Forty years in welding and fabrication turns up a lot worth saying, and not all of it is comfortable. This is where Graham writes it down. Articles and papers on welding quality, the standards that govern it, where the industry gets it right, and where it wastes money and talent getting it wrong.
Some of it is technical. Some of it is about the workforce, the training system, and the industry bodies that shape both. All of it is grounded in real jobs and real numbers, written for engineers, fabricators, and project owners who would rather have a straight opinion than a safe one.
Read, disagree, and get in touch. That is how the industry gets better.
Synergic Is Not Automatic
Synergic is a lookup table, not a thinking machine. What a synergic line actually is, what trim really changes, and why the amps and volts on the display are not the numbers a WPS can be written against.
The Making of a Welder
Why a decade of welder shortage policy has failed, who actually becomes a good welder, and why aptitude tests and simulators keep missing. 54 pages, fully referenced.
Why ISO 3834 Should Be Non-Negotiable for Australian Fabricators
The excuse that ISO 3834 is for the big guys is costing Australian fabrication shops work, margin and credibility. Here is why it applies to you.
The Competitiveness Crisis in Australian Steel Fabrication
Lodged with the Productivity Commission. Australian fabrication isn’t failing on wages and power prices. It’s failing on competence, a self-serving certification market, and 20 to 30 percent of productivity nobody is picking up off the floor.
You don’t need a different process. You need a different size.
Solid, flux cored and metal cored compared properly. The flux cored deposition advantage is a current density effect you can buy for free by dropping a wire size, and 1.0 mm solid is the pick for most of what a fab shop welds.
The letter Z is telling you something
5 kg spools of gasless wire are almost exclusively T11, and T11 carries no impact requirement at all. Why it cannot be prequalified to AS/NZS 1554.1, what happens when people test it anyway, and what the datasheet has been telling you the whole time.