Q: My question is about welder recertification. The owner of the company where I work wants me to come up with a welder recertification process that includes two 3/8-in. plate tests, which he then wants sent out and tested. With 24 welders on staff, I think this would be very expensive to do on an annual basis. I’ve contacted our external CWI for information, but he has never heard of doing anything other than staying current with continuity. Do you have any information on this subject that would help me?
I like your question. Either the owner wants to go above and beyond the code requirements or he doesn’t understand them. Either way, you’re going to encounter some problems.
It’s important to remember that our primary objective is to meet the code requirements. Going beyond them is great, but the first objective has to be to meet them. I have worked in many environments where going beyond the code requirements was somebody else’s dream that was forced onto me. I have also found that often the job of the CWI is to protect the boss from himself. Adding additional requirements can be a good way to maintain skill levels and quality, but too often they also increase drama and cost.
I have worked with companies that have used additional testing requirements as a way of maintaining welder continuity (which is a requirement under AWS D1.1), but these programs have been bulky and expensive and, as an auditor, it would take me about 10 minutes of snooping to find holes in the program.
In your email you mentioned this annual testing as possibly benefiting welder continuity. Herein lies your first hole. Logs need to be updated every six months, but your owner wants welders tested every 12 months. It wouldn’t take a lot of digging for me to find a welder with an out-of-date log.
If you develop an annual testing program, what happens to the welder who fails the annual test? You need to sort out how you will handle that before you implement the requirement. My uncle (whom my family and I considered to be the greatest welder who ever lived) once told me: “The only welder that hasn’t failed a welder test is the one that hasn’t been a welder very long.”
So again, what happens to the welder that fails (and many will)? He can’t fail the test and then go back out and weld on the line, right? What about the work he was doing right before testing? Couldn’t it now be called into question? You can always get those who fail your testing back up to speed with training and evaluation. It’s been my experience that they don’t lose their skill, they lose their eyesight. Ol’ welders that have been doing what they do forever can make perfectly acceptable welds day in and day out. But give that ol’ welder a qualification test, which is almost always different than their day-to-day job, and they’ll struggle. Oftentimes the struggle is with their sight. For today’s aging welder workforce, I have issued “cheaters” (reading glasses for welding helmets) at four of the fabricators where I served as weld engineer.
Again, you have to be clear on how you’ll handle these situations before they happen. I had one boss who commanded that a welder immediately be let go if they failed the test. Well, the first welder to fail was in his 60s and had been at the company over 30 years. Thankfully, he didn’t get fired. Instead, I worked with him, got him some cheaters, and he was back doing what he knew and seeing what he’d forgotten.
I guess my point is, when we attempt to exceed the requirements, we build in cost and drama, which seem to escalate to an unhealthy level. When that happens, the program is dropped and we are at risk of not complying with the code, which, as you’ll recall, is our first objective.
Paul Cameron, CWI, is weld and NDT level II inspector, Braun Intertec. He is also a member of Practical Welding Today’s Editorial Review Committee.
Source: Practical Welding Today May/June 2017
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