![]() ![]() “The cool thing about that place was it was also a job shop. That ability opened the door at a small aerospace parts company. At a company that built backpack frames, the owner gave him a week to learn how to do the heliarc or TIG (tungsten inert gas) welding necessary to bond aluminum. Once he had recovered from the shock of getting fired, “I was 21 and I’d just bought a house,” Balding took a series of welding jobs, sometimes working two at once. “I thought I was the perfect employee but I found out that I had apparently been seen having a conversation with a union representative.” Dumbfounded, he could get nothing out of owner Gary Hooker. Three years later he was called into the office, given his paycheck, and ordered to stay off the premise or face arrest. “My brother told me how to gas-weld by giving me instructions over the phone. The day I turned 18, I put in an application to work there,” he said. “I had a paper route and delivered to Hooker Headers (which made performance-enhancing exhaust manifolds). ![]() Besides, Balding was still in high school. Thousands of small shops specializing in custom car parts or aerospace equipment beckoned. In the 1960s the area was an ambitious metalworker and welder’s dream. He wasn’t ready to leave southern California, however. The memories of a particular fossil-hunting trip to Farson, Wyoming, stayed with him. His father was an amateur archeologist, his mother a western history buff who sought out and read journals of homesteaders and pioneers. We would sleep on the ground and eat canned goods,” he said. At age 15, Balding bought and restored a 1933 Plymouth.Īt the same time, Balding took long vacations with his parents camping and crisscrossing the rural West. ![]() His older brother, an industrial arts teacher, encouraged Balding to get serious about fabrication and welding. ![]() A partially completed pair of spurs for Lyle Lovett sits on a workbench. They go by the name of Switchback, Steamboat, and Diamond Cross.īecause Sheridan is one of the polo centers of the West, Balding has a line of gear designed for the chukker and mallet set.īalding’s work also attracts big names who groove on objects western. His shanks, western-style bits connected together by a metal bar, range from bare-bones pieces of modern art to the more ornate, decorated with silver plate or initialed in bronze. They feature mouthpieces of copper inlaid sweet iron, a cold-rolled carbon steel preferred by horses because the rusting tastes sweet. Some of the world’s top riders use Balding’s products, including Bob Avila, a multiple winner of American Quarter Horse Association World Champion and three-time National Reined Cow Horse Association Futurity Champion.īobby Ingersoll, three-time winner of the National Snaffle Bit Association Breeders Championship Futurity, calls Balding’s handiwork, “the Mercedes of bits.”īalding’s snaffle bits, many made with gleaming bits of stainless steel, have a stark, sleek look. It’s been horses and what riders use to influence their behavior: bits and spurs. His passion for the last 28 years has not been anything that floats, flies, or rumbles down the street. All his life - he’s now 62 - Balding has taken matters metal: engine parts, boat rigging, and sections of aircraft fuselage, and shaped them to a new precision and level of beauty. I stripped it down and rebuilt it from the frame up.” It was being raced on the track and was trashed. ![]()
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