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Thread: Welding observation

  1. #1
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    Welding observation

    Is it just me or has anybody else noticed that general welds on things are starting to be of poor quality? I don’t mean on structural things like bridges and buildings but more so on smaller items. Hand carts, dumpsters, and things such as that. I know that where I live we have vocational welding high school. It seems like if these kids have just an inkling of skills they are pretty much hired at our local John Deere manufacturer. A nephew of mine had one year of welding in school no other experience and was sent off to a J. D sponsored school to help further his skills.
    It just seems like to me that the quality of the welds I see are getting worse. I look at a frame on a 70’s era Honda and they are dam near perfect. I don’t have much welding experience other than high school back in 1980 but even at that I do remember the importance of not only a functional weld but a good flowing and looking weld.
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  2. #2
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    It's a skilled trade man, few and far between are getting into them. I cant find guys to teach my trade to and it wont make ya go blind! I'm a good welder, enjoy it, but I'm glad I didn't take it up as a career. At least not sgmaw mig welding(production) tig welding and fabrication is still fun but then again I used to really enjoy running equipment. Now it's just another day.

  3. #3
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    Quote Originally Posted by DAM shop View Post
    Is it just me or has anybody else noticed that general welds on things are starting to be of poor quality? I don’t mean on structural things like bridges and buildings but more so on smaller items. Hand carts, dumpsters, and things such as that. I know that where I live we have vocational welding high school. It seems like if these kids have just an inkling of skills they are pretty much hired at our local John Deere manufacturer. A nephew of mine had one year of welding in school no other experience and was sent off to a J. D sponsored school to help further his skills.
    It just seems like to me that the quality of the welds I see are getting worse. I look at a frame on a 70’s era Honda and they are dam near perfect. I don’t have much welding experience other than high school back in 1980 but even at that I do remember the importance of not only a functional weld but a good flowing and looking weld.
    I look at welds a lot, for work and as a hobbyist.

    The welds on the motorcycle frames of the 70s and 80s are pathetic. The only thing that makes them look good are the heavy coats of paint that went over them. As soon as you sandblast it off and start looking at them the amount of pinholes is uncountable.

    Fast forward to the remaining steel framed modern bikes I’m familiar with (Ducati, BMW, Beta and KTM) and the welds are much better, probably done by robots. I haven’t looked at any carbon steel welding on the smaller Japanese bikes that are coming out these days, so they might still be rough.

    All the aluminum welding I see on motorcycles nowadays is much better than the welds I saw on the first aluminum swing-arms coming out of Japan.

    I was in a factory the other day that makes components for Toyota, Tesla, Chrysler and John Deere among others. 90% of the welding is done by robots and the other 10% is done by hand. I didn’t see a single bad weld amongst the thousands of parts that were on display.

    Now everything I just mentioned was welded in a controlled environment. Step out of that bubble and into field construction and I have to agree that there is some really crappy welding going on these days. You see it in parking garages, handrails steel building frames and on custom fabricated items that don’t necessarily require inspection in order to be used in public.

    I think part of the blame lies with the petroleum industry. When the shale boom was going on they snapped up every able-bodied welder and paid them stupid money to work in the field. I think a lot of those guys have decided to go down different career paths after realizing that they would never make that kind of money welding in the small job shops that they got there starts in once the oil industry cooled off.

    This has left the custom fab shops with the guys that weren’t good enough to get on with the oil companies and those are probably the guys that are making the crappy welds that you see out there in the field today.

    My $0.02
    Last edited by El Camexican; 02-10-2020 at 11:44 PM.

  4. #4
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    I've been a production pulsed MIG welder now for 2.5 years welding skidsteer attachments. There are 3-4 guys out of maybe 20-25 welders (if you include nightshift) who simply don't care. Most guys at our plant though put in a solid effort to make nice looking, quality welds. Despite seeing some poor welds make it through, we very rarely get any warranty claims due to broken welds, and skidsteer attachments get put through the wringer.
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  5. #5
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    Quote Originally Posted by hatc200x1 View Post
    I've been a production pulsed MIG welder now for 2.5 years welding skidsteer attachments.....
    Our company is always looking for guys like you with this specific skill set, especially the ability to do line-boring in the field or in the shop on excavating equipment.

    The problem around here, is that all the shops want certified/educated welders and the price of trade school tuition has skyrocketed the last 15yrs. Now kids are taking out much bigger loans but the pay scale locally is frankly, AWFUL. School tells these students that they are "guaranteed to make $________'', and it's usually quite a bit less than what they claim.

