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Your approach to the humorous aspects of our "occupations" certainly fall under the same stars.

I'll be REALLY pissed if you ever start posting dead serious gloom and doom, "America as we knew it is gone....' Horse apple posts.

GTC

To me, the trouble with welding is that if you can, then you must, or your world will not be at peace.

It's like a pronounced doom, or fate...

I am old. My eyes aren't all that good any more. Aint' nobody wants to hear it, though...

I suspect one day their gonna miss me at dinner time, and find me wedged back into a [bleep] hole.
Dead with a stinger in my hand...

I make a bit over 51 dollars per hour with over time after 40, benefits and 17 dollars per hour for my truck and machine. I weld pipelines and you could not pay me enough to work in nuke plants or refineries.

A guy I worked with for a while had been a pipe welder for a long time. He did pipeline and had worked on the Alaskan pipeline etc...Then he worked on the nuclear plant they built nearby.

He said it was the best job he ever had. Two fitters getting everything ready to weld and then he would weld. An inspector would come look and fill out a report, then a second inspector would come by and fill out another. If they didn't match that was a week shutdown while they hammered out the issue, all the time he sat there waiting for them to decide how to go forward. He said lots of weeks he would work 8 hours max a week.

I'm going to Frame this and post it on my shop wall, Amigo.

The better the cut=the better the fit-up=better welds. Win/win

.

Whatever you wanna think.

I spent decades mastering the trade,....got decent at it.

There's better ways to make a living,...but nobody could tell me either.

Seems a welder hasn't arrived til he's stood 170 ft in the air on an 8" beam and poured a paper cup of gator-ade on his sack for relief...

I learned at 16. I was handed a hood and told to follow Charlie, a pipeline certified welder around, and "watch the bead." After doing that 14 hours a day for two weeks, I was handed leads and several sticks of 7018. We had I-beam laid out on the floor and I was told to weld the flats and make the bead look like Charlies'. I did so and as I completed each weld the slag would curl up and start peeling off revealing a perfect 7018 weld. Those welds were for a reverse pit for a workover rig and had to stand a lot of stress, including being sucked onto a semi trailer via winch, but I guess held up fine. At that point, I still had a lot to learn, including running 7018 vertical, but basically learned to weld better than most, including some "professional" welders, just by "watching the bead" of a really good welder for two weeks.