld’s intensive welding training program in 2019. What did the training do for you?
It totally changed my entire life. I've talked to my friends who have also gone through the program, and it has done the same thing for them as well. I've been welding non-stop since October 2019 when I finished the program, and now it's March 2022, and I’ve had welding jobs ever since. It opened up a whole new world for me and I love it.
What types of jobs have you had as a welder?
I started off welding at an auto rack factory. It was a warehouse filled with 60 other welders with no ventilation. Those were very brutal, very tiring, long hours working for UAW making under $15 an hour and waking up at 4:30 in the morning. It was a very hard time, but I toughed it out for a while because I wanted to build my resume. Then I worked with a custom fabricator where I built things like stair railings, staircases, furniture, door frames – it was very detail-oriented work; it was always different every day, always something new, which is what I like about custom fabrication. One of the last projects I worked on there was for a bookstore in Grosse Pointe: we built two giant identical spiral staircases and a balcony for the top stories. The stair wells were aluminum, so it involved a lot of TIG welding.
You were hired as a co-instructor with Women Who Weld to assist in welding training, how has your experience been?
Oh, my goodness, it is the dream job. I don't think I could ask for a better job or a greater opportunity. When somebody asks me what my job is and I get to say that I teach other women how to weld, it’s just the most amazing thing I could ask for. It's the best job ever. I feel so grateful and lucky for the opportunity.
What’s your favorite part about instructing?
My favorite part is seeing the excitement the participants get in their faces when they start to get the hang of it and realize they can see the puddle. It's that moment where they're like, “Aha! I know what's happening, I finally understand!” Welding is so intimidating at first, it's a very strange feeling, it's very uncomfortable and awkward with all the gear on, but when they start to get in the groove, it becomes exciting. I love when people go far with welding and it becomes their career.
Where do you currently work and what do you do there?
I work at a company called Workshop Detroit, it’s on the third floor of an obscure building in the middle of Milwaukee Junction. I’ve been there for the last six months. Only three people work there so it’s very small. We make furniture, tables, and a lot of shelving. We get some jobs in Detroit, but a lot of our stuff goes all over the country. I make all the metal frames for each furniture item. I do some woodworking which is nice for a change because I don’t know too much about carpentry. I recently started using wood planers and a gluing jig where I put all the pieces of wood together using glue and then sand them down. I made my first butcher block the other day which was really fun. But 80% of the time I’m doing the metalwork, building frames for the furniture.
What’s your schedule like, including start and end time, each day? Which days of the week do you work?
I work Tuesday to Friday and I usually get there somewhere between 9 and 10 o'clock in the morning and I work until around four or five in the evening. It's so relaxed and laid back there and everybody just listens to their headphones and podcasts. Nobody questions me, nobody belittles me or makes me feel bad; I'm very well-respected there, they don't even think twice that I'm a woman. I really like the environment and I love the neighborhood. The space that I'm working in is completely filled with windows and the sunlight comes in, it’s such a beautiful shop – it feels like I'm in the 1920s. I really like working in more intimate environments. I don't like working in factories or production. I like working in small shops where everybody knows each other really well.
Describe a typical day on the job?
The first thing we do is drink coffee and talk about the game plan for the day, because each of us have our own part that we play in making the piece of furniture that’s going out, and we're usually doing many pieces at the same time. There might be 10 tabletops going on, six frames being welded together, and a bunch of wood that needs to be planed and de-nailed – we have to take all the old nails out. And a typical day would be getting handed dimensions for material that needs to be cut: 16 gauge, 1.5” inch tubing is what I use mostly, and cutting the material and clamping everything down and welding it together. There are little custom flairs that we do like cut 90-degree angles on each corner of a table and everything is hand stamped with the address of where the wood was reclaimed from. It's very rustic, very unique furniture. I build about one table frame a day and if I have time, I'll help with staining and applying polyurethane and sanding the wood.
Which welding process do you primarily engage in?
At Workshop Detroit it’s only MIG, which I like.
What’s your favorite welding process and why?
I think MIG because it's the one I'm most confident in, it’s the one I first learned how to do. Secondly, I like stick welding because it's just fun and I have a stick machine at my house. And then I think TIG is my least favorite. I'm just more into burning things hot and heavy, it’s more my style. TIG welding is just a whole other game and I'm not as proficient as I would like to be, but I still do enjoy doing it.
That’s the order I would rank my favorite welding processes as well, I like the intensity of MIG and stick.
When I had my job interview for Workshop Detroit, I was like, “Oh, you guys only have a MIG welder? Sick! I know this thing like the back of my hand.” Like, I totally got this. Every weld is going to be absolutely perfect because I know this process so well.
What sort of tools and equipment do you use regularly?
Oh, it's very, very, very important: number one tool is a tape measure. Number two is a square, you got to have your square! And a scribe, I use scribes all day. I use grinders a lot, not so much cut-off wheels, but I use the flap discs, which is the grinding wheel. We have a chop saw with a metal blade on it. I use a bandsaw, but the one we have looks like it's a child's one. It's very, very small. I use a drill press every day to put holes in everything. That’s pretty much it, but the essentials are a square and a tape measure.
Which materials have you welded on?
