Cheap Welding for Punks

Step 2 Don't Poison Gas Attack Yourself, etc.

Welders don't live very long.
Smoke including welding smoke is usually full of some poison or other.
Manganese poisoning is one of the hazards, especially if you do a lot of welding in confined spaces. Wear a respirator with the proper filter.
Or make your own, 1942 style!

New Zealand has a great online manual on welding safety. The number of ways to harm yourself with welding is truly amazing. I took a welding class once. It turned out I'd been doing some really dangerous things. Lets say you need to arc weld a distance from your welder. So you carry a coil of cable. If you weld with that coil of cable around you, you can stop your heart with an induced current.

Comments

[chuckyd]

The discussion about the number of days required to pay for a helment is irrelevant. The real question is how many days will be spent in the hosptial recovering from a burned face received from the newspaper, and will he ever see again after burning his eyeballs?

[darnocpdx]

Yeah the glasses would probably prevent flash burn (temporary eye damage), but in the long run they're all blind...if they survive the fire that transpires on their face when the paper ignites. I know I've caused my fair share of fires while welding.

[pfred2]

That is why all good Chinese welders use the yellow pages and I don't mean out of the phone book either!

[hedghawg71]

I guess a severe Hot foot doesn't bother this OSHA nightmare in the pic. I was wearing my tennis shoes last summer when I was doing an emergency road side repair on my boat trailer to get it home and the sparks and other things that fly off of that tip burned thru the toe of my tennis shoes and smoked my foot pretty good. Normally when I am prepared to weld I got my engineer boots and starched jeans on and he has SANDALS on! Ouch!!!

[themadtreky]

haha, I used to wear flip flops and shorts when I was welding in high school. got some cool scars.

[kill-a-watt]

Scary. That poor guy has a sheet of newspaper to keep the UV rays from giving him sunburn. Are those sunglasses UV proof? Dark enough?

[wackyvorlon]

He's supposed to be wearing a proper welding helmet. A sunburn from welding hurts like you wouldn't believe.

[dabombmaker]

I can and have had to believe

[kill-a-watt]

I wonder how much a proper welding helmet costs over there? My auto-darkening solar powered Chinese import cost less than a day's wages to me.

[Calorie]

That's a very good question. Economists have a term called Purchasing Power Parity (PPP). Economists are also incredibly bad at teaching their ideas to others. It's almost like they try to make it impossible to learn by making it WAAAY to complicated or just too damned boring. A better way to word this question is: How days does it take to earn the same helmet in China? We know it took about a day to earn. You also make a lot more than the average Chinese worker. So it must take him more days worked to earn that helmet than it did you. There are a lot of ways that involve a lot of complicated and boring math. But probably the best way to say it is many, many days of work. Probably on the order of months of wages. Probably close to 7 months of wages. That is to say every penny he earns over 140 work days must go to the same helmet you bought for 1 day. He may also not appreciate the need for a good helmet. We have OSHA, which is a government body that regulates work place safety. He also has a lower educational background. And probably doesn't have any other choice.

[kill-a-watt]

I have an auto-darkening helmet. The plain tinted lenses themselves are something like $7 each and they go into an ordinary plastic mask that could be improvised with locally available materials. Yet he doesn't even have that! Seriously, I'll bet I could make a welding helmet out of a large plastic food container. My brother recalls eating breakfast in a city in china by buying a huge pan-fried scallion-bread from one of many street venders for something like 3 cents.

[Calorie]

That's 3 cents US I imagine. The dollar has a different value. The best way to look at it is the time worked it takes to earn a good. Look at it this way. Salaries in NYC tend to be higher than elsewhere in the nation. However it is also more expensive to live in NYC. Does it make sense to say that a loaf of bread costs more in NYC than it does in Thomasville, GA if they both take 20 minutes worth of work in a minimum hour wage job? It is your time that is being traded in the the end for your wages. Also, there may be differences in how a culture uses and produces products. Food consumption is very different in many Asian cultures than in the West. I noted your brother bought his breakfast. I also noted he bought it from a street vendor. The same bread may have cost 20 times more in a restaurant. This is do to overhead such as a restaurant, it's equipment, staff, upkeep, etc. As far as him making a helmet from scratch, why should he have that knowledge? I think that there's a stereotype that people in the developing nations are very clever and can do anything with a bit of know how and local materials. It's a romantic and false view. People in China are just like anyone else. There is division of labor. Some people work more in other fields because they have the education, social background, connections, geographic chance and many other variables. On that note, my close friend is from Beijing. One thing she cannot get over is how multi-talented Americans are. In her eyes we have the ability to do many things. I restore car as well as study economics. She is a finance professor and is just floored at the idea of people having so many skills. My neighbor was building a wall and she wanted to watch him do it. Again, she is use to people having a single job and that's that. Education is low in China. Illiteracy rates are high. A person has minimal training and tends not to be heavily invested in by a company. The capital (resources, training) a company provides can easily be poached by another company. There are no real "no compete" laws (or copyright.) This means that I can learn everything I need to from my parent company about production or whatever, quit and set up a company using my old employer's exact technology.

