Photos by Jared Soares | The Roanoke Times

Cave Spring High School student Carlos Ybarra (left) works with Matt Hernanan during welding class. Ybarra graduates today, and though he ultimately wants to open his own metal shop, he has a few stops on the road of life to make first.

Carlos Ybarra's father and a half-dozen other relatives are sheet metal workers.

Welding teacher Chris Overfelt (left) instructs student Carlos Ybarra. About 60 percent of the welding work force is at least 54 years old, Overfelt said.

It starts with the thumbs then spreads to the rest of the hand, said Carlos Ybarra.

First they get hard and cracked. They look covered in grease, even when they are clean. They're the thumbs of men who work with their hands so much they wear them down like an old tool.

He's seen it happen to his grandfather and his father. Someday it will probably happen to him.

Unlike many of the seniors graduating from high schools across the country this month, Ybarra, a student at Roanoke County's Cave Spring High School, has his future mapped out. After graduating today with an estimated 1,129 other Roanoke County seniors, he's going to study welding for a year at WyoTech, a technical college in Pennsylvania. Then he'll spend a few years in the Marines Corps. Eventually, he wants to own his own metal shop.

Welding is something of a family trade for Ybarra. His father and about a half-dozen other male relatives are sheet metal workers, many working in the sheet metal union.

It's a smart career choice. About 60 percent of the welding work force is at least 54 years old and getting ready to retire, said Chris Overfelt, welding and motorsports teacher at the Arnold R. Burton Technology Center. Ybarra knows he could join the union for reliable, high-paying employment. But he has his sights on a different kind of metal work. He wants to follow in his grandfather's footsteps and open his own auto fabrication business.

He spent his childhood in his grandfather's shop in California, watching him wrestle sheets of metal into sleek car bodies. Ybarra would sweep the shop or spend hours hammering pieces of metal that his grandfather gave him. As a toddler he would sometimes take naps in the open trunk of his grandfather's car during car shows around San Diego.

Once, Ybarra said, somebody brought a Datsun into the shop, "which is a completely ugly car if you ask me" and his grandfather molded the front end to look like a Ferrari.

"Bringing someone's dreams like that to reality, it's hard not to follow in footsteps like that," he said.

His grandfather tried to dissuade him. He wanted his grandson to go to college and not work with his hands.

"It's not an easy life," said his grandfather, Ron Batson, who retired from welding a few years ago and now drives a shuttle bus for a casino.

Years of welding can give you vision problems, arthritis and carpal tunnel syndrome, he said in a phone interview from California.

"I would like to see him, like any grandparent or parent would like to see their grandchild or child, get a real good education so he wouldn't have to go through what we went through," Batson said.

But Ybarra is hooked.

"I just couldn't get away from it. I just loved cars," he said. "Mainly because of him."

He's got a head start. This year he won the state Skills USA motorsports contest. He also took night classes that will allow him to graduate a year early.

During a welding class recently, Ybarra and Matt Heffernan, pulled down their welding helmets and took turns with the welding gun to attach two long rods known as angle iron. The rods would be used for a weightlifting platform, Ybarra said. They had to come together at a right angle.

Overfelt, the welding teacher, walked up.

"Did you all square it up?" he asked.

They had.

"Take the aluminum and tack it here and here," he said. "Butter it down this side then weld it to the other side. Then weld it down the middle."

A cold blue flame flashed and sparks bounced on the ground as Ybarra wielded the welding gun. Inside the gun is a thin metal coil that is melted down. Once that metal hardens, it binds two other pieces of metal together.

The aluminum, which doesn't weld with steel, is used as a support, Ybarra said.

A radio played faintly in the background. Around the shop sat four vehicles, stripped of part of their metal bodies.

After school, Ybarra goes to an after-school job at Precision Steel in Roanoke. He also hits the gym every day to get his body in shape for the Marine Corps.

"The earliest I'm planning on having my own shop is probably in my mid-30s. Maybe late 30s," he said. "Working with cars you've got to have the experience."