    So the welders get itchy and jump jobs alot. I told my surrogate son to hit the pipeline and don't look back so he joined 798(?) and started as a laborer a couple years ago until he bought his own rig this winter. He made almost twice the pay as a welders helper as he did as a welder in our shops

    When I was in my twenties I welded GMAW on dumpsters and then graduated to water tight cans and compactors.... Laid hundreds of miles of bead in a short time. They only paid me hourly for three months and then piece rate after that, which was a much bigger check.

    Anyway, you had to weld your initials on the can in a specific spot so the owner knew who to yell at if it fell apart. He comes and gets me one day to "talk about my work" so I thought I was getting yelled at or fired... They a demo lot with examples of each type of can and he said "look, I have alot of your work in that show area but you're welding these too nice and I'm not going to be able to sell cans if they don't wear out every five years".... Told me to thin out my beads. Alot of can builders there had stringy snotty looking cold beads so I eventually quit and went back to machining.

    I do think that skilled welders should get paid alot more around here, but in manufacturing overall, welding is one of the jobs most heavily automated and subject to constant streamlining and cost management, so wages aren't going to get much better unless you stay on your toesn and chase the money

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  6. #6
    Join Date
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    Here in the quad cities we have the J.D headquarters, it seems they are hiring a lot of the kids here right out of high school and then they further their welding experience with another company short term class. The problem is they are only paying these kids a very low wage.. If you are at the top of your high school welding class here you have pretty much a guaranteed job before you even graduate. My only issue is that these kid's cannot be that good with the limited skills that they have.. Can always count on you guy's for your input on topics like this..
    90 nickolson Bored and Stroked "The Good"

    Big Bore 110 Pauter frame "The Bad"

    90 Bored and Stroked “vey’s frame” "The Ugly"

    110 JSC frame Bored and Stroked
    flat track build. “Shop trike”

    1974 original 90 X 2

    1974 Original 70.

  7. #7
    Join Date
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    Quote Originally Posted by DAM shop View Post
    ........ My only issue is that these kid's cannot be that good with the limited skills that they have....
    I totally agree. I feel bad for the kids cuz they get cheated out of a solid apprenticeship training that they need even after school. Machining is making the same mistake. They come out thinking they already know everything they need to know and then they learn otherwise. None of these companies apprentice them, they just throw them onto the floor with just enough knowledge to get it done maybe or eventually but not enough knowledge to warrant a pay raise. Catch 22 for them..... Meanwhile that school loan payment ain't paying itself. 20K for an associate's degree in applied science is ridiculous.





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  8. #8
    BarnBoy is offline Just Too Addicted Arm chair racerJust too addicted
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    I think it depends highly upon the product and it's intended use. I work in a fab shop that builds tornado shelters...every weld on that thing it A+ too notch or it's ground out and rewelded. Obviously it is a device that is intended to save people lives and withstand immense force so the welds need to be good. However you would be surprised at some of the welds these shops are cranking out when they pay the guys next to nothing. They're always pushing faster, faster, faster and quality suffers. But the guys who care about their reputation make sure their product is done right.

    There are guys that don't care what their welds look like, as long as they lay down some wire in the right spot. I'm always trying to make my weld better. We run 26v and 600+ inches of solidwire MIG on 3/16" plate lol, HOT and fast.

    I've heard stories about the previous shop that built these shelters...they had been known to miss a weld on a shelter and not catch it till it was built. Rather than reweld it they would take silicone and form it to resemble a weld bead, and paint it. Ridiculous.

    Pipeline and tank jobs pay very well, though many guys I know don't last too much longer than 6-8 months before they're bored and on to the next thing. But they make really good money and as ironchop said 798 is hard to get on but big bucks! Just depends on what you wanna do.
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  9. #9
    Join Date
    Nov 2013
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    A lot of today's welded items like the stuff you mentioned are probably done in factories by non certified welders to keep costs down. then there's the welds on Higher end stuff probably done by a machine. I have seen some nice welds from machines but nothing beats a weld by a really good, experienced Welder. My Dad was a welder for like 40 years here in New Haven, welding huge Oil and HP Steam lines under ground in the tunnels around the city, and in the Oil yards, My older brother followed him into the trade and both are superb welders ...as for me, I weld like a blind 5 year old with no arms who guzzled daddy's last bottle of jack Daniels! lol

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