I was hardfacing on some bucket edges today and it took me back to my first ever welding. I was 16 and working as an apprentice in a farm workshop, one morning the fitter said "iam going to teach you to weld today" everything was stick welded those days with a 250amp oil cooled unit so after several goes with bits of scrap he announced I was good enough to do my first welding job.
This was building up the shares from a sugar beet harvester, these were about 3" square by 3ft long solid bar and probably had a good 1" x 12" worn away. I found out later that he hated this boring job. But I loved it,run after run with 4mm 6013 rods after an hour he came and had a look and although it wasn't pretty I was getting metal down so he was happy. He said when you have used that box get another from the second shelf of the welding cupboard you can use any of the rods from there and he left me to it. Unfortunately I counted the shelves from the top and he counted from the bottom,so instead of using all the cheap odds and sods that were years old I used all his premium stuff like dissimilar rods stainless rods cast rods even cutting rods (couldn't get on with them).
I spent the rest of the day building these up and the next morning I was told to carry on, at the morning break he asked how it was going. I said ok but I don't like the shiny rods much.
It took a while to sink in but when it did and he looked at the near empty shelf I was called every name you could ever think of.
This was building up the shares from a sugar beet harvester, these were about 3" square by 3ft long solid bar and probably had a good 1" x 12" worn away. I found out later that he hated this boring job. But I loved it,run after run with 4mm 6013 rods after an hour he came and had a look and although it wasn't pretty I was getting metal down so he was happy. He said when you have used that box get another from the second shelf of the welding cupboard you can use any of the rods from there and he left me to it. Unfortunately I counted the shelves from the top and he counted from the bottom,so instead of using all the cheap odds and sods that were years old I used all his premium stuff like dissimilar rods stainless rods cast rods even cutting rods (couldn't get on with them).
I spent the rest of the day building these up and the next morning I was told to carry on, at the morning break he asked how it was going. I said ok but I don't like the shiny rods much.
It took a while to sink in but when it did and he looked at the near empty shelf I was called every name you could ever think of.