Weldors welding on welders ...Why ?

[DDoug]

I see this all the time, welding machines with hooks for cables welded onto the sheet metal (usually pretty badly)
Walked into a friends shop, brand new Lincoln aluminum multiprocess inverter with a screen, push pull gun, all the bells and whistles.
Glommed on welds at the back for bent chunks of rod for "cable management".
This machine must be north of $8,000.00 and welding on it probably violated any warranty.
I've "bolted" on some loops of 1/2" rod, finding a convenient bolt
to remove and replace with one slightly longer.
But never welded on the machine.

 

[dkmc]

Haven't heard of qualification test or IQ inquiry needed prior to machine purchase. Seems like a bad way to treat equipment

 

[DDoug]

Haven't heard of qualification test or IQ inquiry needed prior to machine purchase. Seems like a bad way to treat equipment

Yup, and no concern for what's on the other side of the sheetmetal that they have just made red hot....

 

[Arc-On]

As a welder and someone who employs welders, I will say the natural and default way for a welder to stick things to other things is to weld it. It's just how our brains are wired from the factory. Welders by and large aren't a sophisticated bunch, and very rarely progress in the industrial design department. Aesthetics rarely fit in the picture, and it usually is function over form in almost every case. Need a place to hang your torch? Weld a thing on it. Done.

I've discovered very rarely do fasteners enter the equation, and usually the overall design intent isn't really considered. Speed and ease of install before ALL else.

I had to work VERY hard to reprogram my brain to not just weld rods and sticks to things to hang stuff from. It took YEARS of working in a machine shop. Still is hard. When I worked as an industrial maintenance guy, I had to deal with a lot of pipefitters, and they would weld stuff to anything to hang stuff from. We had sticks and rods welded to every table, column, beam and surface in the shop. I went around with a grinder and cut them off and I pissed off SO MANY pipefitters. Once I explained that it not only looked like shit and was unprofessional, it was just plain dangerous they relented and let me put in properly made hangers. The idiots never deburred them and they were sharp and would snag your shirt if you walked near one. I cut myself more than once on the waist level ones.

Last week I had to stop one of my employees from just welding a chunk of 1/2" rod to the pallet racking to hang an extension cord on. We just bent a hook out of the same stock, much better looking and no welding to my pallet racking.

I straight up told my guys I would fire them if they welded shit to my welders. I didn't buy a 10k Invision for them to deface my equipment. Same for welding stops and shit on my surface ground layout tables. NO.

 

[moonlight machine]

I see this all the time, welding machines with hooks for cables welded onto the sheet metal (usually pretty badly)
Walked into a friends shop, brand new Lincoln aluminum multiprocess inverter with a screen, push pull gun, all the bells and whistles.
Glommed on welds at the back for bent chunks of rod for "cable management".
This machine must be north of $8,000.00 and welding on it probably violated any warranty.
I've "bolted" on some loops of 1/2" rod, finding a convenient bolt
to remove and replace with one slightly longer.
But never welded on the machine.

That is crazy, I know that machine well, there are plenty of 5/16 self tapping bolts holding the sheet metal together and work fine for holding cable hooks.

 

[dana gear]

Another thing that just pisses me off is employees scratching, paint stick marking or otherwise defacing the control panel on power sources to mark their favorite settings. After a while it's just a mess. Interestingly the older guys don't deface their dedicated machines the young guys mark the hell out of theirs.

 

[dalmatiangirl61]

Another thing that just pisses me off is employees scratching, paint stick marking or otherwise defacing the control panel on power sources to mark their favorite settings. After a while it's just a mess. Interestingly the older guys don't deface their dedicated machines the young guys mark the hell out of theirs.

I was teaching a young guy to weld a few years ago, it was quite difficult to get him to understand that the power setting/wire speed chart was just a guideline to get you into the ballpark, and from there you have to tweak it by sound and feel. He felt the need to mark my dials one day, I kind of lost it on him.

 

[john.k]

Dunno about US,but I reckon Lincoln here make 1/2 their profits selling bits of ally sheet with poorly anodised and printed dial settings on them........used to be you d buy $1000 worth of new Lincoln faceplates every year.

 

[Halcyon]

My god I'd be mortified. Why not just use a magnet or something?

 

[tylersteez]

I started off with welding before moving to machining and once I saw the practicality of a well designed and removable part vs just welding something together, I rarely ever weld things together unless it makes the most sense. I probably wouldn't even want to bolt something to a brand new high dollar welding machine incase it rubbed and scratched the paint lol. Much better off building a detachable lead stand, connect it to the welder's cart or make it so it can sit under the weight of the bottle and use that to hold it up. The least invasive, the better.

 

[kustomizer]

1) To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
2) If your only tool is a hammer then every problem looks like a nail.
3) Give a young boy a hammer, and he will treat everything as a nail.

 

[Strostkovy]

At an older job I had the welding tables were atrocious. Random scrap metal welded into jigs with more scrap metal jigs on top of them. Bits of tubing to bring a bit of the table surface back above the jigs so you could build any sort of tube frame. And of course there was never any usable table space, so they wheeled over a surface block and put thin sheet metal on it and welded on that. Even press brake tooling was welded to the table.

At my current job I was tasked with designing and building some cheaper and better tables than the small ones we started with. I made it clear nothing was to be welded to them, and I gave the welders a fat stack of plates with matching holes in them they could weld to and then bolt to the table (with corresponding nut plates)

 

[dana gear]

Best way I have found to keep weld tables clean (or cleaner) was when you see someone getting out of control, that is to say crap welded everywhere is to have them take their 4-1/2" cut wheel and 9" L-head and make it pretty. Ya it's going to waste a half hour of shop time, but I found it greatly slows down the bizarre weld artwork.