Andrew Nichols

All right, welcome back to another episode of Out on the Road Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Linker. Today's episode is always brought to you by Slickman Welding Apparel. Nate's got a great line of gloves out, pretty much all your daily needs welding. Even if you're fence lining, barbed wire, everything, he's got a glove for the job. WoeBros.us, same thing with Chris. Not only does he have the FRs, he also has non-FRs. Plenty of patterns and designs to choose from on his deal. Also brought to you by Pearl Snap Pimps. Johnny just come out with an FR shirt. He's got the skeleton gloves. A lot of great products. T-shirts. TNM Welding Supply. Taos and Miss Mary out in West Texas have plenty of welder tools if you need. They sell the Slickman gloves. They got roll out wheels, rod buckets, welding hoods, welding lenses. They're in Big Spring, Texas. Any welding material you need, they have it. I am joined today, Mr. Andrew Nichols. Mr. Andrew Nichols of Southern Leatherworks. I specialize in mostly custom welding hoods and welding gear pertaining to leather. I do all things customization from paint jobs to custom engraving, so on and so forth. I got a long range from belts to hoods to we're getting into arm guards here soon. I do that, and then I also do my own fabrication as well in my own shop. I do a lot of mass manufacturing and custom fabrication as well. This is also, we're coming to you from Quitman, Arkansas, at the second day of the welding events here. This is kind of like the tour day for the high school kids and post-graduates. Some of them's competing tomorrow. Some of them don't graduate for another year. They're just here taking tours. We slipped away from them. We're doing it to record here. It's a nice day here. It's not, last year we battled the cold. This year it's chilly in the morning, but it's perfect for being outside the rest of the day. So today we had, they had the tours going on. At Brown Noon we're having the big lunch. We got the 798 here. We got Mr. Red Ray this afternoon. He's going to do the demonstration on hot taps and short stops and all that stuff on the distribution side. We got a few welding trucks coming this afternoon for them to check out again. That's pretty much day two in a nutshell. Tomorrow morning will be the full-blown welding competition. We'll start first thing in the morning with the second annual Shield Arch and Showdown. And then it will go through four other phases. Waves. Waves will be the word to use. So in the morning it will be the 18 plus competing for the scholarship. First, second, and third. 7,500, 5,000, 3,000. One person wins a belt buckle. And then they will have the pre-graduates, under 18 pretty much, the next three waves. We have 131 young adults signed up. Some of them, some older adults. I think I heard one of the ages for the 18 plus is a 39-year-old fellow that's interested in swapping his career to the welding industry. So good for you. Good for him. Yeah, I think that pretty much covers the welding competition for the day. All right, so on to talking to Mr. Andrews here. He also has a podcast, The Iron Insight, with the guy, Brian. Bryn Welds. Bryn Otto. Yeah, Bryn Otto. He's a great guy. He told me more statistics when I got on their podcast than I know about my own podcast. So very, very well-numbered guy. So what's. What got you into welding, Andrew? Well, I guess going through school wasn't your average kid who cared about school. Mom saw that very early on in the beginning. And it's a weird situation, but her masseuse, her husband was a welder. He owned a shop, and he basically was just self-employed. And he came out of the oil field, actually. He did a lot of repair on rigs and stuff. He owned his own diesel repair mobile shop. And he takes on apprenticeships. This is every now and then. And I was just lucky enough. He hadn't had an apprentice in a few years, and he took me on. And I just started off in his shop, whether it was running the bandsaw, deburring parts, just anything and everything to do with being a shop welder or running a shop, he brought me in on taking blueprints and then breaking them down to material orders, being as efficient as possible with material. So I was really lucky to have his insight. And he was a hard old man. His name is David Hopper out of Spar, Florida, out in the middle of nowhere. He was a tough old man, but he definitely put the hammer to me and helped me out a lot along the way, because I was a crappy learner sometimes. But that's how I got started. And then I slowly started picking up certain projects. My dad's a businessman, and he fed me a lot of work because he wanted to see me succeed. So whenever he had something that needed fabricated, made, or an issue that needed solved, he usually brought it to me, and I was able to get some skills that way. And I heard yesterday that you went to welding school out in Nebraska. Yeah. So came the end of high school, which I graduated, well, my year was cut off by COVID. So it was kind of like, all right, what do we do now? As far as when April hit, everything shut down. What are we going to do? I started looking for welding schools. I looked at Tulsa. This was really before the Western Welding Academy or I even knew about Arkansas Elite. I was just looking. I was just looking at some basic ones. And my mom told me she wanted two things. Well, she wanted