The hardest part of the welding process isn’t the welding itself. It’s trying to weld while crammed into a vehicle’s engine compartment, an aircraft’s wing structure, or while dangling from rafters two stories above the shop floor. Awkward, uncomfortable, or inaccessible positions are a common part of welding. One of…
A high-purity weld is any weld that contains fewer than ten parts per million (ppm) of contaminants like oxygen, hydrogen, and carbon. Ultra-high-purity welding keeps these contaminants below one ppm. High-purity and ultra-high-purity pipe welding are used in processes where cleanliness of the product is paramount, such as in semiconductor…
Welding thin metals is the art of making many tack welds, then carefully welding longer beads to avoid heat distortion. Tube welding, in particular, requires a steady hand to maneuver the arc evenly around the entire circumference of the tube. Stainless steel welding requires careful prep work and a precise…
Titanium has a curious nature. It is thought of as futuristic and expensive, and yet titanium is the ninth most abundant element in the Earth’s crust and the seventh most abundant metal. It’s so common, in fact, that titanium oxides are used in sunscreen and as pigment in white paint….
Orbital welding machines are critical assets for completing high-specification projects to the required specifications and on time. If an orbital welding machine is damaged or otherwise unsuitable for service, it could mean that no welds can be completed until it is repaired or a replacement arrives. Since orbital welding machines…
Equipment issues that arise in the middle of welding are infuriating. Welders in every type of welding process know the blank moment of surprise that comes along with a stuck rod, a wire that curls off instead of striking, or a tungsten electrode ruined by inexplicably crashing into the weld….
Because of the speed of wire feed welding, welders coming from more demanding manual processes tend to enjoy their first time using a wire feed process like gas metal arc welding (GMAW) or flux core arc welding (FCAW). Pairing a wire feed with automated orbital welding offers a similar experience….
Aerospace is the last place any welder or metallurgist would expect to come across stainless steel. Nevertheless, what is set to be humanity’s first interstellar space ship—SpaceX’s Starship—is designed with a hull of stainless steel due to the metal’s ability to retain strength under extremes of heat and cold. The…
The long-time standard for welding pipes is shielded metal arc welding (SMAW), commonly called “stick” because of the rod-shaped consumable electrodes used. SMAW has been one of the most widely used forms of arc welding for decades. Qualified welders and SMAW equipment are widely available and this process is simple…
A staple of dystopian fiction in the 1980s and 1990s was a world that had run out of oil. Today we’re living in a very different reality, with a glut of oil and not enough storage. In fact, oil storage briefly became a commodity that was more valuable than oil…
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