week 5

This week i have reached 20 hours but it doesn't feel like it has been. These passed weeks learning how to weld have been one of the funnest and most educational times in my academic career. This week i have moved on to what i think is the best type of welding, and what is used on a lot of stuff by both professionals and those who need to fix something of theirs every once in a while. It is called tig welding, and it involves a long unshielded rod made of the same material that you want to weld. You then have to go to the tig machine and adjust the temperature, voltage, and how you want the current to flow. you then have establish a ground via a clamp with a cable. you then have to make sure you have the correct tungsten and cup on the tig gun for the type and thickness of your metal. Finally you are ready to weld once you turn on the machine and shielding gas. You then start by pushing the trigger on the tig gun and forming a pool of metal that you steadily move forward as you dip the rod into this pool every time you move. It sounds difficult, and at first it is, but like anything in life practice makes perfect and the more i did it the better and easier it became for me to do it. i really enjoyed learning to tig weld and i hope next week will be just as fun.

week 4

This week I finally am able to produce an efficient and nice looking weld, this means that i can now move on to the next thing which is arc welding. Arc welding is probably the strangest of the three welding techniques and this one is definitely harder than mig. This style of welding requires a rod that is hooked up to a ground on the machine and a ground on the table/surface you are working on. the rod and material then creates an arc and melts the rod you are holding. This style took a little bit to get used to and has some draw backs. one draw back is you go through the rods quite quickly especially if doing a large area or section.it is pretty close to a thing called brazing which i have done before so it wasn't to hard to pick up on and get used to. I am really enjoying myself so far and am thrilled to learn more things every time I come here.

week 3

This is my third week coming back here and I already have accumulated 12 hours which is about half of the required hours for my project. I am definitively going to be putting in more hours than the required time, and i am definitively okay with that. i do have to admit that these first weeks are getting kind of repetitious, but this is no fault of Al's. He asked me if I wanted to try something else out and I said no I wanted to become proficient in mig welding first. Although after I did my butt joint welds and t joint welds he let me use the plasma cutter, and yes it was as cool as it sounds. The plasma cutter is well you guessed it, a two foot torch that gets so hot it becomes super heated plasma making the material look like a hot knife through butter. And because these pieces i was cutting where used for no particular reason i could do whatever I wanted on them. So the first thing I did was cut my name out on a quarter inch steel plate which I now hang in my room. I honestly really enjoy everything about doing this stuff so far and i really hope the next weeks to come are like this  

week 2

This week in welding I began learning the basics of welding and went over the different aspects of the mig machine. Mig welding is a type of welding where the electrical current that creates the massive amount of heat, flows through the rod that is automatically fed the the gun. This type of welding is a very common type of welding used out in the welders field, it is quicker, cheaper, and more consistent than other types of welding. As of right now I am just getting a general feel/ technique of welding steel on steel with the mig machine. Mr. Baer says after I become proficient in this type of welding I can move on to the other types they have at the shop. Learning these things and being allowed the opportunity to learn such things really excites me and makes me happy. I really enjoy learning how things work and why they work that way and I'm excited for our next session.