I’m Ana. I spent over a decade in the welding industry and the last four years in digital marketing and this blog is where those two professions finally meet.
Neither of them is an accident. I studied journalism, and just as I was
finishing, a position opened up at the company where my father and my uncle
worked. I knew early on that I loved writing but wanted to build my career in
industry rather than in a newsroom, so I took it. The company trained young
welders (my uncle was one of the instructors) and sent them to power stations,
petrochemical and oil plants across the world, alongside experienced welders,
my father among them.
But my welding education started long before that. I grew up watching my dad
weld in our yard, admiring the precision of the things he built. Now retired,
he still repairs tools for half the neighbourhood. Some of my favourite
memories are trailing him around tool and DIY shops while he explained why a
particular ESAB machine was worth the money, what made the new helmets better,
and what gear you actually need versus what just looks good on a shelf. And I
never got tired of him coming home from the field, excited, telling us about
some welding problem he’d solved that had stumped everyone else on site.
I should be clear about one thing: I’m not a welder myself. My years in the
industry were spent on the business side, including equipment purchasing, so
what I know best is which machines survive real use, which ones die in a
drawer, and how much money gets wasted at the moment of a first purchase.
How I work
I don’t test machines in a lab, I won’t pretend otherwise. What I do instead:
- Every price and spec on this site is checked against New Zealand retailers before publishing, and each article shows when it was last updated.
- Where hands-on experience matters, I lean on the welders in my family and on conversations with people who sell and service this equipment every day.
- If I haven’t been able to verify something, I say so in the article rather than guessing.
- Nobody pays me to recommend their machine. If that ever changes for a specific link or article, it will be clearly disclosed on that page.
If you spot a price that’s gone stale or a claim you disagree with, I genuinely want to hear about it — head to the contact page.
Ana Rajic