Ah yes… I was right… It only took two days, and I’m highly irritated again… I swear, I do not think it is possible to work at this place for more than one day and not get royally annoyed at the very least… (I’m working for someone else at the moment, not my own company this time)
So they have, as usual, hired me to do their welding for them. This is a lovely deal, because I love welding, and we just don’t do very much for my company… So it gives me my outlet to butcher steel, and get a little money for my trouble… The main problem seems to be twofold… 1) Management doesn’t pay attention to the drawings, and/or does not do any drawings at all… 2) Management doesn’t know a thing about working with metals…
Now, know this is an issue should help right?... I should be able to see the problems coming and avoid them right?... Well hell, that’d be nice wouldn’t it… I can’t seem to avoid the problems for a couple reasons… 1) every time I think I have an idiot proof solution to their needs, the idiocy reaches a new level… 2) it isn’t my job to deal with design prints, I’m just there as a welder, I gave up the TD job at this place years ago since it’s a terrible job…
This weeks project is to build them a swimming pool to put on stage… Ok folks… This should set off a bunch of alarm bells… 1) water is very heavy… 2) water and the compressed fiber board (duron in this case) that stage floors are often covered with don’t get along well… 3) water goes stagnant pretty quick… Then there are other issues that come to mind as soon as I see the shape of the pool… 1) they want square corners in this pool… 2) they want lights in this pool…
Now, most of that doesn’t effect me as a welder… I just have to worry about building this thing butch enough to hold the pressure on the walls… The other things are issues for the theatre to deal with… So my solution is to build this pool in one unit… When finished it will be 15’ wide, 6’ front to back, and 1’6” deep… (more like a pond than a pool… but annoying none-the-less) Given any choice in the matter, I would have used 1” x 1” steel tube with a 16ga wall… That’s pretty light stuff, but when you weld it into a truss arrangement, it gets incredibly strong… Unfortunately, the TD said use the 1 ¼” x 1 ¼” steel tube that is 11ga… All I can say is ugh… I don’t have a reference to look it up here, but the 16ga tube is about 1/3 the thickness of the 11ga tube… That plus that extra ¼” on each side adds up when you start to get into the multiple hundreds of feet of tube… It adds up in weight… It adds up in time to cut it… It adds up in additional welding time… It doesn’t add a damn thing to the strength of the unit though really… (It does technically, but I’m not trying to hold the pressure from a pool full of Mercury… geesh…)
I roughed out the weights at the shop earlier… 200# for the 1x1… 500# for what I’m using…
I figured out how much steel I had to turn into dust while cutting angles on a very slow bandsaw… The tube I used required me to vaporize 14.625 cubic inches… the 16ga would have required around 5.4 cubic inches…
I am not going to figure out how much actual difference in weld there will be, but each weld takes about 8 seconds for the heavy tube, and 5 seconds for the small tube… There are roughly 900 welds on this unit…That’s an additional 45 minutes of actual welding time…
I’m not even going to get into the step units I had to fix today for a different show that they didn’t read the prints for…
What a waste of a day…
Posted by Backstage at December 2, 2003 06:23 PM