Hello, I’m Abbie Watson.

In Japanese, the name of someone who repairs ceramic pottery is kintsugi-shi, and a metallurgist is a yakingakusha. Both of which have been hobbies of mine for many years, and now becoming something of an official side-hustle.

I learned the art of kintsugi while apprenticing for two years at the Enrico Fermi Institute, site of the fabled University of Chicago Metallurgical Laboratory and where Chicago Pile 1 was constructed (the first nuclear reactor). In the 1990s, I was working in the Department of Anatomy and Organismal Biology as a research assistant, where we were reassembling dinosaur skeletons. Professor Sereno would go out into the field, and bring back skeletons of dinosaurs, which were stored in the High Bay, as they had the 5 and 50 ton hoists that could move the casts around and set up the rigging. The team was tasked with a 30,000 piece jigsaw puzzle to glue back together. After gluing the rubble back into a skeleton bones, we would then use vacuum form molding to create plastic copies; and then construct rigging for the dinosaur, which would eventually go to museums. Our work on Suchomimum tenerensis is on permanent display at the Chicago Children’s Museum.

Years later, my family inherited my grandparent’s hobby farm, with woodworking and metalworking and quilting shops in the barn. We had some old Miller welding equipment, and an acetylene torch leftover from my grandfather, who was a welder and foreman on the P-47 Thunderbolt assembly line (grandma was a Rosier the Riveter). The old equipment was dry-rotting, and the Miller stick welder was like playing with wet car batteries; so I decided to replace the equipment. Having worked at the Enrico Fermi Institute, I had an idea of what a modern welding setup looked like; which is how I decided to purchase a PrimeWeld TIG 225. And then I had the bright idea of putting a bunch of welding books into a RAG pipeline, and suddenly I was in the game of AI assisted welding.

Intellectually curious, independent and self-directed, and an empath who feels things deeply, I find catharsis in repairing things. In this broken world of ours, find a small corner of it to tend to, repair, and leave better than you found it is a radical act of hope and optimism.