one thing was a school with a two-year degree because she sees that as important and always make your mom happy. And then Mr. Dave Hopper, he told me I need to look for something with a robotics degree as far as welding robotics. So it just so happens in my mom's hometown of Grand Island, Nebraska, where she was born and raised, and I still have family there, they had a school with a two-year degree for welding technology, and they offered certificates in welding robots, you know, setting them up, programming them, and running them, and so on and so forth. So it was just almost like a freak accident or God telling me, you know, this is where we're going, and that's where I went. So with the going the school route, like you said, you looked for the two-year degree, but as far as the welding part of it, what did you really look at on that part of it, like just looking at the school in general when you were deciding on the welding part of it? The problem with that was is I had, I had no, I had no peers, no insight, nothing like that, so it was just what I could find. And all I saw was, you know, they offered the list, you know, you start, you start with stick, you move to MIG, you move to TIG-1, TIG-2, TIG-3. So all I could tell was they were going to, you know, teach me how to run these different products. I was already really, really good with, you know, MIG and stick, but I had never TIG'd before. So kind of had to figure it out myself. If I were to do it again, I would definitely do a different route. But for the route I took, I made the most of it because, I mean, nobody in my family is a welder. They've never welded before, so I was kind of first generation to say, and I had no real insight. Nobody I ever knew had ever gone to school before, so nobody could point me in the right direction. When you say you'd go a different route, what route do you feel like you would take? Well, if I were to do it again, I probably wouldn't go. Because the school I went to was more of a college that had a welding program, which is a great, it was a great program. But I would go somewhere that's more serious, like here at Arkansas Elite, you know, not trying to, you know, advertise for them, but they run an amazing program here. I just sat down and, you know, listened to their, their, their pitching, their sell point, and they run a tight program. They expect a lot of you. You have to show up at 630, which, you know, is going to be pretty common on most jobs, if not earlier. So they expect you to show up. They expect you to show up. They expect you to show up with everything you need and to do a job. So if I were to do it again, and I wanted to travel weld, I would probably come here. If I were to go the school route again, I wouldn't change anything to do with being a shop welder for the first, you know, five years of my career. Because I started when I was, when I was about 14, so four years. I wouldn't change that because I learned a lot of good things that are more in depth than just welding. Wouldn't change that. But as far as school goes, I would probably come to a more specific program. Like Arkansas Elite. Yeah, they've done away, or they're doing away. This is the last of the kids that take the plate, the structural. It's no more structural here. Yeah. Because it goes kind of, it's kind of rhetorical because if you can weld pipe, you can weld. You can weld, yeah. You can just about always weld structural. Absolutely. So I do think that if you can weld structural, it kind of helps you manipulate metal when you go to pipe. But I can understand them wanting to bring out a more clean product to the working world. Yeah. And that's what pays the most, is pipe. Yeah. I mean, that's it. There's no doubt about that. But I imagine over the next several years here, as like Chad said yesterday, with these data centers and stuff, there's going to be a lot of growth for iron workers, structural welders, and so forth. A lot of piping going into those things. You know, you've got to have water lines, and they'll have, I mean, like he said yesterday, a bunch of them is going to run on natural gas because it's the only guaranteed. fossil fuel that we have for the most part, electricity, you know, our grids suffer a lot but you know a couple of pressure stations you can keep natural gas pumping and about to bounce off that when we were doing the questionnaire yesterday with the 798 just hearing how they run things I would look very heavy like I think if you paired an Arkansas elite education and then jump to the Union apprenticeship like if you wanted to travel and do their their construction Union construction whatever or the pipeline is it sounds like I mean an amazing opportunity for someone that doesn't know what our our apprenticeship program is not up and running yet there is still a lot of the 798 apprenticeship program is not up running yet they're still working on the curriculum but it's gonna be more than just welding you're gonna go do some journeyman stuff you know learn the space pipes and so forth so it could really to be a pipeline welder it's kind it's a lot of stuff that goes into being a journeyman for the 798 that you need to know you know like stacking skids and you know running them internal clamps and torquing and you know the hydro testing or the air testing of the pipelines running and drying running pigs and drying pipeline there are a lot