It was not a religious college. A liberal arts college back East that was and currently is not too expensive for most kids. About 1/3 of my class was on some sort of scholarship. To keep your scholarship you had to be in the top half of your class. So it was pretty competitive. There were about 10 males to each female. So most freshmen did not manage to get any dates. The legal age for liquer was 21. That kept getting drunk down. I expect 98 % of my class graduated.
Now there are a few more women than men undergraduates. But I expect the same percentage flunk out.
It really depends on the school. I went to Michigan State, which was a real party school. Most state schools are. The University of Lausanne in Switzerland was only slightly better, with the foreign students being the more serious ones. My son is at Washington and Lee Univ. in Virginia, one of the country's top liberal arts colleges, with very selective admissions, and the students are mostly dead serious about class work.
Not that they don't party. But they play hard and work hard. That's my kind of college. The same is true, I'm told, of most of the top-ranked, highly selective liberal arts schools.
Well, yes , you are partly right - if you start from NO knowledge, then the learning curve is really steep. I did a "short course" in welding years ago, was pretty well useless as I couldn't stick weld at the end of it. The only way is to go through boxes of rods until it "clicks".- eventually you get to the stage that, if you change your brand of rods, you can cope with them having different characteristics.....
And your correct to re instructor time - modern education is run by accountants who do profit and loss statements, run schools as "Business Enterprises" - the trade college I go to has a CEO , for gawds sake. I don't think he was ever a teacher....but, you wait your turn, the good ones wander around and yell at you if your doing something really stupid - and as a Old Fart, I don't learn as quick as the Kiddies ,so I do take all chances to learn from the teacher.
But I disagree, particularly in welding "proper" classes, where one day a week for a semester adds up to a LOT of time practising, and thats what is needed. Oh sure, there are the "self paced learning modules" where you fill in the boxes (it does save having to employ a teacher to do it, and its a crap way of learning, my view anyway) but it doesn't take long to show the basics of welding - after that, its up to the student. You will get practice time, perhaps not enough, but hopefully enough to get to some degree of understanding.
Next semester, I am "doing" welding as part of my course - looking forward to it, I have got reasonably OK with stick (after I bought a DC inverter welder and an LCD helmet and did LOTS of practice)), used to be good at oxy, which I prefer above all else as I did so much lead wiping as a Lineman that it came easy but then bottle rental got so expensive I couldn't afford it (Bugger!) and am doing TIG and MIG as well - that should be good, always wanted to have a go at it.
Will I be a competent tradesman at the end of it - No, there is a separate course of hundreds of hours to get to that stage, and you need to be working in industry as well (its called "apprenticeship") - but I will have the basic knowledge and ability to develop my competency. Wish I could afford MIG and TIG and Oxy gear tho......
So - go for it, if you want to learn, you will. You will have a decided advantage over the Kiddies as you will have learnt to work for what you want and stay focused - you wont be nursing a hangover from the weekend, or fall asleep cause you been out to 3am the night before, or think you don't need to bother cause your never going to need these skills. And you wont think you know it all before you start. And you will know to be nice to the storeman as he is the most important person in the place - antagonize him at your peril.
Teachers WANT to teach, they live for the bright, enthusiastic student who WANTS to learn - and as a mature age student, they can probably relate to you more that they can the Kiddies. You have a natural advantage there, use it.
(Gee, I got fired up over that one - still getting over the envy attack of seeing Gunners big lathe pictures I guess)
I went to college in the 70s and in the 2000s. If anything it was even more of a party atmosphere than before. I think the difference in students is that some of them just party and do no work, some of them party hard but also do their work, and some of them don't party at all and just work. It's probably a different percentage in every school. But as a rule drinking, partying, and fooling around is a very large part of the college experience. I know that is bad news to the kids' parents but that's life. If the parents knew what their kids actually did when they aren't looking they would be mortified. Nothing new about that though.
Hope you enjoy your class as much as I enjoyed the ones I took!
It really can depend on the type of teacher you get, but you will be able to learn from it no matter what.
4 or 5 hours once a week was the format of all the classes I took. Some where 4, some where 5.
I didn't find that to be true for any of the classes I took. The teachers were standing around doing nothing half the time and it was easy to get them to answer questions or demonstrate a weld or give you feed back on your last weld.
Class sizes were typically 10 to 20 for us and most had both a teacher and an assistant to help out. Often, there were other students in the classes with a lot of experience that could answer questions as well.
The lab has something like 12 arc welding stations and 16 oxy-acetylene booths. After the first few classes, there were always people who didn't show up or who would drop out so most the time you would have a station to yourself for the full lab period. Only rarely would you have to share.
The general nice thing as well about the lab was that it had a wide range of different equipment purchased one or two at time over a period of years so there was there was a wide range of different types of equipment to learn to use.
