Roque was his partner in an automotive repair enterprise going by the ridiculous name “Autocircle”. The years, mid-70s to the end of the 80s. They fixed busted fenders, overhauled engines, assembled jeepneys and did odd welding jobs. Roque was old when they began the business. The Maker was in his late teens. He thought Roque was the best welder in the world. He still does. He was his student. He studied welding before he studied art. He was his first master of the craft. And this was how he taught him welding.
The oxy-acetylene welding torch is a device to mix oxygen and acetylene together and then channel the gaseous mixture out into a pointed nozzle. The gaseous mixture is flammable and if not controlled, explosive. You light the nozzle with even the smallest spark, and then the gas shoots outwards in a flame that you can adjust for temperature and according to desired uses. This hand-tool is the basic welding tool.
You can adjust the flame by increasing the amount and pressure of oxygen going into the mixer. You do this with two valves on the base of the torch. The flame turns blue violet in color and the oxidized molecules shoot outwards at great speeds. This pressure will blow melted metal away. This is the flame one needs for cutting into metal.
To weld metal together, you have to lower the pressure of oxygen going into the torch and then increase the acetylene pressure. This way the flame turns cerulean blue. You adjust the size of this flame depending on the thickness of metal you want to weld. If you are welding thin metal sheets made mostly from iron, this flame would have to be extremely fine. The combination of gases and the physical design of the hand tool is such that the flame coming out from the nozzle is hot enough to melt metal that comes in front of it.
To weld two pieces of metal together, the two pieces have to be positioned so that there is only the tiniest line of space between them. You bring the point of the flame into this line which are of course the edges of the two metals. In no time at all, the metals begin to melt into a bead and flow into each other filling up the line of space between them. And two separate pieces become one. They are welded into each other.
Welding is not like soldering where you melt a soldering metal in between two pieces of metal to bond them to each other. Welding produces a stronger joint ordinarily but not all the time. Nothing beats a mechanical joint. A nut and bolt or a rivet holds two pieces of metal much more surely. But welding used in combination with soldering and mechanical jointing gives you the ability to do anything at all you like with metal. With this ability you can do quite a range of tasks spanning the distance from fixing a radiator to fixing a busted fender or making your own car body. You can make sculpture with it.
Sculpture is what the Maker does. He makes them using not just welding but also soldering and mechanical jointing. If you see the show entitled “Bulahan ang Bunga sa Tiyan Mo” opening 7 pm on December 22 at the Art Center of SM City Cebu, you will see quite a lot of things done with metal. While he did these sculpture he could not help remembering his old master Roque and wonder where he is now. They had not seen each after their shop closed. They were quite in a sense poor when they parted ways. It turned out to be a failed business and the Maker knows he was half-responsible.
But a love for metals is something he carries with him still. And since those times, he has come to learn the language of welding and metal working. It is an expressive language. With it one may be able to talk about anything in the world. One can use it to tell a joke. Or, if one is inclined, use it to produce a work of faith, perhaps a picture of God. Welding is like writing, it is text in general. It is a tool for making text not dissimilar from text in a computer. But with metal working, the text is wrought in metal. In the case of the Maker’s most recent works, copper. The medium transforms the text itself so that it becomes a story that can be told only in a particular sort of way, a particular sort of language with nuances best understood by other makers of the craft. And the Maker wonders how his old master Roque would have received the works.
And he does not even know if he is still alive and well out there. But if he is, he hopes he will read this as his invitation to our show. Every student in due time ought to earn finally his or her teacher’s approval. For the Maker, that would be nice.