that goes into that side of it that I never dealt with as a union welder that now I deal with in the 798 yeah like I'd never kicked a pig before until down there which is just pulling the pig out of them the header but I'd never done it until getting in with the 798 and I mean it's easy money for a pipeline or at the end of a job you kind of get kicked back and draw some some more checks you know because it's only like six of six welders left and maybe two journeyman at the end of the job and it kind of prolongs it because we made the last weld and we were still there another two weeks yeah absolutely torquing and doing a lot of stuff around there all right what is one piece of advice I always like to ask this what's one piece of advice that your younger self that you would that you would at the beginning of your career you heard a piece of ice that I heard yeah or like you used at the beginning yeah it would be don't be scared to ask questions there is such thing as a stupid question but because you asked it you won't look stupid again in that way so I mean you got to look stupid sometimes and that's okay you're green I've heard another kid say you got to knock the green off yourself but don't be afraid to ask a question because if I mean if you don't ask question there's gonna assume you know and they won't listen they won't know to teach you any better so always ask questions even if it makes you look a little dumb you'll learn a whole lot faster asking that question like yesterday morning when I was going to do my welding in the booth a little coupon or whatever Reed asked me if i had a whip i'm gonna pop on it we don't tote around whips do you have a whip just pull one out of the audi out here yeah um i've never had a separate i mean my leads are connected the whole hundred let me bring a hundred foot never had just a whip i don't have stingers for different jobs um i've seen guys though undo their uh undo it at a quick connect and put their put their stinger in their toolbox or their own on a rick truck i've seen that yeah uh on the 798 side i've never seen that on the non-union side but uh so going through the middle of it you know you do a lot of you do a lot of custom trailers for the for the for a concrete company around there um you spent a lot of time on welding hoods uh we should have brought one up here with us yeah that's good what a bit of good ornament good advertisement good good uh setup but the uh like i just got mine but yesterday was the first time that i got to weld in one of them they're super lightweight i wear the old school um pancake um the one piece you know lot cut down it's real small the original yeah well the original is kind of big oh is it big old bulky thing but mine is like the new age it's short i don't know how i mean i don't know what it measures out to be but it's a little bitty lightweight uh but putting your hood on yesterday you know it's chopped down um i got it looks like a jackson maybe yeah it's a jackson it's a jackson hsl2 but it's a jackson square hood super super lightweight though uh which mine has the fish on top and stuff uh and that lens that you put in on the auto dart yep it was in the the one for the raffle um was the one i was wearing yesterday and it's super comfortable lightweight you know um i wish that i could put the band that you have yeah another thing we should have brought up here with us but uh i wish that that one would fit the band you know where it's more that pancake style of hood but yeah at the same time when i was trying to do some hilly arcing or tig welding yesterday it was pretty nice to do the flip down but i wear a auto dark lens for most of my welds these days so uh you know if i pull the which i'm accustomed to pulling it down because i even you know with the band with the adjust on the back i still was pulling my hood down yeah it's just a it's just a habit um so when you when you get a welding hood are they already cut down or is that something now you do so i have i have my suppliers and whatnot i have them and then when i get it in i usually try and unbox everything take the head gears off i all have a stack on every now and then i'll post a picture of it's just a it's a mountain of hoods and then uh i mark them all cut them all get them all set up ready for leather and then put them back in the box that way i have them bulk chopped ready to roll do you think that when you you cut them do you think they're all different sizes do you think it's exactly they're close probably within some of them yeah some of them are a little off but they're i mean they didn't i thought that nobody else could tell how many like i like to ask nate and i'm like i'm like i'm like i'm like i'm how many uh hoods do you think you've sold i'd like to i'd like i need to sit down and calculate everything because i've changed platforms where i sell a lot but i mean i think i've bought over 10 000 tiger hoods at this point just what i've bought and sold at this point so um i mean it's up there last time i talked to nate it was an astronomical number oh yeah i can't imagine he's yeah went through uh chris i asked him the other day when i was talking to him about shirts yo i can't remember the number he told me either but there was some crazy numbers yeah and you know most of that just started right after kobe it didn't know like that's when they started to really all yeah all three