Frank Marlow

Frank Marlow could put a lot of letters behind his name. He is a PE--Registered Professional Engineer--and holds a BA and BSEE from Lehigh, an MSEE from Northeastern and an MBA from the University of Arizona. With a background in electronic circuit design, industrial power supplies and electrical safety, Frank has worked for top companies such as DuPont, Boeing, Raytheon and Emerson Electric, but many years ago he dumped the corporate world to follow his dream.

That dream was to work with metal. He took numerous welding and machine shop classes and then studied with top masters.

His first welding course used an expensive and nearly incomprehensible textbook that frustrated the students and Frank thought, “I can do better than this.” And he did. His first book, Welding Essentials: Questions and Answers is now the text for that course and has sold over 100,000 copies and been translated into Spanish and Chinese.

Frank believes that what the expensive book lacked was hands-on experience, the type you only get by working beside an expert and asking lots of questions. After many years of gathering the know-how, methods, and tips known only by master machinists and welders, Frank compiled this information into three easy-to-understand, well-illustrated books:

His machine shop books capture techniques that would otherwise be lost because machinists are rarely writers and writers are rarely machinists. Luckily, Frank is both. His latest book, Welding know-How, captures the knowledge of experienced welders who have seen just about every problem and devised clever, workable solutions. This book will make you slap your forehead and say, “Why didn’t I think of that?”

Frank has served on the board of the Long Beach-Orange County Branch of the American Welding Society and on the Orange Coast College Industry Advisory, but what he really likes to do is work in his shop and get his hands dirty.