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For over 60 years, Atlas Welding Accessories has been one of the largest welding supply wholesalers in the United States - 4 locations, 100 product lines, and more than 1,500 distributor customers. And it all started with a welder's hammer. In the late Thirties, the use of mineral and cellulose-coated arc welding electrodes was spreading rapidly. However, those coatings produced a lot more slag, or scale, than bare wire electrodes. Welders had to chip off the slag to clean the welds for inspection and / or to make additional passes. The tools they improvised for this purpose were not effective or safe. Then Jack Honhart, a Detroit-area welder / businessman, hit upon the idea of combining a chipping hammer and a wire brush in a single tool - the first of many styles of "Tomahawks" was born. Honhart was a self-taught welder and a noted problem solver, whose background included teaching welding, supervising welding during the construction of a Brazilian refinery, and inspecting welds in trans continental pipelines. He once worked for Murex Processes of England, a pioneer in coated electrodes. In the mid - 1930s, Honhart and H.A. Jackson founded the J & H Holder Company.