What your Weld Supervisor is not Telling you.

In this edition I will continue to document the “Lessens Learned” to Balance Cost and Quality to Improve Schedule for companies with sales between $5-150 million dollars within the Structural Steel Industry.

In this article I will touch on:

How do you overcome welding cost and wasted production time when you use Gas-shielded flux-cored arc welding (FCAW) in the shop. You know, Metal-cored arc welding (MCAW) wire is what you need right, but your quality manager, or weld supervisor is not telling you about this filler metal of choice for your fabrication and manufacturing applications?. To the point here are three (3) reasons to change your process.

Metal-cored (MCAW) wire is a better choice for improving productivity on single-pass applications longer than 3 inches that currently employ solid wires. Extremely well suited for applications in the manufacturing industry, particularly automotive and heavy equipment production, such-as building and bridge fabrication especially when operated with an argon/CO2?shielding gas blend.

Metal-cored wires do not produce a slag that most welders are accustomed to which, must be removed after each welding pass, resulting in a higher deposition efficiency (arc-time) and little to no post-weld clean-up as compared to flux-cored wires where you have to chip, scrape and brush to assurance fusion of the next pass.

1. Metal-cored wires offer significantly higher deposition rates compared to solid wires in many applications. This means that the welder can weld at higher travel speeds and reduce distortion on critical components. For the welding operation, this leads to a higher throughput and little to no rework.
2. , because of the wide penetration profile, metal-cored wires are more tolerate of poor part fit-up and will bridge gaps more easily and accurately without burn-through, so your fitters can be slap happy as long as the components are within fit-up tolerances.
3. Metal-cored wires present distinct productivity benefits in the pre-weld and post-weld phases of the welding operation.?Metal-cored wires tend to be more tolerant of dirt, mill scale and rust, which are commonly found on the base material in a typical fab shop. So buying from a warehouse, where the material isn't quite clean but cheap (but make sure they have CMTR's), you can still produce high-quality welds, non-value-added activities such as cleaning and grinding prior to welding can either be reduced or eliminated the process tends to produce very little spatter and minimal weld defects such as porosity, lack of fusion and undercuts. This means that the post-weld activities such as grinding and chipping of spatter are usually not required, and there will also be a substantial reduction in weld rejection rates.

If you did not know now you are in the know that you could literarily run one wire type in you fab-shop, standardizing your processes will assure a consistent product to the point of reducing inspection costs as well.

So in conclusion the reduction or elimination of the pre-weld and post-weld activities can increase the flow of the completed parts to other stages of production, freeing up labour that can then be reallocated to other sections of the welding operation to produce more parts, improve the overall productivity of your job-shop.