Luis

Luis began his career at Quality Tubing in 1989 when he went to the coiled tubing shop to get a job application for his brother and was hired on the spot.

After starting out as a hydrotester for coiled tubing strings, he soon moved into the service department, spooling and respooling the strings. Fascinated with the mill, welding, and all the processes, Luis then convinced his plant supervisor to move him to the welding team. “I’d never struck an arc before in my life,” he chuckled, “and then, I ended up working as a splice welder.”

Driven by his passion, a desire to do more, and a genuine interest in the advancements in welding and coiled tubing, Luis became “hungry.” The bias line, which involved plasma arc welding, quickly caught his eye. Though at the time the process was a secret due to a pending patent, Luis’ recognized skills enabled him to advance into plasma arc welding.

After 17 years in welding, Luis’ then-manager tasked him with creating a training manual for all the welding processes. With 8 months and little direction, Luis chronicled every single process step—making a bias weld, loading the strip, etc.—to create the training manual. It was a success, reducing training time by up to 66%.

But his work in training others didn’t stop there. Luis became the go-to man for training at Quality Tubing, training not only internal people but also customers and outside welders on welding procedures and Quality Tubing techniques. This way, customers don’t have to keep bringing back strings for repair or hire third-party welding companies each time. It’s a value-add that gets baked into everything, starting right at the initial sale. The end goals of establishing these kinds of procedures are to achieve greater consistency and repeatability in manufacturing design and to enable the welders to do their job the same day that Quality Tubing receives the steel.

While working, Luis got married, had kids, and even went back to school to earn an associate degree in welding from San Jacinto College. “You really can go from the very bottom up to the top here,” Luis says with a smile. “You can go from a helper to leading an operation to supervising people. And I’ve always been really proud of that.” Luis pushed forward thanks to his innate drive and tenacity as well as the support of a company and group of people who had become family. Now, he’s also working on training manuals for Spanish speakers, helping those in his native language with technical translations.

People like Luis are the backbone of NOV’s business. Without them, there would be no products to sell to customers, no innovation to discuss in papers and articles. Luckily, after 30 years with Quality Tubing, Luis still enjoys what he does. “This is what I tell my son: that you need to go work every day like it’s your first day at work. If you can do that, if you can honestly do that, you’ll last a long time.”