Thread: My new welder sucks!? It's not the unit it's me? Do we overlook troubleshooting?

BobL was good enough to place these mig notes in the old woodwork forum archives.They are a years old but there may be something there that helps. I had almost forgotten about them. All the principles still apply.

Welding Lessons by Grahame Collins

Grahame

Originally Posted by sacc51

Nothing wrong with the OP's terminology 'I taught myself to weld'. If on the other hand he was to say 'I taught myself to weld to aircraft or gas pipe standards' then certainly there is something not quite right with the statement; however, a hobbyist is very unlikely to ever come in conact with aircraft or pipe welding so the it's a moot point.

I saw the result of a hobbyist thinking he knew how to weld and people got killed. It happened many Years ago in Sydney quite close to where I live, people standing on an elevated deck during a party and it collapsed due to poor welding. My tech teacher was at that time a DLI inspector for incidents regarding welding and he had to assess what had happened.

Another one but these guys were professionals and I think it happened in Wagga from memory. A very large tank had been fabricated and two welders were doing the leak tests on it and decided to short cut the procedure. What they had been doing was if they located a leak they would dump the air out of the tank and repair the weld/leak and re-test which was a fairly drawn out procedure. They were working at the top of the tank and decided it would be quicker to just grind out the weld and put a short weld in without dumping the air. When the weld pool started to happen the whole thing ruptured and blew both of them into the roof of the building and unfortunately they did not survive. Even trained tradesman can do stuff that they shouldn't.

Decades ago when I was attending a TAFE welding night school class in the country one of the class members brought along his trailer that he had torn the chains off (and been driving around without them for some time) and welded them back onto the drawbar. Although he was quite pleased with his efforts even I could see that is was a pretty dodgy job. The instructor came up to take a look and without saying anything he picked up a screwdriver, put it through the welded links and snapped them off the drawbar like a rotten carrot. The instructor ended up welding them for him.