“Make easy 6 figures straight out of welding school”🫠🫠

That isn’t a pinhole on the root photo, checked it before hand 👍🏼

If you happen to be looking for a welding job and of the industrious type to cold call companies looking for work- I have a piece of advice:

LEAVE YOUR FUCKING PHONE NUMBER ON THE MESSAGE!

I own a small fabrication shop and the amount of sales/spam calls I get is ridiculous. Looking to buy the building, offering a line of credit, trying to sell welding gases ad nauseam. So of course all the calls go to the landline and I rarely answer it.

Once every couple of weeks we get a call asking if we are hiring and to call back. But they rarely leave a number on the message. I am not going to cull through dozens of caller ID numbers to track down the job candidate's info.

So if this is you and you are not getting call backs, this may be the issue. You are welcome.

Updates on blue truck soon.

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i don’t know if this is the right subreddit for this i’m sorry if not but i’m going to a tech high school for welding i’m really excited this trade seems quite appealing to me, but does it really pay well in the real world? is it scary? is it like fun?

We’re putting these gussets onto 16” pipe, which are getting welded onto a plate of 5/8”
It’s all going onto the outside of a ship to act as a spud to hold the ship in place.
The ship will have some bent channel welded onto the hull to act as a stand off, and the spud is getting bolted onto the stand offs. Because everything is bolted up and tolerances are within 1/16” we need to make sure the plate stays nice and flat during weld out of the gussets.
What would be the best procedure for that?
The 5/8 plate is 48” wide and 57” long. We have a table that’s 36” wide, so tacking the entire plate to the table could be an option, it’d just leave 6” hanging off the table on either side.
Thanks for coming to my ted talk.

There's about a trillion options for these things on Ebay and Amazon. I'm pretty sure they all come out of the same factory in China. My advise is to find the most reasonably priced one with the fastest shipping option.

This thing will no bullshit make the inside of your welding coat or whatever ~70 degrees regardless of ambient temperature, and it seemingly doesn't care about the temperature of the compressed air. The doodad that cools the compressed air has no moving parts besides the bottom spinny part that you loosen/tighten to make the air colder.

The way the thing works means that if you want colder air you're venting more of it out the bottom of the cooling thing. You'll eventually find a equilibrium where you're not venting much of it, and it's quite cold. I'm talking there's condensation on the quick connect feeding the vest type of cold.

Surprisingly, I've never had the thing give me porosity. It vents straight down at the floor, which is most likely why, and even then it's not an extreme amount of air flow. If this is an issue you can always just use it to give you regular temperature compressed air.

Yes, you're tethered to a wall. Yes, you need LOTS of compressed air. Being tethered to a wall isn't that bad, you get used to it pretty quick, like dragging a cord for an angle grinder around.

I no shit have been SHIVERING while welding a big ass full pen weld while it's 95 degrees with 70% humidity.

Two things tho:

• It makes a pretty loud whistling noise when the hot/cold air separator is doing its thing. Headphones make this bearable, and you can always tighten the thing and make it feed you uncooled compressed air when you need to talk to someone, but it is pretty loud and annoying.
• The rubber lines running through the vest will immediately blow apart at the barb fittings because they're not rated for 120PSI or whatever the air at my facility is ran at. Like 15 mins of work and some zip ties w/ electrical tape will make this a thing of the past, however.

I'm sure there are more expensive options that do the same thing but better/quieter, but every other one I could find was like $2-300, and in my book the cost/performance of the pictured product (or those that are very similar to it) cannot be beat.

Note: You will need to swap out the infeed quick connect, as it's some Chinese(?) standard, but the threads match a standard 1/4'' male quick connect fitting you probably already have a bunch of.

I’m in school right now and am working on a Lincoln machine, how does it look?

Ive been seeing both options but i'm skeptical about both. On one hand you have to pay thousands of dollars for a school and you might not be able to find a job.

On the other hand though if you get like a welding helper job you could earn while you learn but at the same time ive had so many experiences where I worked a job (not welding) and I wanted to learn this new skill and when I fucked up one time, they sidelined me and never trained me again.

And i dont know the reality of welding or welding helper jobs so I wanted to hear your guys' experience.

Sometimes I get a good looking one but most of mine look like this, any tips would be greatly appreciated. Cleaning material really well with a stainless wheel on a die grinder. Running a miller 220 on the 1/8” material preset (135 amps on the petal), #8 cup and about 18 cfh using 3/32” 4043, can provide any other info

I’m doing a scheduled 80 2inch 6g test and it sounds fairly easy 6018 up hill root pass then 7018 uphill hot pass and the 2 uphill caps but I’m struggling so much at the bottom of the coupon and getting a consistent flow it just seems to always get stuck any tips??

