By KIMBERLEY GILLES, associate editor

John Brommel positions partially completed sculpture at its permanent location.

In 1971, Brommel started a five-year apprenticeship that launched a 35-year welding career. He has worked on everything from residential boilers to refineries, and from manufacturing plants to nuclear and coalfired electrical power generating plants. However, his latest project is not quite that industrial.

Brommel is creating a monument to the organization that helped to launch his welding career Local 33 of the Plumbers and Steamfitters Union in Des Moines, Iowa.

Brommel retired from industrial welding in March. He says he always has been interested in art.

“I’ve drawn and sculpted in wood and stone,” he says, and, at some point in his career, he began thinking about the artistic nature of welding and metal.

Other industrial welders nurtured his skills and interest in welding, Brommel says.

“There is quite a competition among welders in a friendly way for the sake of improvement. People will walk past your work and make a positive or less-thanpositive comment,” he says. Such comments help to keep a welder’s work at quality levels, or pushes a welder to improve his skills.

Now Brommel is using his acquired skills to create a stainless steel sculpture of two pipe wrenches. Each of the wrenches is 25-ft. long, and the combined weight of the work is 5,000 lbs. Brommel will finish the sculpture by grinding and polishing the welds.

The sculpture will have the wrenches standing upright, held by a pair of hands that appear to come out of its base. At the top of the sculpture, the wrenches will hold a pipe union made of stainless steel that has the Local 33 insignia on each side.

Brommel completed most of the sculpture in sections in his home studio by using new and scrap stainless steel. He used TIG and pulsed-TIG to put the sections together. “On the round parts, the dimensions worked out to be the exact outside diameter of 8-in. thin-wall stainless steel pipe,” says Brommel. He purchased pipe from a local supplier, and salvaged other pieces.

“I needed to cut so many small pieces that to find a 5-ft. long piece of 8-in. stainless pipe at scrap prices was a real boon because stainless costs $30 per foot new,” he says.

For other parts, he used 0.0625-in. metal sheet. Butt-welding this material was a challenge, and Brommel said in retrospect he should have picked a heavier gauge material that would have been easier to handle. Brommel also switched between using TIG and pulsed-TIG to make the curved welds on the thinner pieces of metal for the sculpture. He wanted to find the right process for those welds.

After completing sections of the sculpture in his studio, Brommel moved them to the site at the union’s headquarters. Then he welded the wrenches to plates embedded in the foundation, and attached the palms of the hands to the wrenches. He built fingers for the hands on-site and welded them into place as he wrapped them around the wrenches.

Brommel anticipates completing the work by the end of May, and the sculpture will be dedicated later this summer.