Testing, Testing

I pulled the trigger on my SMAW stick/arc welding test on Thursday.

Now, because of the limited time left in the quarter due to my injury I decided on just going for the 3G (vertical) certification. I need to finally get my MIG cert after putting my TIG, Dual Shield and SMAW certs in front of it, and sometimes you need to admit that stupid happens and it can be costly. In this case, I paid full test price for the cert and only got half the certification. I have three weeks left in the quarter with which to try and pull off a vertical and 4G (overhead) cert in MIG, and I don’t know if I’m going to even be able to pull it off, but I have to try since that is where the work will likely lie around this area.

But anyway, let’s get to those pics! (click to embiggen, and all that)

The test is done on two pieces of 1″ thick, 6″ long, and 3.5″ wide mild carbon steel. There is a V-groove between the two pieces of 1″. Each piece is cut at a 22.5 degree bevel for a total of 45 degrees in the groove.They’re welded to a 1/4″ thick and 1″ wide backing strip. The length of the strip can vary, but must be at least 6′ long. You can also add wings at the ends of the plate to help with keeping a consistent bead end-to-end. As you’ll see, I took the strip and wings to ridiculous lengths, mostly because I’m a bit handicapped at this point and too much cutting of specialty pieces seemed a waste of time, so I went with bits of scrap I found.

I got the full-on nervous tension B.S. the morning of the test and forgot to get a picture of the empty groove on the test plate beforehand. But y’all have imaginations and can probably figure it out after seeing this one.

That’s about half way filled up. Already into three passes per level.

When your travel speed is perfect and your coverage is consistent, the slag cover tends to stay in one piece and will do this

One tap from the chipping hammer and the whole thing drops to the floor. There were 28 passes in this weld and at least 1/3 of them did this for me. A very good sign.

Here it is all filled in and cover passes put on.

And here it is cut into five pieces for the destructive testing.

The two in back will be tossed. The two in the middle will be ground smooth on the four long sides and then polished before being bent. If they’re successful, they’ll then be welded to the center piece at the bottom of the pic and stored for certification inspection.

As you can see from the piece on the upper right, one of my welds on the strong backs cracked under the distortion. My broken right hand TIG skills apparently aren’t the most structural. It doesn’t effect the test any, so when it went pop in the middle of pass 18 I didn’t freak out too much.

I also forgot to get a pic of the passing bends because we didn’t get to bend the coupons until 8pm that night and I was beat. I’ll post those on Monday.

So now I’m certified in GTAW (TIG), FCAW (Dual Shield), and SMAW (Stick/Arc) welding processes. One more and maybe I’ll actually feel like I know a little something about this welding thing.