of us kind of really kicked off right there we started what we were trying to do so and like uh now you're making the belts and yeah so i do yeah i'm trying to get into belts and then obviously i'm wearing one the glove lanyards as well keep your gloves right by your side but we're trying to get into the uh the forearm pads for you guys out there on the on the on the um the right away uh trying to make sure they're perfect because i know you like a smaller foot um just trying to make sure it's i don't have my welding hood up here or my welding truck up here yeah um i didn't even bring an arm pad yeah uh but yeah i like this mine is super small i don't know what it would measure out to be but it's super small yeah because like i i don't put on an arm pad really depends on what you're doing but if it's 16 inch pipe or under i maybe even 20 inch pipe it depends what what phase i'm doing like if i'm making a whole weld it's 20 inch 500 obviously i'm going to put on an arm pad because heat displacement um but if it's like a 12 inch but like most time when i take a welding test i don't ever even put on an arm pad because boom 30 minutes that the bell is done it's on to the branch and on a branch you know you put your arm on top of it to the side or you know i've got a bad habit of squatting and freehand and stuff yeah you know or um so i don't really i feel like it's more in the way the 798 one thing about them is they supply our pads these then tillman's with them i don't know they got a lot of them i don't know they got a lot of them i don't know they got a lot of them i don't know they got a lot of them i don't know they got a lot of them i don't know they got a lot of them i don't know they got a lot of them in there oh yeah and when you first look it's got this flap that flips over and when you first look at it you're like that thing's be like i don't like them but when he's in louisiana my normal arm pad i was sweating through so much i was like i'm not wearing mine so i got some of them arm pads two of them and i would just rotate them in and out and they're really not that bad they're just not stylish you know sure you know yep and we like to be stylish to kind of have to talk to nate a little bit you know it's because they they provide everything on these jobs right you know you show up with with your stuff and then as your stuff deteriorates or gets tore up they replace it yeah well they replace your gloves with tillman's okay i don't wear tillman's no 100 i wear slickman's every day of the week uh and they're like why would you buy your own gloves and i'm like well i just get gloves you know yeah even if i had to buy the gloves i would still buy them yeah i buy the 1121s six at a time i mean i just don't i don't wear anything else i used to always wear the 820 plus uh the gray ones yeah uh stick gloves but i kind of gotten to wear them burners or just my glove of choice you know the the i like the way the cuffs feel on them you know they're kind of tighter at the at your wrist you know and they kind of loop up they get over arm pad real good uh but it keeps a lot of them sparks from getting down here and inside that cuff you know that's when you're sometimes when you stick well and you get your arm kicked up they just fall right down in there and you get a bunch of burns but all right back to you i got a little i always do a little sidetrack um so we're doing you do the welding hoods you do the custom trailers and that they kind of just feed off one another you know because you're making your tiktok content you're working on trailers where wearing your hoods yeah because what i mean what people don't want to buy welding products for someone who don't weld i mean come on like if i get someone new onto my platform i want them to see like oh hey this guy's not just a poser you know yeah and i know what i mean i know what i'm doing i like using my stuff and that's a good way to test it out so like i'm never going to sell someone a piece of it you know because i'm not you know a piece of that that doesn't work so it's it's all about testing it as well and showing it in use and we won't say the name of the outfit but of why you started building yeah um i got a subpar hood for a high price and my mama bought it for me for christmas this is when i it was the first christmas it was christmas of 2020. um i got real excited i said this is what i want this is it my welding school i want a nice hood no because it was cool And I got it, and it just wasn't, you know, I know what the value is of something, and I could tell it wasn't that. And I'm like, well, can I do this? And I started leatherworking at the time, just messing around, small stuff here and there. And I'm like, well, I like welding. I like leatherworking. Let's try it. So I started off with just cheap little Hobart shells that I could get from Acme Tools out in North Dakota. I'd buy them. I'd chop the bottom. I was just doing the bottom for a while and then slowly work my way to more quality stuff. But, okay, so you're, I would say, kind of two hats that you wear because, well, they both follow per entrepreneurship. But the building the hats part, or building the hats, building the welding hoods and building the trailers is kind of two different avenues. You know, like two different ways you handle people. Absolutely. Because both of them's hands-on, you know, which is what we all strive