Welders, Cutters, and Welder Fitters

Job Purpose:
Use hand-welding or flame-cutting equipment to weld or join metal components or to fill holes, indentations, or seams of fabricated metal products.

Essential Duties and/or Responsibilities:

• Operate safety equipment and use safe work habits.
• Weld components in flat, vertical, or overhead positions.
• Ignite torches or start power supplies and strike arcs by touching electrodes to metals being welded, completing electrical circuits.
• Clamp, hold, tack-weld, heat-bend, grind or bolt component parts to obtain required configurations and positions for welding.
• Detect faulty operation of equipment or defective materials and notify supervisors.
• Operate manual or semi-automatic welding equipment to fuse metal segments, using processes such as gas tungsten arc, gas metal arc, flux-cored arc, plasma arc, shielded metal arc, resistance welding, and submerged arc welding.
• Monitor the fitting, burning, and welding processes to avoid overheating of parts or warping, shrinking, distortion, or expansion of material.
• Examine workpieces for defects and measure workpieces with straightedges or templates to ensure conformance with specifications.
• Recognize, set up, and operate hand and power tools common to the welding trade, such as shielded metal arc and gas metal arc welding equipment.
• Lay out, position, align, and secure parts and assemblies prior to assembly, using straightedges, combination squares, calipers, and rulers.
• Chip or grind off excess weld, slag, or spatter, using hand scrapers or power chippers, portable grinders, or arc-cutting equipment.
• Analyze engineering drawings, blueprints, specifications, sketches, work orders, and material safety data sheets to plan layout, assembly, and welding operations.
• Connect and turn regulator valves to activate and adjust gas flow and pressure so that desired flames are obtained.
• Weld separately or in combination, using aluminum, stainless steel, cast iron, and other alloys.
• Determine required equipment and welding methods, applying knowledge of metallurgy, geometry, and welding techniques.
• Mark or tag material with proper job number, piece marks, and other identifying marks as required.
• Prepare all material surfaces to be welded, ensuring that there is no loose or thick scale, slag, rust, moisture, grease, or other foreign matter.
• Select and install torches, torch tips, filler rods, and flux, according to welding chart specifications or types and thicknesses of metals.
• Remove rough spots from workpieces, using portable grinders, hand files, or scrapers.
• Position and secure workpieces, using hoists, cranes, wire, and banding machines or hand tools.
• Clean or degrease parts, using wire brushes, portable grinders, or chemical baths.
• Repair products by dismantling, straightening, reshaping, and reassembling parts, using cutting torches, straightening presses, and hand tools.
• Fill holes, and increase the size of metal parts.
• Dismantle metal assemblies or cut scrap metal, using thermal-cutting equipment such as flame-cutting torches or plasma-arc equipment.

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Knowledge and Skills Required:

• Mechanical - Knowledge of machines and tools, including their designs, uses, repair, and maintenance.
• Equipment Selection - Determining the kind of tools and equipment needed to do a job.
• Time Management - Managing one's own time and the time of others.