![]() ![]() He bought a young colt and a horse training book. He packed his vehicle and drove until he came to Wyoming. ![]() “I looked over the valley one night at sunset and had an epiphany,” he says, “I saw a neighbor’s horse in a pen and decided I wanted to own a horse, but decided it had to be somewhere it wouldn’t have to be in a pen.” The company welded parts for Hobie Cat sail boats, aluminum backpack frames and other custom parts.īusiness was good, but by 1980, he was burnt out. By Monday, I left my job and started my first business at 23 years old,” he reminisces. “One Friday afternoon, I was having a conversation with someone about starting my own business. “I was a really good employee while working for each company, but I was restless and moved from job to job,” he explains.īefore long, Baldwin reached a fork in the road. He excelled as a craftsman, but was never content. “There was an endless amount of work available and it paid really good,” he says. ![]() His first fulltime welding job was for Hooker Headers, a race car exhaust system company and by age 21, he was certified to weld government aircraft. He began experimenting with his father’s acetylene cutting torch and soon learned of an opening at a local welding shop. His route took him past a small welding shop, “I saw this guy welding and he sparked an interest,” he says. Though his father was a welder and his younger brother eventually became a metal shop teacher, it was Baldwin’s teenage newspaper route that ignited an interest in welding. Raised in a family that enjoyed the outdoors, but one that had no interaction with horses, he never imagined he would one day be known around the world as a master craftsman, specializing in bits and spurs. Forks in the road have lured him from his birthplace in Southern California to the open skies of Sheridan, Wyoming and from steady full time employment to the owner of not one, but two successful businesses. They also handcraft bits made for shank bits, snaffle bits, baseline bits, bit shanks, and mouthpieces for Western and English markets.Life, for Tom Balding, is about forks in the road.įorks in the road have led him from hot rods, to aerospace, sailboats and eventually, to horses. Their products include spurs, custom spurs, heel bands, spurs, shanks, and rowels. Each part of every product is made to 1/1000 of an inch accuracy. All custom pieces are made at the fabrication shop where they are precision cut into parts and fitted together, instead of being cast. ![]() The company handcrafts metalwork products and other items in Sheridan, Wyoming. The business is now widely recognized throughout the world of western horsemanship. He built her a new one, and for the next 15 years, he ran Tom Balding Bits & Spurs out of a repurposed mobile home.Īfter that, the business expanded due to increased popularity from the endorsement of multiple NRCHA Snaffle Bit Champions such as Bobby Ingersoll. In Wyoming, he worked as a ranch hand until 1984, when a neighbor asked him to repair a broken bit. He continued to TIG weld in the aerospace and sailing industry until he moved to Sheridan, Wyoming in the late 1970's. In 1974, he opened his first welding and fabrication shop specializing in a precise type of welding called TIG welding. In the 1960s, Tom Balding began working with metal as a teenager in Ontario, California, building such things as custom hot rod parts and aluminum backpack frames. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |