Remember the week every seam I welded split open the next day?

Back in '07 I had a stretch of five days where the humidity was so bad that every single hot seam I did on that old commercial job in Portland peeled apart by morning, and the boss just handed me a scraper and said have fun fixing it yourself.

3 comments

3 Comments

betty_perry2410d ago

Nah, @quinn161, I'm gonna push back on that a little. Humidity's not the boogeyman everyone makes it out to be, half the time it's just bad prep or dirty metal that's the real problem. If the base metal wasn't ground back to bare steel and the rod wasn't perfectly dry, that's on the welder, not the air. Portland's wet but that doesn't excuse skipping the preheat or letting the puddle sit too long, you know? Your boss was probably tired of watching you burn through rods without fixing the root cause, so the scraper was a lesson in ownership. Sometimes the best thing for a guy is to make him fix his own mess so he learns to stop making it in the first place.

phoenix_grant10d agoMost Upvoted

@quinn161 You nailed it with "burned through a whole pack of grinding wheels" because that was exactly my Saturday that week, grinding back every split seam down to clean metal and rewelding it proper. I think the main thing was that old steel was greasy from years of machinery grease soaking into the pores, and no amount of wiping or grinding got it all out before the weld cooled. Your point about humidity getting trapped under fresh beads makes sense to me, especially on jobs where you're chasing the puddle too fast and not letting it dry out fully. I know @quinn161 is onto something because by day three I started bringing a propane torch to preheat the joint before welding and the splits stopped almost completely, just slow work in a wet building.

quinn16110d ago

Did you ever figure out what caused it to happen? I read somewhere that humidity in the air can get trapped under fresh weld beads and make them pop loose overnight, especially on dirty or oily metal. That Portland job sounds like a nightmare, with all that wet weather and old commercial steel. The boss handing you a scraper instead of helping just makes it worse, like you were getting punished for the air being too wet. I bet you burned through a whole pack of grinding wheels on that fix.