Back in '05 we welded a 500-ton boiler drum with stick, last month we did the same job with a dual-wire rig

I was thinking about this job we just finished at the old Miller plant. Twenty years ago, welding the longitudinal seam on a drum that size was a three-day grind with 7018 rods. You'd have a guy preheating, another welding, and the heat and fumes were brutal. Last month, we used a new dual-wire flux-cored setup with an oscillator. The difference was night and day. We cut the weld time down to a day and a half, the bead profile was perfect right off the gun, and there was way less grinding after. The old way worked, but the new gear just lets you put down more metal, faster and cleaner. It makes you wonder what we'll be using in another twenty years. Anyone else made a big switch in their weld process lately that just blew the old method out of the water?

2 comments

2 Comments

mary23911d ago

Try switching to pulsed MIG for thinner stuff, it cuts down spatter like crazy.

butler.brian11d agoTop Commenter

Yeah but pulsed MIG is a whole other machine cost for most people. @mary239 makes it sound simple but that's a big jump. For thin stuff a good old tweak on your wire speed and voltage does the same job. Spatter isn't that bad if you know how to set your gun right.