to be. Like Nate's extremely hands-on, you know, Chris's hands-on. But yours is even a step further because, like, Nate don't weld anymore. Chris doesn't do it. Like Johnny, he don't weld no more, you know, at Pearl Snaps. Taos really doesn't weld anymore. Bernardo doesn't weld anymore, you know. But you still go in, you know, building the trailers, you know, doing your custom work like that, which is impressive. You know, that you can find the time to balance both. Yeah. That's, I think that's where I was kind of going to the question. Yeah, it's usually split. Like, I'll try and get out there first thing in the morning when it's not hot, not too humid, and, you know, bust out some trailers, get, I mean, bust out whatever I'm doing, get five, six, seven hours work out of it, and then I can go in the AC in the afternoon and sit down and do my leather work where it's, you know, nice and cool. So, it's, it's hard splitting between the two because I got customers, they want their hoods right away. You know, they order it, they want it, you got to get it out. But then it's, it's hard. But then as well, I make a good bit of money off the welding still. We got to pay the bills. We got to keep, you know, keep money coming in so I can get new products on the welding side. So, they feed off of each other very, very well. That's good. The, so, where did I go? The middle of this. So, you're a couple years in on it. What piece of advice in the middle of your career here are, you know, at this point in your career would you say is important to you? What's important to me is two things, being flexible because like we said, I got two very different things going on. If I can't be flexible and weld for two hours and then move to the hoods and just, just be able to mentally and physically jump around, it's not going to work and you're going to really cap yourself there. So, you got to be flexible no matter what you're doing, especially in this industry, you got to be able to move very, very fluidly. And the second thing is, being confident in what you're doing, like what I'm doing, I'm trying to be, you know, what they call an entrepreneur. If I was just welding, I think it would be a whole lot easier, but I'm trying to build the welding hoods mostly. And that's scary because how many welding hoods can I sell? Can I sell that many? You know, is this actually going somewhere or is this dead end street? So, the confidence to wake up every morning and do the same thing, knowing full well it could flop or we could cap out and, you know, I could waste, put all this time into something that I can't grow anymore. So, being flexible and being confident is two things. Like when I come to events like this, I'm not a pipeliner, I don't know any of it, but I get to hang out with you, I get to hang out with the guys at 798 and talk to you guys, and just being confident enough to learn something and asking the stupid questions. Pipeline is pipeline, like I've said before, whether you're welding for the union or not the union, pipeline is pipeline, you know, it's, there's a stigma around the 798 that I hope a lot of people don't know about. They like the nice stuff. They don't want the cheapest thing. They want something nice. - Well you want them to be a little flashy. well that's yeah that's our whole trait is it's you know if you're good you might as well look good right well back when i dealt with a lot of plant stuff you would go to this plant meet a guy that was hollywood go over here this guy's hollywood you know i've probably met 10 hollywoods and plants from back in the day till now um i don't know any popliners named hollywood yeah some of them could be hollywood with the flashy stuff that they got for sure um so i know you're doing that you'll work on the arm pads um got a shit ton of stickers yeah some of the coolest stickers i've ever seen you know everybody likes stickers and everybody likes the free candy too the rainbows welder shop is who's building my stickers now he does a great job um i don't know if you've seen i have the one the little money ai one i don't think i have oh you know yeah that's what pops up every time you call me actually that's a good one that is a great one you , he's good with them stickers yeah um he built the ones for the welding competition they're awesome this is a shirt for the welding competition uh or for the welding competition as a whole um is there anything else you'd like to cover um you want to drop do your little spill on southern leatherworks your website all right all that there we go if you're looking for um a better quality product at a better price you can head over to southernleatherworks.net um we have a full line of products that are available on southernleatherworks.net we have a full line of from it's from a hundred dollars to you know three hundred dollars um we got it all we got every shape and size we got sugar scoops tiger hoods jackson's we'll have pancakes there soon i promise um we got just about everything we have talked about on that website southernleatherworks.net you can find me uh southernleatherworks on instagram and tick tock i post pretty consistently on both and we're doing a giveaway just about every week um i think every week for the last two or three weeks i've been doing a giveaway and they've done pretty well so yeah that's something i want to try to do this next this next year do they're