Welder and artist Rae Ripple shared her talents with the world in the Netflix show “Metal Shop Masters.” We talked to her about how she found her passion for metalworking and what advice she has for others considering careers in the skilled trades.
What inspired you to pursue a career in welding?
I wasn’t exposed to welding and fabricating or metal or literally anything that I’m doing right now — it started with something extremely basic, which was making cakes. I think this is kind of where the sculpting started, because it’s a lot of sculpting that goes into cakes.
At the time, I was transitioning from working as a waitress to a truck driver while being a single mom, and at night after the kids would go to bed, I would paint on canvases. And then like one day a customer approached me like, “Hey, can you paint on this piece of sheet metal?” And so I started painting on sheet metal. And then I discovered tin snips and baling wire and rivets, and I started cutting all these pieces of metal together, and riveting them together, cutting all of them and ripping them together, which would create these elaborate 2D pieces.
The very first weld started because my truck broke down and I needed to replace the steering column and I didn’t have the tools to fix it. And then I just fell in love with it.
You’ve made a huge name for yourself in the welding world, can you share a bit about how you got to where you are now?
Honestly, I think I made a lot of wrong choices that led to a lot of places I shouldn’t have been, and those places led to me making the right choices in the places I should belong. But I think the ultimate breakthrough leading up to this moment right now is the Netflix show I did, “Metal Shop Masters.” So, in 2021 when the show dropped, literally the next day, everything was different. And I don’t know how else to explain it other than, like, the phone just didn’t stop ringing, the emails just didn’t stop.
At the time, I was transitioning from working as a waitress to a truck driver while being a single mom, and at night after the kids would go to bed, I would paint on canvases. And then like one day a customer approached me like, “Hey, can you paint on this piece of sheet metal?” And so I started painting on sheet metal. And then I discovered tin snips and baling wire and rivets, and I started cutting all these pieces of metal together, and riveting them together, cutting all of them and ripping them together, which would create these elaborate 2D pieces.
The very first weld started because my truck broke down and I needed to replace the steering column and I didn’t have the tools to fix it. And then I just fell in love with it.
You’ve made a huge name for yourself in the welding world, can you share a bit about how you got to where you are now?
Honestly, I think I made a lot of wrong choices that led to a lot of places I shouldn’t have been, and those places led to me making the right choices in the places I should belong. But I think the ultimate breakthrough leading up to this moment right now is the Netflix show I did, “Metal Shop Masters.” So, in 2021 when the show dropped, literally the next day, everything was different. And I don’t know how else to explain it other than, like, the phone just didn’t stop ringing, the emails just didn’t stop.
What is the most rewarding part of your career? What’s the hardest?
Giving it away. I never get to see what the world sees when it comes to this stuff because I build it and then I’m ready to be done with it and move to the next one.
But then I’ll see people’s reactions within it, tagging me, sending me pictures, or things like that. So, it’s definitely the world seeing the work.
What do you hope other women take away from your experience working in the trades?
I hope every single woman that sees what I do and everything that I’m doing, especially coming out of the same upbringing — same outcomes, same product of their environment — I hope they understand that you can go through everything, you can literally be raked through the pits of hell, and you can still pull yourself out of it.
We forget, as women, how powerful our thoughts are and how powerful we are as individuals and the energy that we hold. I think women are the true center of the universe. And because we are the center of the universe, I think so many women are wasting potential because they don’t know that their thoughts are energy — they don’t know that they carry a power and aura within them that will literally allow them to capture anything they’ve ever wanted in their entire life.
What advice do you have for those looking to dive into this field?
Full send. If you don’t full send, you’ll never know what could have been, and you don’t ever want to look back at your life and think “What if?” If you fail at something and it leads to something else, and then that leads to something else, is it really a failure? Or is it just simply a redirection? And so, I think if you live your life in a full-send pace, realizing that your failures are not failures and are just simply redirections, then you can have anything you want.