Practical welding?

footy wrote:
Practical welding can involve welding in all kinds of awkward positions,
like upside down, head first, under a pipe in a ditch and lots of other
strange positions depending on what you are doing.

So there I was trying to finish up welding on the last engine mount
flange to my Delta's fuselage. By the time you get to the engine mount
flange, the Delta has grown to a considerable size and I had it up on
sawhorses. All the tubes coming back from the firewall to form a closed
box. The only way to get inside the box in through a lot of longerons
and diagonals.

Well, I had managed to get my head wedge up between a couple of the
bottom diagonals. My right hand snaked the torch around the longerons,
and my left hand wrapped around the front bottom crossbrace to bring in
the filler rod. The metal was hot and flowing and the bead was running
smooth. Then my filler rod got short. Not the whole rod, just the part
on the weld side of my hand. It had taken several minutes to get wedged
into this position, and I didn't want to kill the weld bead just to feed
more filler rod. Thinking quickly, I grabbed the back end of the rod in
my mouth, pulled my hand up further and continued the weld. "Smart", I
thought to myself, as the bead rolled on.

Most of you have already guessed what happened.

Melt. Fill. Melt. Fill. Advance. All in a steady staccato beat. More a
habit than thought. And then, as I reached the end of the filler rod,
for some indiscernable reason, I decided that I could slide my hand all
the way to the rear of the rod if I grabbed the other end in my mouth.

I'm not sure if the burn mark is still discernible across my tongue, but
I do know that there isn't much worse that having your head caught in
your airplane when you need to scream.

Later, I learned the proper way to advance your filler rod without the
aid of gravity is to dip it in the weld pool and let the pool cool just
slightly. It'll solidify just enough to allow you to slide your hand
back. Bring the heat right back in and keep going.



--
This is by far the hardest lesson about freedom. It goes against
instinct, and morality, to just sit back and watch people make
mistakes. We want to help them, which means control them and their
decisions, but in doing so we actually hurt them (and ourselves)."