[WhoTookMudshark]

I bet it's pretty safe to say that the Chinese version of a "welding helmet" (newspaper and reading glasses) probably cost a Chinese person about a day's wages. Now that's what I call parity! XD

[Calorie]

The glasses are very expensive. What's even more important is the lack of knowledge (education) about the effects on his health. He also has few, if any options in his safety. Education is very important. Education means you have specialty skills. If you are specialized you can earn more. Education means you can make choices about your future, rather than be driven by your socio-economic past.

[DELETED_gabethegeek]

(removed by author or community request)

[Kryptonite]

Wow, imagine having to weld with a mask like that! I wonder what the life expectancy of those people are? Is the third picture an image of that guy out of M*A*S*H*? I notice that it would be impossible for him to see where he's welding, oh well, all's well ends well.

[kill-a-watt]

probably not impossible, the paper is translucent and the light is very bright. If those glasses are glass or polycarb, they will block a bunch of the UV I've forgotten to bring my helmet once, I tacked the project together by closing my eyes and giving the trigger a short squeeze on the MIG. That was easy with a MIG though.

[Kryptonite]

Hmm, I suppose you're right with the dude without eye holes, but it would be hard to get the end of your welder in the right spot. And what is an MIG?

[Prometheus]

Manganese Inert Gas. You can also use CD's (believe it or not) to shun most of the light from welding. Try holding a CD between the sun and your eyes, generally "shiny-side-out". A double-sided DVD is best as there is no interference from the backside layering. You can actually look directly into a 5mW 650nM (red) laser if there is such a disc between it and your eyes without harm or even strain. Test this at a distance at first though, since any form or arc-welding gives off blue light and not red, possibly about 475-450nM due to it's sheer temperature. Two or more layers may be necessary to protect at a range of less than 10 feet.. FYI "TIG" welding is "Tungsten-Inert-Gas" as well...

[endelman]

MIG stands for Metal Inert Gas, not Manganese(!) Squeezing the trigger of the MIG "gun" feeds the welding wire to the workpiece, while inert argon gas surrounds the weld to prevent oxidation.

[kill-a-watt]

yup, metal inert gas (MIG) welding. move the gun into position with your eyes wide open. close eyes pull trigger for a moment listen to the sound like "frying bacon" (stick welders are sometimes called a "buzz box", I like to call a MIG a "bacon box") Remember that you are still not protecting your skin from the damaging UV rays I only had to do about 7 spots of weld to get this thing together, so my skin was OK, a day's worth of stick welding is another matter, That's why I suppose they have enough paper to protect their neck.

[Astinsan]

I don't think the glasses would help even if they did block the uv. They need to block IR also. You can actually cook a contact lens to a eye in a second with a arc welder flash. I also recommend using clothing that is thick enough to block some of the light. I can remember having a arc burn tattoo of a t-shirt with a logo on it.

[dabombmaker]

ps it cant burn a contact to ur eye its a myth promise.

[Hollon]

You obviously say that about contact lenses without knowing what you're talking about. I, who wear contact lenses, have looked at an arc for a second or longer without having them "cooked to my eyes". Not that I did this on purpose, but it has happened, and I came out with contacts that were still easily separated from my eyes. So please don't just repeat things you hear, without finding out if they are true or not.

[Astinsan]

This was taught in a welding school. I didn't think to question it since it was an instructor.

[Siphon]

I think I can shed some light on the contact lens Issue here. Let me just state first that I am a Certified pipe welder.. and also a wearer of contact lenses. What actually happens that makes the contacts stick is getting welders flash. Welders flash is actually a sunburn that happens on the skin of your eye. When that happens your eyeball swells to deal with the pain creating a vacuum between the lens and your eye. Hence the rimer that the lens is fused to your eye which is not the case. Easiest ways to avoid it, (A) don't watch someone welding w/out a helmet, (B) if you think you got weld flash take your contacts out right away so they don't get vacuumed onto your eye. Removal of the contact after this occurs will also possibly remove the top layer of skin from your eye.