Welding Tips and Tricks

I have shared this on a few other locations but thought it may be of interest to some here.
http://weldingclassroom.com/learning/th ... ied-welder

Thanks Gerald, and welcome to the forum

You can say the same thing for college graduates.

Much the same can be said for all "professional" relationships.
The first thing that MUST be established in all business relationships is who is the employer and who is the employee.
This extends to Doctors, Lawyers, Insurance salesmen, and anyone purporting to be a professional.
Accepting the "Professional's" opinion because you are too lazy to learn what you need know to make an informed decision is a path to disaster. I've fired enough "professionals" to know the game.

When you get down the line of hucksters to the level of Certified Weldors, the majority on both sides of the deal are blind and clueless.
A weldor can be Certified to weld brackets today, for XYZ shop, but he isn't Certified tomorrow welding the same job down the road at ABC shop, unless he goes through the process of Certifying at ABC. Similarly if a weldor doesn't remain current in a job, the Certification expires. In 2018, we have auto body shop suppliers and VoTech high schools issuing Certificates of Completion for some course of study, and people who are named on that paper claiming to be Certified weldors. Wave that paper around as you apply for a welding job and you instantly certify yourself as unemployable in a real welding shop.

Federally funded job retraining slave labor shops are real good at issuing Certificates too as they walk their victims to the door when that trainee's funding runs out.

Certified is a word that has been overused, misused and worn out by scammers and hustlers.

Gerald,

I read the article and a bunch of the other ones on your blog. Putting aside the "certified" aspect I find the QC dynamic of welding to be a very interesting aspect of the whole industry. To give a little background, I am a union iron worker in the NE, so every welder that comes out to the job has passed a CWI verified bend test to the D 1.1 standards. The bigger point here is that it is very easy to replace an employee where I work. While the impression is that being part of a union means that it is hard to fire people the reality is that if the employer does not like the work product they can replace you with one phone call.

Given that, we get into the welding inspector aspect of the job. As a welder it is assumed that you can weld to the WPS on any job called out of the hall if you are "certified" for that welding process. Showing up to a job as a union welder we may have to take a test upon arriving to the job but normally not. Now, as the job starts, the only thing that matters is how much footage we get a day and how many of the welds fail. Most of the time this is a visual inspection. As a competent welder, if there is; porosity, undercut, lack of fusion, or really noticeable problems, it gets fixed before you move on to the next weld. You never leave a weld with a clear deficiency because it will get you replaced and because everything we weld impacts the structural integrity of what we are building. You don't walk away from a crap weld. It doesn't matter if you have to go get a grinder from the boss to fix it. You go and fix it.

Now the quandary starts. Welding on galvanized in a very awkward position I can see that I am burning through the paint and getting fusion into both parts of the weld. I can see that I don't have any cold roll. I finish the welds and chip the slag off of the 12 slugs that I just welded. 8 out of the 12 looks very good. There is nothing wrong with the welds. The other 4 look decent but are not as "nice" looking as the other 8 but no glaring problems. As an inspector I am sure you know what I am talking about. What do I do? Figure it take 10 minutes to run 2 more passes per slug to make sure the weld passes. Do I just keep going and risk having the weld fail and having to go back or do I run extra passes on a weld that would pass anyway? The other result could also be that the current weld looks blah, not bad but not good, but given the position and what you are welding doing anything else will just make it worse. In the latter case you better bet I am moving to the next one.

Having worked with a couple of the "golden arms" it seems that from a welder's perspective one of the most important aspects is to be able to tell when a weld is good and when a weld is bad. If you spend time re-doing welds that are fine then you are going to get run off. Just like if you are moving on to the next one and leaving crap behind you, you are going to get runoff.