This is a mess

But the results should be great!

I took my Flux Core Arc Welding (FCAW) certification with Dual Shield wire today and it went well enough. My vertical was damn near perfect. My overhead plate got swamped with porosity on the seventh pass, but I think I welded it up well enough after that that it should be OK. We’ll find out on Monday.

Anyway, the pics…

As I said in a previous post, this is virtually the same test as my TIG certification, but there are some differences: The plate is 1 inch thick instead of 3/8in and the process is a wire-feed type.

Dual Shield is so named because it not only uses a shielding gas for the welding atmosphere, it also has flux in the wire (hence, the name). All in all, Dual Shield is one of the easiest process to use and it is strong as an ox. Bridges, skyscrapers, boats and just about anything else “big” uses FCAW because it is strong and goes down fast and smooth.

The downsides are that it is toxic as hell to put down and it is dirtier than stick welding.

This is my root pass

That ugly colored, rough textured surface you see is the slag on the outside of the weld. Underneath it is a shiny steel weld that will polish up nice and takes paint well. A few whacks with a chipping hammer and a couple passes with a wire wheel on an angle grinder is all it takes to remove it.

Yes, I took this pic while the top of the plate was still glowing red hot.

Another one of those and we’re ready for the filler passes.

It is now too wide to fill in with a single pass, so you want to angle these fillers at the corners of the plate where the new weld meets the plate.

And another set of those and it’s ready for the cover passes.

Going left to right: One

Two

Three

At the bottom edge of cover pass number one, you can see where I angled my wire too far towards the edge and blew out the run-up tab. I cleaned it out and came at it with a severely angled shot of weld to fill it up. It is not on “The Plate”, so technically, it doesn’t count on the test, but cosmetics are a good portion of the visual inspection.

Here is a shot of the floor after completing the first plate.

The second plate, in the Direct Overhead position, is set above my head so that the groove runs out from my face to the far edge of the booth. Basically, I have to start at the far end and bring the goose neck on the wire feeder directly back towards my face during the weld. In the mean time, that slag no longer has any reason to stay on the weld surface while I’m welding and all of gravity to pull it down. So not only are you dragging fire towards your face, you’re also getting spattered upon and barely hardened molten slag is falling off onto your legs and chest (because the booths are not made for guys my height, I had to sit down for this position).

Sounds like a fun, huh?

All of the cover passes were below the 1/8in over-height limit and there were no low spots, so this one passed the visual examination.

My second plate was nowhere near as pretty as my vertical plate and had a decent amount of porosity in the middle three inches of pass six. However, I was able to fill them in and am going to have to hope for the best during the bend test on Monday.