gonna give away a month or something you know no they're no uh chase on smoke jason and them they start giving away grills here and there yeah because we got one in the raffle too right oh yeah i saw that i was like oh man i really want to win that that was sweet it's the holler yep uh i bought one for myself and one and they donated one for the raffle oh um they're great people they are they are very good people last year they donated i didn't i didn't really go after money this year from my sponsors because i wanted to do the raffle i felt like um i don't know i felt like people were sponsored and they have i had a number i wanted to hit with you know we got like 40 maybe or so tickets left i don't i don't know i don't really handle that yeah because i got enough on my plate but we don't have a lot of tickets left but the uh it went pretty well and next year i would like up it a little bit uh but the reach didn't really reach the way i thought it would but i also kind of started late in the game too yeah because we didn't really have a there's a lot there's a lot of things that go into it and plus i've i just hated social media this year um not really because of the people that's on social media because of the politics and all that stuff are just so depressing so i try to be limited to it you know try to do a better job and i've got gotten better at delegating things you know that's a that's a tough thing where i don't have to worry about you know you can go to out on the road.com get your two t hats hoodies um there's out on the road stickers there uh and i don't have to deal with none of that stuff anymore so that's that's a blessing so and we got some other new things that's going to come out but i might start doing giveaways too i don't know rambling now all right so uh like i said you go to out on the road.com you can find the the podcast the old ones the new ones uh spotify apple youtube any place podcast or it puts it out there so um this will be the start of 2026 building towards next year's uh third annual shield arkham showdown um like i said we had 17 and 18 plus i don't know if i said that already but we had 17 in the 18 plus this year so you know it's it's a scary thing to make a change in your career if you're hardened but if you're if you went to college and you didn't really feel like in place in college you know and you and you liked welding but you didn't really have an opportunity i hope to build this into a thing to where this is a lot easier resource or you know a lot easier path for for a guy that you know there's there's guys out here that that are in the military and they got kids uh they got a kid or two and they got wives you know i want to make it a more accessible thing in the future for people that want to make that career change you know and and they're like i like i said yesterday in the q a there's a big age gap you know i'm i'm 36 years old and i was on a job where i was considered one of the young guys you know which so it's a big age gap from 18 to 36 you know we got to fill that over the next you know five six ten years that that's gonna have to be filled because these guys are gonna retire they're gonna pass away you know all this stuff is gonna they're gonna move on to inspection or our qc all that stuff so we got a we got a big gap in there that's got to be filled where i think people kind of got a little bit more on the college train especially like my generation parents pushed for you to go to college a lot harder my dad didn't waste his breath because it wasn't going to happen but there's there's a gap in there that's got to be filled and so we need more people to get into the trade especially welding you know hvac back plumbers steam fitting it ain't got to be everybody's not going to be a popliner there's uh there's so many more ways to do welding uh you know do and to circle back to the to the whole union thing do your research you know uh there's 360 uas out there do your research you know if you maybe you don't want to travel you can stay at home and uh there's probably a local in the nearest big city around you uh get in there you know talk to people that's that's one of the most important things about any of it you know whether you're deciding on schools do your research on these welding schools um talk to people you know reach you know you can you can reach out there's plenty of of direct messages you know in the world you can dm somebody and find out about anything you want to know uh on any of it shoot on any social media yeah you there's so many people you can reach out to um and then numerous podcasts well like uh we mentioned earlier brent and i do a podcast the iron insight we bring on welders like mr ty here and we get their background story how'd you get into what are you doing now where are you going you know what's your what's your favorite music to listen to while you're working about stuff like that so there's there's a whole lot more now than there was five years ago um like when when covet hit a lot of people started hitting you know more social media stuff um to get the word out there so and you got more info now than you ever had just on social media alone so i'm sure chat gbt can help you yeah they could help they can help you i appreciate everybody listening i appreciate andrew's time here we gotta we gotta get back out there so uh we'll be talking to you all down the road