San Bruno Pipeline Accident Update

I can see you have contempt for welders, and that is based on your very small amount of experience contaminated by your vast amount of knowledge.

Welding for a month, even under master teachers is not "I learned how to do this type of job." In any trade. Being able to sit at a bench, inside, under ideal conditions, and welding two objects placed in front of you has no relevant connection to being able to do anything in the real world.

Your forty hours of experience does not qualify you to blanketly condemn and paint a whole trade with your overlyeducated broad brush. I've known more engineers who couldn't find their way to the bathroom or zip up afterwards than I have known welders who had to have "someone sit and hold their hands." Welders who didn't perform were fired. Engineers who didn't perform were usually promoted.

Steve

Many do wind up getting specialized, especially the nuke pipe welders and those skilled in sheetmetal welds. It's not done on purpose, exactly, but if you show a lot of skill in something, you are more likely to get stuck doing that thing for a while. Sometimes the rest of your career.

Hopefully the person really likes that kind of self-imposed limitation though- I think it stinks getting stuck in a rut like that, so I do my darndest to practice and use all my qualifications, not just the ones people think are "cool."

I'm currently qualified in smaw, dual-shield, mig-pulse, mig-spray, and tig, with a decent range of material types. I like to use whatever process would make the task at hand easier, quicker, and cleaner. Just in the last week I've used smaw, pulse, spray, and tig on two sizable assemblies. Personally, I think it's a fun challenge, not an agonizing chore.

Personal question: Were you ever hampered by someone (or an engineer) who insisted they had to hold one of your hands?

Steve ;-) (ducking and running)

Yes, it took us (welders) a long time to do a simple repair because the engineers did not want us to grind out the defects to our satisfaction.

We pussyfooted around this thing using polishing stones and picking slag pockets out by hand rather than simply grind into it and do our weld repairs. Took us about two weeks of work to accomplish what should have taken two or three days. That two weeks came after the engineers had taken a month to look at it and write their papers.

Engineers wound up getting spanked, too. They couldn't make up their minds as to what level of serious-ness to classify the work as, until NAVSEA had to step in and hold their hand! It's not much, just that the lives of everyone on the sub depended upon these welded blocks holding.

In the end, we wound up essentially doing what I wanted to do in the first place-- grinding in all the way to the root, tigging it all the way back out. Funky partial penny joint design that took lots of weld in a sizable bevel.

That experience proved the point to me. Engineers get paid to plan and design things. Welders get paid to fix the engineers plans and designs.

Tinlizzie (new computer, no sig yet)