Graduate welds experience, future plans

[Editor’s note: This is the sixth and final in a weeklong series recognizing noteworthy graduates from the Class of 2017. This year’s series highlights “the road less traveled,” students who are taking on unique experiences or facing unexpected turns in reaching his or her destination in life.]

By SAM WILSON

Daily Inter Lake

Along with his diploma, Crockett Lentz will graduate from Columbia Falls High School on Friday with a far less typical emblem of academic achievement. It’s a massive rectangular prism of solid steel, weighing well more than 100 pounds and the product of what his metal-shop teacher estimates was hundreds of hours of painstaking welding practice.

“That was the biggest thing that allowed him to get better, was his willingness to do the daunting task of burning rod,” Ben Schaeffer, who runs the Industrial Tech program at the high school, said last week. “It is boring. It is not fun. ... But it’s hours and hours of burning rod that gets you to the point where you’re successful.”

Lentz, a Hungry Horse resident, doesn’t define “success” quite like many of his fellow seniors who will be moving out of the Flathead to attend four-year universities next fall. For someone who spends his after-school hours riding dirt bikes and snowmobiles or working jobs that require a substantial back workout, welding was a welcome respite from the standard fare of biology or English classes on other students’ class schedules.

“I’m not a guy to be sitting behind a desk,” Lentz said. “I have to always be doing something,”

His introduction to the program was accidental, he said. One of his three brothers had just started welding, and as the youngest of the four male siblings, Lentz’s competitive nature pushed him in the same direction.

“I wanted to be better than him, so I went in to get certified first,” Lentz recalled with a grin. But he quickly accelerated through the high-school program, finding an interest in school work he hadn’t known before.

“I think it’s just amazing, just taking something from a solid state to a liquid, and making it stronger than it was before,” said Lentz, whose typical school day during his final semester allowed him to spend more than half his time in the metal shop.

A large part of his high-school welding career was spent working on his build-up pad, which begins as a square steel plate, just three-eighths of an inch thick and measuring 3 inches on each side. Students practice welds on the plate, eventually adding enough molten steel to build it out to a 3-inch cube or larger. Schaeffer said when Lentz’s was finished, it weighed about 160 pounds and measured about a foot by a foot-and-a-half.

For some, the process of “just burning rod” — melting thousands of individual lines of steel on the same build-up pad — would be about as engaging as watching paint dry. But Schaeffer explained that through that repetition, welders slowly master the foundation of their trade.

“You’re watching the puddle, getting information, seeing how it’s burning and watching your lead edge,” he said. “There’s nothing exciting about it, but it’s their knowledge of how that rod is burning.”

In and of itself, a giant hunk of metal won’t get you very far in life. But along with his massive build-up pad, Lentz is graduating with plenty of experience to launch himself into a welding career.

On Saturday, he’ll become the first-ever student to graduate from the high school’s program with eight separate welding certificates and 13 college credits. And during his junior year, he also became the first Columbia Falls student to “triple-cert” — notching official credentials in three separate welding skills within a single semester.

And along the way, Schaeffer said he watched Lentz develop from an inexperienced freshman into one of his star students.

“He brings that leadership to the table. When other kids see him at work, they say, ‘Oh, Crockett’s welding, we better get to work,’” he said, adding, “I know as an instructor, he pushes the boundaries of my knowledge.”

And while his characterization of school resembles a former prison inmate describing life inside, Lentz is clearly proud of his accomplishments over the past four years.

“I saw school as time that we’ve all got to do, and I got something out of my time here.”