Our CC doesn't have a single beginner class that covers all the processes. Arc welding is two classes: ARC-I and ARC-II. In ARC-I you learn flat position welds. In ARC-II you learn vertical and overhead. They also have a pipe class for ARC (which is one I've not taken).
Oxy-acetyline is another class. It only covers work on 18 gauge steel (and maybe a little bit on 1/8" but has one project with multiple out of position welds. It covers gas cutting and brazing as well and when I took it, we had a heat treating project thrown in as well.
Inert gas is another class which used to cover TIG and MIG but recently has been only TIG in another class.
Then there is a MIG and fluxcore class which is mostly steel but has some aluminum as well. This used to be taught with 18 gauge steel projects but the last time it was taught when I took it was mostly 3/8" structural steel welds in all positions.
These are all 16 week classes with about either 1 hour of class and 3 hours of lab, or 2 hours of class and 3 hours of lab. The lab time is always right after the class time and the class time is seldom over an hour even in the ones that are listed as 2 hours of class so they just end up with 4+ hours of lab time a week.
Even with full 16 week classes on each process you can only just begin to learn all the different processes and positions. Every process and position and material is like learning a whole new skill.
If you tried to touch on all processes in a single class you wouldn't have time to actually learn how to weld anything. Learning to make a good weld takes lots of practice. I suggested to one of the instructors once that they add an introduction course that covers all the processes, and his thought was that none of the students would actually learn to do a weld if you did that because the class would have to move on to the next process before anyone actually learned even a single weld in the previous process.
I spend about a year taking classes and there were 3 or 4 classes they offered I haven't yet taken. I could easily spend another year working on the process if I wanted to get better to be a professional welder. But I did it just for the fun of it for hobby/home use and I know far more than I need to know at this point.
There was reading, some homework, and tests, but most of that was trivial for the classes I took. I might have had to spend a few hours a week out of class total reading/studying/homework but the real work was all in the lab actually practicing welds.
Once you got to the know the instructors, they would give you a lot of flexibility to work on other projects as well. So as long as you were getting the required projects for the class done, you could switch over and practice other processes or other positions, or even bring in small projects from home to work on if you had something that needed to be fixed or welded. The previous welding instructor (that sadly died the 2nd week I was there) was always welling to help people fix things that needed to be welded.
One friend for example is auditing the oxy class this summer (which he already took last year) but not working on oxy at all - he's using it to learn pipe and other stuff. People sign up for classes basically just to get cheap access to the lab and the instructors.
In our CC, the welding shop is part of the auto mechanics and it's in the same building so when you hang out there doing welding you also get to know all the guys in the auto-shop program so again you get to know people who like fooling around with mechanical stuff and metal.
This summer, I'm talking an auto class which is an introduction to machine shop. I took it to learn the basics of mill and lathe work and I've spend most the class playing with the mill. I'm making a 6 sided dice which is almost done. I'll have to post pictures later. The class is really about all the specialized machine shop equipment used to rebuild engines so we only had one class on the mill, and one on the lathe and the rest has been on valve grinders and cylinder boring and honing, crank balancing, rod conditioning etc. It's an intro class that goes so fast you don't learn much of anything other than getting to see a demonstration of the processes but they have full classes you can take on each areas of engine rebuilding (one on heads, one on blocks, etc) if you really want to get into that stuff. The intro class is there mostly to get you familiar with the tools and the shop and teach safety. It's a pre-req for all the other auto machine shop classes.
I wish they actually had pure machine shop classes instead of just specialized auto classes but they don't. It seems they used to a few decades back, but it was shut down. I guess with all the automation in industry these days there's just not much demand for training people to be machinists anymore.
I too found TIG to be fairly easy and I too had many years of experience soldering with electronics. I started building Heathkits when I was in the
6th grade and spend most of my high school years playing with electronics as a hobby.
TIG is also a lot like OA so if you learn OA first then picking up TIG should also be very easy. If TIG is your first exposure to welding, it might be a bit intimidating learning to deal with the welding hood and the electricity and using two hands an a foot all at the same time to control a weld pool you can hardly even see. :)
I've taken both evening and day classes at my CC. There was a noticeable difference in the students. The day classes seemed to have more of the kids and other people who weren't working. They weren't as sharp or as motivated. More of the "someone suggested I try to learn welding" type of situation. The night classes were mostly people that worked and they tended to be more motivated, older, and have a higher education.
As a small metric, in the day class, I was able to finish the tests long before anyone else (by many minutes - some people would take 90+ minutes to finish a test that took me less than 15 minutes). In the night classes, there were 3 to 4 guys that finished the tests 5 minutes before I did. :)
I used to run out of hands just soldering stuff. Ended up with the roll of solder stuck in my mouth to feed into the joint. Would probably give the OSHA type guys a heart attack, never used any of the lead-less type solder :)
A ton of them. :) Every process, every type of filler metal, every type of material to weld, every position to weld in, every condition and geometry of joint, every thickness of material, is a different weld you have to practice and learn (and get certified in if you care to really show you have learned it).
