Students in Mr. Nelson’s high school trades class, which is an advanced welding class, are welding dumpsters for River View Sanitation.

Students get a taste of what a real-world situation would be to work for a welding company with a life-sized project rather than smaller pieces of metal to work on.

Many students say that welding the dumpsters is challenging due to the small angles and bigger requirements, like continuous beads or vertical welds along the sides.

Welding student Ethan Jorgensen, in particular, finds it challenging because his dumpster came in bent, creating a large gap between the two pieces of metal he needs to weld. “There is a large gap in my dumpster, so getting the weld to be properly supportive has been a problem,” Ethan said.

Time is running out for the students who still need to weld or fix parts of their dumpster.

“Tomorrow is a no-weld day, Nelson wants to walk around and look at our dumpsters to look for errors or issues in them,” Jorgensen said.

Mr. Nelson has been having his class weld for RVS for years, so every mistake is more time that RVS needs to take out of their day to fix, so every correction matters.