Welding on the Amazing Race tonight

[bc]

Watched the Amazing race tonight in Uruguay and their first detour was a welding project. They had to stick weld an inside corner bead on a couple pieces of what looked like 3/16" plate 6" square with one flat and the other one propped up at 90 degrees. Then they took it over to a table where a guy laid it down with the corner up and hit it with a 4 lb. hammer. It had to survive 2 blows with the hammer. A lot of them didn't make the first hammer blow and one made the first but broke on the second. Eventually they all passed it and moved on. Saw a number of welds that reminded me of what I've done but the boys and girls got welds that held and none of them got hung up for a very long time so they figured it out.

 

[plattman]

watching for it right now.

 

[miangus]

For a number of years I managed the Natural Gas Safety program for Michigan, and I had to take all the required federal training classes for pipeline inspectors. In one of the materials class, they had the students do just a little hands-on lab work; fuse a plastic joint, rebuild a regulator etc. In one lab they had all the students try their hand at arc welding. Just laying a bead on a flat plate, I was the only one out of about 30 students who was able to lay down that bead. They were using the thinnest 6010 I had ever seen. With the welder setting they were using you had to feed it fast. When I finished the instructor said, "son I think you have done this a time or two".

 

[Hemmjo]

The Welding Engineering Department in college had a huge drop hammer for testing welds. We welded 1/4 x 2 x 2" plates together at 90˚. That big hammer ALWAYS won. The goal was to make sure break was even and in the base metal.

 

[bc]

The Welding Engineering Department in college had a huge drop hammer for testing welds. We welded 1/4 x 2 x 2" plates together at 90˚. That big hammer ALWAYS won. The goal was to make sure break was even and in the base metal.

That's what we did a lot of in the arc welding and oxy-acetylene welding classes I took at the local Juco back in the day. I think we put them in a press to test them.

 

[Keith True]

I had a year of welding in a vo-tech school I went to in 1974. One test was to weld up a 6X6 cube,with a pipe nipple in it.Then they would submerge it in a test tank full of water.Then it was pressurized to a certain PSI,(I don't remember how much).It was a pass-fail test,and mine passed.I still have it,all four sides are bulged out.I was attending the automotive side of that school,and was sent to the welding shop for some basic welding lessons.My test cube would not have passed for the guys that were enrolled in the full time welding courses.