Kate Bermel
Kate Bermel had one of those life-changing moments at a prestigious East Coast University — one where the ivy grows up the side of the buildings. Bored to tears in an English class, the mechanical engineer major looked around the classroom and asked herself, “Why am I here?”
“I like to build things,” she recalls. “These guys like poems.”
At $30,000 a year, it didn’t make much sense to continue. “I was dying in there,” she says. So Kate moved back home to Lancaster, PA where, as a kid, she built soapbox racers and helped her father re-plump the family house.
She took a job at a custom metal weld shop. She drilled holes for weeks on end. But what she really wanted to get her hands on was a welding machine. To her eyes, welding was mesmerizing — something she had to master.
Kate moved to Baltimore. Being a logical mechanical engineer type, she headed straight to a welding supply store and asked, “What’s the best welding shop in town?” B&B, they told her.
The next thing she knew she was rubbing elbows with the guys at Baltimore’s most sophisticated fab shop. Kate quickly passed her weld test in flux core and is pending certification in E7018 overhead welding. She also took the initiative to take on quality control.
Kate’s computer software background has proven an enormous boon. The former college computer repair tech already knows AutoCAD, reads shop drawings, and stepped right up to the CNC software: “Learning that was nothing,” she says. These days, she can be found programming the anglemaster, punching precision holes in slabs of iron.
It’s been a wild journey from the classroom to the weld shop. But she loves it. “I’ve never been treated so well at a company,” she says. “They paid me to go fishing. They’re flying me to the Peddinghaus factory Oktoberfest. It’s a family here. And I’m just trying to earn their respect.”
When she’s not welding tons of steel, she’s out cracking heads in women’s rugby, football, and ice hockey. A competitor, she sees a clear goal for her B&B future: “I want Ralph’s job,” she says. “But I’d take Dennis’ job too.”
updated 2009
