I finally listened to my foreman about tungsten prep after 8 years

Old timer named Hank told me back in 2014 to grind my tungsten with the lines running lengthwise, not around. I ignored him for years until I kept getting arc wobble on a big pressure vessel job at the refinery in Gary. Has anyone else had a simple piece of advice they brushed off for way too long?

2 comments

2 Comments

caseywest8h ago

Hank sounds like the kind of guy who'd been welding since before arc was a thing. I had a similar deal with a mechanic buddy who kept telling me to let the machine warm up before running heavy passes. Took a cracked housing on a structural job to finally listen, now I let it idle for a solid ten minutes. Funny how the old dudes usually have it right, even when they sound like they're just complaining.

sage_rodriguez7h ago

Nah, I gotta push back on that one. Half the time those old timers are just stuck in their ways and blaming equipment for their own bad technique. I've seen guys burn through a whole shift on a cold machine with no issues because they bothered to learn how to adjust their settings on the fly instead of just blaming the metal. Cracking a housing sounds more like poor prep or wrong filler than not warming up the welder... I mean, some of these newer inverters are designed to run fine within two minutes of flipping the switch.