It is always sad when you come to the end of something, whether it be a vacation, a job, a relationship or in this case, a class that I really enjoyed. Over the past 16 weeks, I have commented on many of my experiences in the class. This unfortunately is my last one for this class. I plan on taking an advanced welding class, but I am not able to do so until fall as there are no Saturday classes offered during the summer.
I left the house at 7 am, a little earlier than usual. I wanted to stop and pickup some doughnut holes for the class to enjoy before the test. Little did i know three other people had almost the same idea. When I arrived , there were three dozen doughnuts on the work table to which I added my box of doughnut holes. Lots of sugar to keep us going today. A few of us had also agreed to wear orange tee shirts on this final day as kind of a homage to our instructor Ted. Ted has worn an orange tee shirt to class every Saturday for the past 16 weeks and today was no exception. Unfortunately only one other guy besides me, remembered to wear the orange tee. Regardless, Ted got a kick out of it, which was the intent.
As I mentioned last week, I had two more TIG labs to complete and I was intent on getting both of them done today no matter what. We all signed in and received a quick run down of what today would look like: Two hours in the lab, one hour of review and one hour to take the final. We exited the class room and made a dash for the lab. I say dash because everyone knew they only had two hours to complete whatever labs they had left and there were only so many booths setup for each of the four welding processes. There were only six booths setup for TIG which is what I was concentrating on finishing today and by the time I got out there four of them were already taken. The only two left were booth three which is the messed up one I worked with last week, and booth two which had no firebrick on the bench and a fairly new machine. The firebrick is usually to the side of the metal grate welding surface so that you can set your pliers, goggles filler rod etc. The brick does not conduct electricity so it is safe to set all your ‘stuff’ that you are not directly using during the weld.
I decided to use booth two so I went into booth three and grabbed half a dozen bricks to at least fill half the bench surface. That way I was able to spread out my equipment and work comfortably in the booth. I assembled my TIG torch, turned on the Argon gas flow, turned on the welding machine, checked all the settings and hit the foot pedal to test the gas flow. All system go. Off to the dreaded sand blaster.
Luckily I only had to clean four or five pieces of steel for these two exercises so I would only waste maybe 30 minutes on the cleaning process. The blasting booth was not any better this week and actually it seemed a little worse than usual. I had to keep pumping the gun trigger to get any noticeable sand flow to come out of the nozzle. I decided to only do one edge of each of the two steel pieces that would be used for the butt joint. Since only about 1/2 inch down the length of each piece would be touched by the arc, that is all I really needed to clean. I only did two pieces to start as I was anxious to get to the actual welding.
Back in the booth, I arranged the two pieces of steel on the metal welding surface, about an eighth of an inch apart with one inch of each piece hanging over the table edge. I do the overhang so that I can tack the end together with a quick weld. I then flip the two pieces around and tack the other end. If I did not do this, the two pieces would move closer together as the metal heated up during the weld.
With both ends tacked and cooled enough to hold the pieces steady, I checked my helmet settings, grabbed a filler rod and started the but joint weld. I was immediately in the grove making small concentric circles as I added filler to the weld. The soft blue arc and the gentle buzz of the torch was very soothing and as always helped me concentrate on the task at hand. Once I start doing this at home, I can’t wait to add some classical music or maybe some Stones to the mix. Zen indeed.
I completed the butt joint with almost 100% penetration across the length of the gap. Not perfect but good enough to turn in with limited time. I quickly walked back to the blasting booth and did three more pieces of steel. I wanted to try the butt one more time to see if I got better results and I still need to do some straight beads with filler on the surface. Ten minutes later the blasting was done and I was back in the booth. I tried the butt joint one more with the same results so I set those two aside to clean up later and jumped on the filler task.
The filler task went very well as I have a pretty steady hand and the only trick is to feed the filler rod into the heat but not into the arc so that it melts in as evenly as possible. The goal is to have a nice straight bead with even height across the whole length of the plate. I ran six rows of beads with filler and was satisfied with the results, so I took that plate and the original butt joint task over to the quenching tank (we need to cool the metal in water in order to work with it without gloves), dried them off with the air hose and polished them up with the grinder for submittal.
I finished both tasks with 15 minutes to go, so I cleaned up my booth and headed back to the classroom for the review. We spent the next hour reviewing what we had learned in the past 16 weeks, then we jumped online to take the final. 30 minutes later I was done as were most of the other guys, so we went back to our seats until everyone was finished. By 11:45 everyone was done and we all sat around for the last 15 minutes talking to and thanking the instructor for his time and talents.
I really enjoyed the class and was glad I was able to fit it in this spring. I look forward to the advanced class in the fall and can’t wait to do my own setup in the planned shed in the backyard.