Welding Tips and Tricks

OK I'm a Lead man(foreman) in large fab shop but I'm not dumb enough to think that I know everything even half the time. so I'm looking for some good Ideas. most of my experience is with short welds three foot or shorter.

ok so here is the problem:
I have to weld 26' I beams together from plate. (stupid crap, why not buy them) and the have to be 100% ultrasonic tested and MT'd material is charpy impacts tested

ok so we will brace the beam up and welded , Drawback: tacked braces means a lot of grinding and grinding cosmetically unnapealing. besides braces in the way everywhere

so how about welding it from both sides of the joint at one time, ( I don't know how that would work without back gauging since it is a ut joint but maybe migging in a root with er70-s2 I dunno just a thought but inspectors aren't to keen on the idea since it is charpy material

or the best solution is if someone (who really knows welding ) can give me an argument on why the beams have to be ut'd since we have plant out on the east coast who builds the same thing and only MTs their beams ( i dunno engineers seem to think MT is fine but weld inspectors want UT welds

any help will be appreciated. I am beating my head with this one. I've seen beam welding lines but we are just not set up for that

Hey,

A my work, they used to do a job that was essentially an I beam, as you say, though only about 1.5 meters long. They used to do the exact thing you speak of, a welder on each side, to control distortion. As we lost staff they dragged one guy off this job and used welded braces and a staggered welding sequence. not sure if welding both sides at the same time will harm your charpy v notch test. Probably make it perform better.

Mick

If there isn't a WPS already in place for this I would see if you can get a test section to pass their testing and create your own procedure. Building a 26' column to have it fail would be a waste.