WELDING

In every movie I’ve seen, welding is a farce. In Flashdance, there was no welding happening. There were sparks flying, but there was also hair flying. Welding and hair are not compatible, especially structural. If she were a welder, she’d have short hair (anything that sticks past the helmet is GONE), lots of burn scars (hey, it’s an occupational hazard), and muscles. Steel is heavy. Safety equipment is heavy. You’re often having to support yourself in awkward positions for a very long time. You do a LOT of sweating. Did I mention how much heavy protection you have to wear?

Another pet peeve is speed. You see people go into a room, and they run a pocket welder around the door to seal it up. What the hell is that? For one thing, the thermodynamics of steel require that whatever fuel source you carry in your pocket be able to heat a hefty chunk of steel up to thousands of degrees. That takes a lot of power. For another, running a bead is not quick—not if you want it to have any strength at all. For a bead that goes all the way around a door, expect to spend a good twenty minutes on it, at least. You will also need filler metal. No door has good enough fit-up to be able to melt the door and the frame and have it form a joint. All doors have a small gap, otherwise they wouldn’t open. That requires filler metal. To do a whole door will take about half a pound of filler metal at a minimum.

The other problem with welding doors is that most of them are not solid steel (if they were they would weigh a thousand pounds, like a bank vault door.) They’re thin sheet metal over a lighter core. When you weld thin sheet metal with a lot of power (remember you NEED a lot of power to weld fast), the sheet metal blows away into a shower of sparks and leaves a gaping hole that can’t be welded up.

Yet another problem is paint. You can’t weld to paint. It doesn’t conduct electricity. The first thing you need to do is go all the way around the door with a grinder and grind off all the paint to expose bare metal before you start welding. And the paint on the parts you didn’t grind off WILL catch fire from the heat.

Then there are the people who want to go through the door afterwards. They spend 30 seconds with a torch, and cut the door open. Problem with using a torch is that just melting the metal will only make the weld STRONGER. That’s what a weld IS, after all—melted metal. To actually cut it, you’ll have to use something that will gouge out or grind out the groove, freeing the door from the frame. If the door is actually welded all the way around, it’s going to take a VERY LONG TIME to cut around the perimeter of that door, and then you’re going to have to pound on it with a heavy hammer to break loose the welding that didn’t cut completely. There will also be so much smoke that filming would be impossible (not to mention breathing).

I also love it when they depict someone doing arc welding using dark goggles. Dark goggles are for gas torch welding and cutting. The problem with arc welding is that it throws out furious amounts of ultraviolet. Any exposed skin (like your face), WILL be severely sunburned, even with only a few minutes of exposure. Not to mention all the scars on your face from the white-hot spatters of molten steel being thrown off.

There is never any consideration given to metal types. It is impossible to weld aluminum to steel. It is nearly impossible to weld cast iron without it shattering.

Then there are places where welding makes no sense. In The Big Bang Theory, Sheldon had a car engine in his apartment, and was allegedly learning to work on it. For no explicable reason, he was doing arc welding on it. That’s something that was like fingernails on a chalkboard to welders and car mechanics both!