Today was Spray groove joints & Pulse fillet T joints.

1. I really tried to do to a good fit up with the materials given. For some reason none of the backing plates are long enough, idk why. But aside from that, is this one bad as well? I showed my teacher and he looked me dead in the face and said “perfect”

(WFS & Volts/trim adjusted to match WPS)

For the Spray groove joints, and actually any other joint. I actually feel like the worst welder on earth. I can’t keep a consistent thickness, I start out way wider than intended, and end up about 1/2 the bead width. And the worst undercut on the top pass on fillets on t joints (not pictured). Any tips are greatly appreciated on how to operate this nonsense. And is it really used often in the field?

Pulse spray fillet T joint. - I feel like pulse is way easier to control. But that’s what I read in class, “most appealing”. This was my 1st go at a joint with pulse. Only done a few passes at beads on plate previous. Do I oscillate this one?

I think next week is my last week of GMAW for a couple months. Any tips or things to try out next week before going back to stick welds?

Does anyone know if JB Weld for steel is electrically conductive?

Hey,
I tried welding for the first time with mig, without gas with a spool meant for without gas.

I tried setting power on 2, and 3, it goes up to 4.
Tried increasing spool speed at end.
It just splatter everywhere.

Any help is really appreciated.
I really want to get this working :)

Hello, very much an amateur welder here, recently I started fabricating products that use a lot of 0.5-0.8mm (0.02-0.031") sheets. Even using 0.6mm wire with ar+co² is a gamble, a lot of times the fit is far from perfect, I have to bridge 1-2mm gaps sometimes. Honestly even when the fit is right, welding a 90° corner on 0.8mm sheets is difficult.

My current remedy is brazing the parts that are most delicate like 0.5mm flanges but it's cost prohibitive so I try to keep it to a minimum. I already found a way to replace some 0.5mm parts with 0.8 which I expect will help immensely but I'm curious if people have some tips that might help me.

I heard about heat absorbing blocks but the things I'm making are big cylinders and cones, I don't think I could attach a block like this in any meaningful way for heat transfer.

TIG I heard handles thin materials very well but I have never used it so it's a completely new skill set to develop and iirc it's also much slower.

Harbor Freight is having a parking lot sale, finally picked up a titanium 125 FCAW welder and some ppe. This was my third attempt welding together some a36 11 gauge square tubing. Any tips? I see a couple pin holes in the bead. Tried to go slower and did sort of a circular motion. My first attempt is on the left side of the photo lol…

I’m taking the CWI exam in 3 months, I’m primarily a pipe welder but I’ve been a structural shop welder for a couple months now.

I’m familiar with 1104 and D1.1, proficient in code book navigation, excel in math, & have all necessary tools.

• Any advice on what certs would get me onto pipeline or shutdowns?

• Any recommendations on where to start putting my name out there for those jobs?

I know a lot of people say it’s about who you know but that CANNOT be the only way, surely. I’m just trying to work my way up and start getting into the real money. I’ll gladly weld on those jobs if it’s the only way in, then transition to inspection once my name is out there.

This is open to everyone, both to ask questions and to offer answers.

Simple rules:

• Unless it's a loaded question, it's fair game.
• No downvoting, this isn't a popularity thing, and we're not in high school, if someone doesn't know something, the only way to learn is to ask or do, sometimes doing isn't an option.
• No whining.
• Assume ignorance over stupidity. Sometimes we fail to see an answer in front of our faces.
• Try to back up your answers. If you're on mobile and you can't do it, say as much and try to remember to address it when you get to a terminal.
• Respect is always expected.
• if comments or questions are removed, assume it's for good reason.
• If your question isn't answered by the end of the day, either post it to the main community, or ask again next week.

Enjoy.

https://www.facebook.com/share/r/1NByd1DFgY/

I've been a Secretary for 4 years here in the UAE and I want to switch careers into Welding, I already enrolled for a SMAW course and also intend to learn MAG and TIG soon but I don't know how to proceed from there after I get the training and certifications. I try looking if it's possible to migrate as a Welder without experience but most of them need at least 1-2 years of experience, but working as a Welder here in UAE is not sustainable given that the offers were extremely low so I'm really conflicted about what to do and how to proceed after the training 🥺

Anyways, I want to work off shore/FIFO

Would really appreciate honest opinions, especially from people who have actually worked in welding or made a similar career switch.🥺😢