Well, welding is actually so hard to be really good at that people do tend to specialize on a single process. And stick is not easy. You can learn to stick stuff together with any process fairly quickly, but making a good weld is not easy.
3 of the classes I took were 100% stick and I still feel like I've only scratched the surface with it. And after all that, I've still never even tried a single pipe weld. It only takes a few hours to learn to run a bead and make things stick together but every different joint is a whole new skill to learn that can takes weeks of practice. A T joint seems simple at first, until you put it on a press and break it open to check how much penetration you didn't get. Then try it in the horizontal position without getting undercut. Then try it vertical without getting globs of metal dripping out. Try it with 6010 vs 7018. It's a very different weld either way because 6010 won't drip as easily. You have to use a very different technique depending on which rod you are using. Then learn to do with a weave bead instead of stringers.
Then we you are really getting a feel for the welds and think you are getting somewhere, get an experienced welder to show you how much more consistent of a bead he can run than you can, and make you realize how many more years of practice you have ahead of you if you every wanted to be a "real" stick welder.
Then after all the work on T joints, start working on grove welds with backing. Seems simple at first, and you get good looking welds. But cut it up and perform a bend test on it, and snap, the weld cracks right open from slag inclusions and poor penetration. 10 welds later (after hours and hours of prepping the metal, welding, and then prepping the coupons for a bend test, you finally get one that passes. There is a huge difference between running a bead and making the metal stick together so that you can't pull it apart with your hands or a hammer, and making it actually pass a bend test.
Then after you have got that mastered for a grove joint with backing, start over trying to do a open grove joint in the flat position and make it pass a bend test. You have to learn to do it without having any concave spots on the back, and without having more than about 1/16" reinforcement on the back. Not too much reinforcement on the front at as well, and an even consistent width and height bead, with no undercut or porosity or excess splatter.
And when you think you have that joint down, start again on vertical. Instantly you are in a whole new world and all that skill you learned on the last joint no longer seems to apply. You have to start all over learning how to space the plates, how big of a land to grind on it, and exactly what amperage setting works. For open grove welds, being off by only a few amps or by a 1/64 of an inch in spacing means the difference between burning holes or trapping slag or melting big globs of crap out the back.
You have to develop instincts for when it's running too hot and learn to sense when it's about to melt out before it becomes a problem or when it's running to cold. This all just takes hours and hours and hours of practice under the hood.
After 3 classes of nothing but stick, I got certifiable joints for all the major positions for 3/8" steel but I still feel like I've only just started. I think you really need to get a job and weld 8 hours a day for years to really hone your instincts. And of course, learning to deal with all the problems you run into in real life in the field is another whole set of skills to master which you don't get in the classroom.
Stick welding is not easy. None of the processes are if you actually try to learn a wide range of positions and joints and materials. Every one is a different skill to develop.
It's definitely a skill that needs to be learned and practiced, like playing the guitar, or playing pool, or playing golf, it's not one skill but instead, many different skills under one name. With the guitar, you have to learn chords in the first position, then learn barre chords, and learn to read music, and learn different rhythms, and different strumming, and different finger picking patterns. Each is a different skill to learn and improve on. It never ends. With golf, each club in each type of ground condition or ball lie is a whole new skill to learn and improve on. You can take lessons for your entire life and still be learning new things the day you die.
Welding is a skill which is as hard to learn as any of these. The more you practice, the better you get, but you will never stop learning. Like playing the guitar, you don't realize how much you don't know, until you see someone far more advanced than you at work.
Whether you specialize on a single process (pipe welding with stick), or whether you learn all the processes, how good a welder you are will always be a question of how many hours of practice you have been able to put in.
Ditto me there, Batman. I got to where I could weld with my left hand to do particular sections of a pipe weld and pass x ray, but never really mastered TIG. Right brain, left brain, no brain. I never did get it.
Ignoramus22312 wrote in news:HIqdnRXjsfMVKebVnZ2dnUVZ snipped-for-privacy@giganews.com:
Try playing a Bull Fiddle.
Left Hand fingering the strings and Right Hand working the bow while balancing the neck on your Left shoulder so it won't fall down when you turn the page.
Bugger. Was all enthused to start my semester of welding today, but its been postponed. Apparently some of the teachers quit - someone offered them $80k plus car+laptop+mobile phone. And it was local jobs, not out bush in WA in the mines. Sure beats teaching. So, have to wait till they get new teachers.
Went back to machining, having a stab at indexing. Set up the indexing head and tailstock. Getting there - (Apart from forgetting to divide by 2 to get the final cut to tolerance done, and breaking a end mill cause the rapid traverse on the mill got a bit too enthusiastic)....normal student mistakes, I am told.
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