PRODUCTION: Rocket Gunman

Less than three years ago, boyish, trigger-tempered Ted Nelson, 36, was an $11-a-day welder in San Francisco’s Mare Island Navy Yard. His financial resources hardly bulged his vest pocket. Last week Ted Nelson, in his own spick-& -span new $330,000 San Leandro plant, received an Army-Navy E, topped off the celebration by announcing the opening of a second plant in Camden, NJ. in a few months. He had skyrocketed up on a Buck-Rogerish invention of his own, aptly dubbed the “rocket gun.”

California-born Ted Nelson started slowly. After graduating from high school, he spent some 15 years picking up mechanical know-how in machine shops. He finally landed in the Mare Island Yard as a welder. There he fell afoul of a problem that had puzzled the best welding minds for 20 years: the problem of conveniently welding short, pencil-like pieces of metal to perpendicular or overhead surfaces.

Devise a Trick. Earlier welding guns could be used only on horizontal plates. A small mound of powdered metal, of flux, was dumped on the plate and fused by electricity to attach the “stud.” But on perpendicular plates there was no way to keep the flux in place. Instead, a small square of “welding pad” had to be laboriously welded, then the stud welded to that. Ted Nelson wearied of doing this, finally worked out a crude welding gun to make the job easier. But when he got “no thanks nor extra dough” he quit, and set to work perfecting his gun in a shop behind his home at Vallejo. His simple solution: encase the flux in a small cap and fasten it to the end of the stud. When the stud was loaded into his 7-lb. gun and the trigger pulled, a spring snapped the stud against the steel plate, electrically welding it in a trice.

Inventor Nelson began to make guns in his garage. At once he found a feverish market for them in the coast’s mushrooming shipyards—at $500 apiece. Reason: with the old method, a fast worker could weld 40 studs in eight hours; with the rocket gun, 1,000. (A Liberty ship has 10,000 studs to hold hangers for wireways and pipes, plastic decking, etc. in place. The C-4 has 55,000.)

Collect the Profits. The gun soon blasted out of its garage home, forced Nelson to incorporate as the Nelson Specialty Welding Equipment Corp. He borrowed $95,000 from RFC, put up a new plant in a San Leandro cornfield. Soon he was supplying guns to 120 shipyards.

He soon found that the big profit was in selling his patented studs. He began to hand out a new model of his gun to old customers on a replacement basis for $50 —the actual cost of materials. In the last 19 months, Ted Nelson’s profits have been a fat $407,000, all plowed back into plant expansions and repayment of loans.

But he still spends 16 hours a day in the shop, still dresses in shopworker’s tan pants and shirts, still blows up in rocket-hot cussing over new problems. Of the $1,000-a-month salary he collects, he spends $200 to keep up the small cottage he and his wife live in near the plant. His 150 workers are paid $350 to $400 a month. Looking at the whopping $4,000,000 business the rocket gun is doing annually, Ted Nelson has no worries about the present, few about the future.