Signed up for Welding class

Where? All the evening classes in my area seem to be three to 4 times a week... thanks

You're going to love it if you get a good teacher. I was fortunate and got some good ones. Believe me, they can make you remarkably better in just a few hours a week. And most will skip the stuff you already know and let you advance to something you're having problems with or need to learn, and you don't have to spend a lot of time going over stuff you already know how to do.

It's nice, too, from the standpoint that usually you get to weld on steel that has proper root and bevel configuration. Sometimes this translates to the real world, but a lot of times, it just gives you an idea of how it would be done in ideal circumstances, and then you will adapt from that to the real situation in your shop.

Let us know how you do, and share those AHA! moments.

Steve

Our local community college, west of Chicago. It is actually rather good based on my past experience.

I'm envious! The great stateof Wyoming has consolidated all of its CC (and university) welding classes to the Casper CC. At 175 one way miles at todays or even last years fuel prices not an option. There is no other.

About 4 miles for me. This is a great CC also. I studied some things there a few years ago.

Thanks Steve. I wil let you know how it goes.

So... the definition of "Community College" there calls for only one community to have the college?

Joe Pfeiffer wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@snowball.wb.pfeifferfamily.net:

It's a cost-effective way of maximizing the use of the existing equipment without spending anything upon either maintenance or consumables.

The CCC may also get a subsidy from the Feds as part of a job-training program.

Which do you want first the good news or the bad news? Okay, I'll give you the good news. Taking a beginning welding class is in general a good idea if you plan to do much welding. I took one a year or two ago and since I knew absolutely nada about welding at the time it was a necessity that I learn the basics, which I did. The bad news; unless you are very lucky you will not get nearly as much help from the teacher as you need. There will be a bunch of other people constantly asking him for his help, so you have to get in line. The other thing is that all you will learn is the most basic principles of each type of welding so you won't get very good at any of them. What it does most is prepare you for the next class where you will learn a lot more because after the first class you will know what's going on. So you really need to take about a year to really get things down pat. I'm glad I took the class, for sure. But I didn't get nearly as much as I wanted to out of it. Then there was the part of reading the book and taking tests and having to be graded on everything. Maybe you won't have that to worry about but I went to a community college and they make the whole thing like the rest of the curriculum. Have fun and get the fundamentals down as well as you can because that's all you will probably glean from it.

Hawke

John means that only the Casper school has welding classes -- there are 9 more CC's in 7 other Wyoming towns. Wyoming is #50 in population among US states, has about 5 people per square mile and 10% as many people as Cook County, Illinois.

-jiw

COD Iggy?

Rob

What I will get out of the class, is all speculation at this point. Hard to say. Even in the worst case, I will get an introduction to welding methods that I never tried, like O/A and MIG. Also, I will get a chance to practice harder welds like vertical and overhead, and have someone knowledgeable who would correct my mistakes.

Plus, having access to proper welding setups, test materials etc, will also be useful.

My welding experience for now is 90% stick like this one

and 10% TIG.

Yep.

I expect it varies quite a bit. When I took a similar evening welding class the book portion was pretty much limited to the first class and just about everything after that was practical hands on time. The student to instructor ratio was low enough to get an adequate amount of time with the instructor. There is usually an advanced class or welding II you can continue in, or given the low cost of most of these classes, you can easily take it twice if you need more instructor time.

Tentatively, if this class goes well, I will take a TIG class and a stick class to lean more about out of position welding, which is my weak spot (among many).

From my perspective (I'm a computer science professor at NMSU), it just seems totally contrary to the whole community college concept. Having local access to vocational training like that is exactly what CCs are supposed to be good at. Let's see... three of NMSU's four community college campuses offer welding (I wonder why the fourth doesn't... hmmmm...)

Wouldn't surprise me a bit.

I fully realize I was very lucky to get as good and patient an instructor as the one I had. I hope I'm as patient with my backward CS students as he was with me!

Well, yeah. How much of a skilled craft can you learn in 10 weeks?

Actually, the videos/book/tests were the easy part for me. But then, that's the sort of thing I'm good at....

Having spent several years working for a community college system, I can tell you that the sad truth is that colleges exist to serve their bureaucracies and the egos of their faculty, not the needs of the real world and certainly not the needs of their students.

Welding and other "dirty" classes aren't trendy, so they get shoved to the side in favor of trendy classes and of course the handful of classes that serve no purpose other than to employ otherwise unemployable faculty.

Even calling those classes "vocational" is a sign of the discrimination, since virtually all classes beyond art appreciation are "vocational".

Here's what you'll get, from my experience. You won't get any of the hard welds like vertical or overhead, that is advanced. What they do in a college class is just like any class. They start at the very beginning and give you the basics, a lot of safety, different metals, history of welding, etc. Then they start you out on O/A because once you have the hang of that you can pretty much do the rest. In my school we only got through oxy, stick, and barely some mig. But once you understand how to do oxy the only thing you need to know about mig is how to set up the machine for your specific job. The joke is that a monkey can mig weld if a human sets up the machine for him. We never even got to TIG at all. I doubt if you'll get to that in a first semester class. That's why I said you just scratch the surface in a first class in a community college. You really need to do another semester to learn what you probably want to know. That said, I'm glad I learned all the fundamentals the right way. Welding can be dangerous if you don't know what you are doing. You have to start somewhere though and that first class is a must even though you won't learn what you hoped to.

Hawke