Welding Tips and Tricks

I was just sitting and thinking, what goes through everybody's head when the hood drops and the dimes start to stack?
For me it's just peaceful what ever bull $h!t that happens during the day just seems to disapear when my hood drops and that arc starts and my head just clears. Was just curious if its the same for anyone else??

I look forward to the regroup time between sessions. I try to consolidate the bulk of my welding Thursday and as a casual exit Friday so that I can put all my other tools and mess away for a fresh start Monday. I'll also use welding time as an escape from intermittent ADD, and more often than not, alternative solutions to engineering nightmares will occur to me, much like walking away from a problem and revisiting it with a different perspective.

It all goes quiet when the hood drops.

Hours pass without notice till I get hungry enough to have a headache. Then I notice my coffee cup is still full and ice cold.

The only other thing that focuses my attention that intensely is mathematics/physics - basically any applied math topic really.

For me ATM it's
Hope the ally doesn't drop,
Hope I cleaned it enough
Hey keep breathing
Stop fogging up
This is going too well, something bout to go wrong
What's for dinner tonight.

....why the hell does everyone wanna chat the second I start to weld?

I'm a long way from a pro, this is just my 2 cents.

When i was in school and for a time after, the concentration would leave me in a kind of 1000 yard stare mode for up to a few hours after I was done welding.

I still get that sometimes, but when I'm welding metals I'm used to in thicknesses I'm experienced with, it's just quiet in my head while I'm lit up, usually no laggy feeling afterward.

I almost always have an mp3 player with a podcast I know I'll like going when I'm lit up, otherwise I'll just sing the same 2 bars of some song I hate over and over again in my head.


We didn't start the fire....

Edit in RE: aeroplain:
When I was in school there was a chatty fellow who liked to interupt me while I was lit up. I made it real clear this was going to be a problem for him if he didn't knock it off. Some people need to be reminded of the obvious.

"man I hope it doesn't look like sh*t"

But I'm still learning

Edit in RE: aeroplain:
When I was in school there was a chatty fellow who liked to interupt me while I was lit up. I made it real clear this was going to be a problem for him if he didn't knock it off. Some people need to be reminded of the obvious.

They have all been alerted to the "hazard" of talking to me. The boss is the worst; has a voice that could peel paint, and they are all a bit thick IMO. I wear ear plugs too, it helps, but the rat bastids still get through.

I have a rule here that if I have a gun in my hand it means I am going to weld. I worked with a guy that got terribly irritated if you tried to walk up and talk to him when he was getting ready to weld. One day he decided to teach me a lesson, I walked up and started talking and without warning he started to weld and did not stop. I got the hint and a new idea
For me, when the helmet is down I think of a lot of things. Mostly random but I do like to sink into my music. Sometimes I go blank as described but find when I do this I sometimes can forget to do something of lose track of where I am at. My favorite time on a project is actually the welding itself. I too wear ear plugs and crank up the music if I can. Oh and I like EDM and it drives everyone else crazy.
"....it was always burning since the worlds been turning"
-Jonathan

.....make puddle.....dab filler....move forward...make puddle....watching the edge and trying to match them as I go. Totally oblivious to anything else.....unless a wi$e a$$ decides to drop something heavy close to me. Kapling clunk clink !!!!! Then I grab the grinder. This is when I tell them not only will this make me kill you... it's going to hurt the whole time you are dying.

Usually just think about stuff I need to do around the house. One of the hard things for me is talking while welding. As an instructor you kind of do it some but it's not comfortable to me. I also find I put my tongue into my cheek when I weld, which makes talking even harder.

When the hood drops for me all else goes away, all my nonesense goes blank and I just perform what is needed to make the weld, it is really weird that I have kinda lost the thinking about the weld and now it just kinda happens, not sure how but it does.

forrestderp wrote:When the hood drops for me all else goes away, all my nonesense goes blank and I just perform what is needed to make the weld, it is really weird that I have kinda lost the thinking about the weld and now it just kinda happens, not sure how but it does.

About the exact same for me I was just wondering if anyone was the same

when I drop my hood all I think about is eeeeeeeeeeee

Zach_T wrote:

forrestderp wrote:When the hood drops for me all else goes away, all my nonesense goes blank and I just perform what is needed to make the weld, it is really weird that I have kinda lost the thinking about the weld and now it just kinda happens, not sure how but it does.

About the exact same for me I was just wondering if anyone was the same

It is a good place to be.

forrestderp wrote:

Zach_T wrote:

forrestderp wrote:When the hood drops for me all else goes away, all my nonesense goes blank and I just perform what is needed to make the weld, it is really weird that I have kinda lost the thinking about the weld and now it just kinda happens, not sure how but it does.

About the exact same for me I was just wondering if anyone was the same

It is a good place to be.

Yes it is!!

I don't think of anything and tune out to my mp3 even if the boss (wife) is yelling at me. I work for myself now so much better

Depends on what it is. If its something I've done a bunch of before I think about all kinds of things, groceries list, what to do later, have conversations etc. if its something that's a new part, with an unfamiliar joint, that gets inspected multiple times throughout and xrayed etc then I don't really think about anything. It's a strange thing but its like everything goes black and I'm just hyper focused on my part.

Depends on what process I'm doing. If it's stick welding, I'm usually complaining in my head that I have to weld on this piece of #@$%*. If I am mig welding, I know this is super sad, but I use a the cursive e and it's long beads I'm running I sing to myself "the beads on the weld go round and round". If I'm tig welding, it's like a 12 year old boy, oooooo shinny puddle I will put this stick in and now push shinny puddle then oooooo shinny all over again. I'm am 100% ok with my mental state.