Out of 39 teams, Austin Gudergahn, Gage Jaeger and Trey Pellett from Minot High School finished in fifth place at the 55th annual National Skills U.S.A. Leadership and Skills Competition in Louisville, KY in June.
“This was the first time I took a group,” said adviser Ray Helseth, a Minot High welding technology instructor. “Some of the people there had been there three times.”
The competition consisted of each welding fabrication team building a wood-fired rocket stove out of new plate steel, stainless steel and tubing.
The four welding techniques they used included flux cored arc welding, gas metal arc welding, gas tungsten arc welding, and shielded metal arc welding and oxygen acetylene torch to cut the parts to size, detailed on blueprints, and to weld the parts of the stove together.
As part of the competition, Jaeger explained that they were required to create their own blueprints, which showed their original design for a shoe collection box.
The rocket stoves built during the competition were donated to the organization WaterStep, which helps provide safe drinking water at sites around the world, and sent to Africa.
Image courtesy of Minot Daily News