terryk10•15d agoTop Commenter

Just had a stainless steel weld fail on me mid-job at a refinery in Gary

Tbh I was about 40 feet up on a scaffold at the BP plant in Gary, Indiana, welding a support bracket onto a feed tank. I thought I had the heat dialed in right but about halfway through, the puddle just went to crap and the whole thing cracked right down the middle. My foreman saw it from the ground and started yelling up at me, asking what the heck I was doing. Honestly I froze for a second, then I just told him I needed to drop down and re-prep the joint. Ended up grinding it all out, using a different filler rod, and cranking the amps down by 15. Took me an extra 45 minutes but the second pass held like a champ. Has anyone else had a weld go sideways on a high-stakes job and had to talk their way through it?

3 comments

3 Comments

the_simon15d ago

You know, a few years ago I would have said you just need to "trust your setup" and blame bad luck. But after a similar screw up on a critical pipe weld at a chemical plant, I realized it's more about staying calm and knowing when to admit you screwed up. Your story about dropping down and re-prepping the joint is exactly what I had to do, and it saved my butt. Now I always carry a second filler rod type just for moments like that.

charles44215d ago

Drop the second rod in my pocket before I even start now. Learned that one the hard way too, @the_simon. Had a weld go bad on a fryer hood last month. Had to grind it out and start over. Felt like an idiot. But hey, better than a grease fire.

bennett.mason14d ago

Four times I've had to grind out a weld and start over on a boiler tube bundle last year alone. Felt like I was paying tuition to the welding gods or something. My foreman still gives me crap about the time I had to cut out a whole root pass because I grabbed the wrong rod out of my pocket. Now I color code the damn things with paint pens, red for stainless, blue for carbon. Makes it harder to grab the wrong one when you're half blind from the hood and sweating like a pig.