Need advice on shielding gas selection

[JethroC85]

I have been working on alot of assemblies at work lately that have been coming to me with heavy mill scale on them. The parts are generally bead blasted before hand to remove all of the scale, but due to an increase in production, this step is being skipped. The parts are already tacked together so grinding is out of the question, and even if I could get to all of the joints to grind the scale off, it would be way to time consuming. Now any welder out there who has dealt with mill scale, should know it usually makes the weld look like crap and can cause defects (at least for MIG applications).
I was wondering is there is a mix of gas I could use to help out with this dilemma. I am currently using C15. Any ideas?

 

[Jan]

Somehow I doubt that the company is much interested in quality preferring quantity throughput. I may be wrong, but this sounds like a job for super ... er, I mean stick. You could make your feelings known to your supervisor/foreman ... sorry, foreperson (preferably in writing) before the fertilizer approaches the air conditioning and returns in your direction. To mix my metaphors: We all know what rolls downhill!

 

[Bill Edwards]

Sadly you're onto a loser trying to make a good job of welding it. I don't think any gas can help, at the end of the day a MIG can't weld through muck. Stick welding may be more tolerant but still isn't right, and as speed (quantity) looks to be the aim it wouldn't be the choice anyway.
I don't think there is anything you can do other than produce substandard work or get them to clean it up properly.

Sorry, I wouldn't like to be in your position!

 

[JethroC85]

Thats what I figured, I at least got my boss to get a temporary deviation, and we can now use flux core wire, kind of get the best of both worlds with stick and mig.

 

[BrokenBiker]

Somehow I doubt that the company is much interested in quality preferring quantity throughput.

i can fully beleive it. 3 factories i have worked in, on filling sandwiches, the second making batteries for aircraft safety systems and telecoms equipment, and the one i am in now making hgv brakes, are all more concerned with numbers at the end of the shift than quality

 

[daleyd]

i can fully beleive it. 3 factories i have worked in, on filling sandwiches, the second making batteries for aircraft safety systems and telecoms equipment, and the one i am in now making hgv brakes, are all more concerned with numbers at the end of the shift than quality

I go to lots of different factories in my job, and can see both sides of the coin.

If you are in an industry where customers will pay for quality, you generally get it (Or at least quality to a defined standard) - Rolls Royce or similar being an example. However, when you are competing with the likes of factories in Poland, China etc then first you have to make enough to keep the business going. I'm not sticking up for management but sometimes it is tricky to balance.

It gets maddening when quality cutbacks actually end up costing more than they save, a company I used to work for made industrial dryers for the printing industry. In a good year they would make perhaps 60 dryers, but then decided to make savings on some of the components, eg changed a limit switch from a £10 one to a £5 one (Not real figures, but it serves to illustrate a point). To send an engineer to site to rectify a £5 limit switch under warranty cost maybe £500 not to mention the bad impression it gave the customer. Using a £10 limit switch we never had the problem - £5 saving X 60 machines = £300 saved over a year all of which was wiped out in one visit. Crazy, and everybody except the management could see it (French company, so they weren't overly interested in what a Brit field service guy had to say !).