Read an Excerpt

From Chapter 1: Why This Book Exists

Nobody’s ever written a book about welding tables. Look, I get it. If I didn’t know what I know, I’d think it’d be a boring premise for a book too. But hear me out.

There are books about welding processes, books about metallurgy, books full of projects you can build, and shelf after shelf of certification study guides. But the very thing every single one of those projects gets built on? Not one book.

A product category worth billions of dollars a year, sitting in the middle of every fabrication shop on the planet, and the total published literature on it is a pile of blog posts and whatever the manufacturers’ marketing departments want you to believe.

That’s insane.

When you buy a car, there are entire industries devoted to telling you the truth about it. Crash tests. Consumer reports. Long-term reliability data. When you buy a welding table, which might be a five-figure purchase that outlives your career, your sources of information are: the guy selling it to you, a forum thread from 2011, and a YouTube video sponsored by the guy selling it to you.

And what’s worse – the information vacuum gets filled with marketing! And marketing departments write specs the way fishermen describe fish – sure, they may have caught a fish! But the numbers grew in the telling.

Hardness figures measured on a layer thinner than a human hair, but implied to be the entire thickness of the materials. Also, implied to actually matter!

Load capacities calculated by methods nobody will disclose, and that no known engineer has officially certified.

Tolerances that sound like they came from a NASA cleanroom attached to products that arrive with a twist you could see from across the shop.

Nobody is checking any of it, so it keeps escalating.

I’ve spent the last decade running one of the largest welding table manufacturers in the United States. We’ve built tables for NASA, Tesla, Microsoft, Mary Kay (can you believe it), every branch of the US military, Fortune 500 factories, one-man shops, and schools teaching sixteen-year-olds to run a bead. Somewhere in that decade I ended up knowing more about welding tables than just about anyone alive, which is a strange thing to have carved on your tombstone, but here we are.

The Accidental Table Company

Here’s the part nobody expects: Texas Metal Works was founded by accident. I’m a direct metal sculptor. An artist. Years ago I was fighting a piece of sculpture that needed to be perfectly flat, on a homemade two-dimensional table that had no interest in helping. So I went shopping for a real table, and I found the super expensive Germans immediately. Beautiful equipment! And money wasn’t the obstacle. But there were obstacles, and they were more practical: the table I wanted weighed well over a ton! And I didn’t have a forklift laying around to receive it. And it wasn’t mobile at all, and I needed to move my table around the shop.

So I designed my own. When it was done, my fabricated table weighed a third of what theirs did and was just as strong, and it rolled around the shop on casters rated at a thousand pounds apiece. Functionally, for my needs, it was flat-out superior. And because I used to host a TV show (a whole different story), I shared what I’d built with a lot of followers, and a bunch of them said: will you build me one?