Are there welding classes? I do not see anything on the calendar. My father-in-law is interested, and I considered purchasing him a membership for a month or two and taking the classes with him.
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None yet. Metal shop is transitioning, and I think haven’t gotten their footing yet where classes are concerned. Hopefully soon…
@texastboneking might be able to chime in with more info (or maybe not, but I figure’d I’d bump him anyway) 
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I have a small welding repair, that I would love to use to learn on. I get tired of paying for the repair.
I am not even sure what type it needs. Spot welding on a folding table leg
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Lee has brought up the fact he wants to teach classes. I think he wants the ventilation installed first for the class. But if it takes too long he will probably do classes without ventilation.
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Spot welding is quite a bit different than welding beads. Does DMS have a spot welder?
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Based on my perception, we should be looking into that… We were able to teach them before with relative success, so it seems like we should be able to make a go of it without ventilation now, in my opinion.
Might hit up @Afloyd Andrew Floyd on that. He had purchased a spot welder and was anxious to try it out. Also, he is, I beleive, a licensed, working, professional welder and formerlly taught the safetly classes here @ DMS (hopefully will be in future, but I have no knowledge of that).
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Not as such. Electronics has one for battery tab welding and the like, but not suitable for this. @Afloyd I believe recently purchased one and might be easily persuaded to assist, but that is not “DMS”'s per se.
He will be fine with that. We were hoping ventilation would be in by now. Fire marshal approved. Building owner engineer didn’t. So its waiting on a mechanical engineer
I wanted to click “like” on this, but, dammit, I don’t like. Don’t like it at all. I understand and won’t complain (much more) but I don’t LIKE it… 
Thank you Trent for chiming in. BTW, NOT trying to undermine the need for ventilation; I just don’t think it should derail us further from teaching what I perceive to be much sought after welding classes.
I can’t agree with him. He said 6in isn’t enough for the pipe. But flow and pipe size are two different things. With the right blower 6 inch would be plenty.
It is a broken weld on one of the legs on one of the white folding banquet type tables. I have been paying the guys at a used tire place to weld it.
Well… I am going to keep my 2 cents on that because…well, for many reasons. I thank you and the other folks working on it for tackling it, and trust you will reach a verdict which will make us as happy as we can be while in compliance. … my bottom line is this: ANY on-demand ventilation in that room shall far surpass what we had (opening a door) and, I think, will be a much needed improvement. And again, I can’t thank ya’ll enough for taking it on.
Is it possible to just drag a stick welder or two out by the loading dock and fire them up there for a safety/intro class? We have rollable safey shades which can protect onlookers. Stick was meant to be used outside, anyway.
Yeah but no shade trees to truly mimic their natural habitat…
Also, as far as i know, there is no OFFICIAL NEED for ventilation before we can resume welding classes. It is required for use of the plasma, not the welders. But it would have been nice to not have to be worried about it.
The volumetric flow of ventilation necessary is hard for me to figure out without knowing a collector configuration, but I’m pretty sure its greater than the recommended flow for a 6-inch round duct, which is around 100 CFM. 100 CFM in a 6-inch duct yields a linear velocity in the duct of about 8.5 feet/sec, with no account of friction losses or bends.
I’m pretty stinkin’ sure you will not get the required ventilation volume out of a 6-inch duct.
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Welders are not requiring ventilation.
We were just going to add a flex hood over there anyways to help with fumes. But the fire marshal didn’t say anything about it.
We had a plan of flex hose coming down to the plasma head. So the hood itself would be relatively small
This should probably be part of a bigger conversation on safety.
I think he meant “Welders are not requiring ventilation [to satisfy any officials and keep our occupancy certificate].”
It seems obvious that most of us, including the Metal Shop Chairpeople, WANT some ventilation over the welding area, or we wouldn’t be trying to hang it off the same system we’re using to meet official requirements.
@texastboneking Please correct me and forgive me if I’m mistaken.
As part of a bigger discussion, since I"m not aware of one currently in progress, what’s the status and thoughts surrounding the welding fumes filter unit? I thought it was adequate for a single welder in operation…
TBK, not to be contrary, but I have to disagree. Plasma and Oxy/Acet do have fire code requirements, and all of them produce dangerous gases in some circumstances. Anything alloyed with chromium, puts out hexavalent chromium and that’s just seriously nasty stuff. Plasma cutters are nasty as hell (I owned one for years) and put out all manner of nastyness, in addition to the fine atomized metal dust they fill the air with. Given that a lot of folks aren’t going to know the properties of the metals they are trying to weld/cut, you have to assume worst case will be happening.
That said, it’s just bad to weld indoors in an unventilated area.
Temporarily, nothing would prevent us from rolling the welders over in front of the open garage doors though. On a non-windy day, it would be doable for classes and use of the welders. and I’ve never owned a welder that wasn’t on a cart - too many times you need to move welder to the work.
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