At Workshop Detroit, it’s all mild steel. But in the past, I’ve welded on stainless and aluminum. I’ve also welded on cast iron, which is really awful and not fun at all.
You’re 29 years old, what are your future career aspirations?
I am slowly but surely working my way towards doing my own custom fabrication work, because the dream is to work for yourself, of course. And I'm slowly building all the supplies I need to do that. I have a little welding setup: a very small welding table, a disc grinder, and the tools I need. The only thing I'm missing is a bandsaw, and also space, because my basement floods and my garage is collapsing. I get offered work all the time, but to have your own custom fabrication start-up is very expensive. It's not like candle making where you can go buy some scents and some wax and start making candles. It's very expensive to start up on your own, you need gas, wire, machines…
But I'm just gonna fake it till I make it in my basement because you got to start making little things. I would like to do some blacksmithing as well, and make little ornamental things. I have a lot of ideas.
What are the things you like most about being a welder?
The pride it gives me, it makes me so excited. And I don't want to say powerful, because it sounds so cheesy, but just the confidence it gives me. I’m so excited when someone asks me, “Hey, what do you do for work?” And I'm like, “I'm a welder!” And they say, “What? That's so cool.” It's such a cool, really fun and exciting thing to be able to do, and to work with metal is so nice. Although, there are days where I wonder why I’m doing this, because it's so abrasive, dirty, greasy, and loud – you have to have earplugs. But when the finished product comes out, it's all worth it. I like going through brutal things in order to have a beautiful outcome.
Welding is exciting and it is powerful. And it’s hard to explain to someone who has never welded before what it feels like when you are welding. That's why I started Women Who Weld, I wanted to share the joy and intensity of welding with others!
"I wouldn't be where I am today if it wasn't for Women Who Weld.”
What are some challenges you’ve encountered as a welder, if any?
I guess being belittled or questioned or made to feel bad. I don’t like to get my feelings hurt.
You had thyroid cancer in the past, which predates your welding career. How do you keep yourself safe while welding?
I use a respirator all the time, not just for welding but also grinding. Which is so, so important when you’re grinding welds off for a finished look. If you have a bunch of black boogers in your nose, you know it's going up into your body and your brain and your ears. So I try to make sure I always have my respirator on and always wear my PPE.
Do you have advice for women who may be interested in pursuing a path in welding?
If you really do have a passion to learn how to weld, then you have to tough it out. The skill doesn't come overnight, and there’s going to be a lot of disappointing times or times that aren’t fun. But at the end of the day, after a couple years go by, you look back and you're like, “Wow, that was really hard, but look how much I know now.” So if it's something you're very passionate about, you're naturally going to overcome it.
What do you like to do in your free time?
I like to have a frickin’ blast! I like to have a lot of fun. In my free time, I really enjoy ceramics and pottery. It's so much fun, so magical, and so relaxing. I hope I can start doing it again once I get some free time and a little extra cash because I recently had to fix my car and my dog had heart-worms, and that was two-grand all together! I went from having money saved to not having money anymore. But it's coming back up. I just got my tax return and I got money from FEMA from my basement getting flooded over the summer. So everything's okay now.
I'm also always working on my house. I have chickens to take care of and I have dogs. I like to ride motorcycles and I like wrenching on things…and I'm obsessed with reading books. I love traveling. I'm always taking trips everywhere. Even though I work my butt off, I'm constantly taking trips no matter what.
And I love working. I'm all about working. I love waking up in the morning, drinking coffee. Having responsibilities, that keeps me good.
What is your dog’s name?
My chiweenie’s full name is Sweet Baby Roy Country Sparks Long Blonde Boy. I also have two other dogs named Kickstand and Mouth.
If you were not a welder, which career path may you have chosen?
If I could have done what I wanted when I was a tiny child, a photographer for National Geographic. But that's never going to happen. I love taking film photos and I love pictures. I travel a lot, so I always have a disposable camera on me at all times, no matter where I go. And when I was a little kid, I thought the coolest job in the whole world would be a photographer for National Geographic, but that's not realistic. To say one that is realistic, I would probably still be painting, I enjoy painting a lot. I just don't feel like I'm working unless I'm using my hands and doing hard labor. That's what work is to me, doing labor. I like it.
How do you describe what you do for a living? Do you refer to yourself as a welder or a metal fabricator?
I just say welder. It's simple and most people know what that is. I say I work at a furniture-making company in Milwaukee Junction, and that I instruct part-time with Women Who Weld and most people are like, “What the heck is that?” and I tell them, “It's the best thing in the whole world, and I wouldn't be where I am today if it wasn't for Women Who Weld.”
“I believe in having to put in work in order to receive the effect of something. If you put in hard work, it'll pay off eventually.”
If you could travel anywhere, where would you go and why?
I would go to Europe. I’ve never really left the country except for Canada and Mexico. But I would definitely go to Europe. I am American and I was born and raised here, but I think naturally people want to go to where their roots come from, which is Ireland for me. I'm very Irish. My father's father’s father came from Ireland on the boat. I would love to go to Ireland. And then backpack around Europe.
Interview 13: Kate, a Fabricator and Instructor
Loooove it so good! Inspiring aswell never found a good weld home…..I’ve been discouraged lately when it comes to welding.