The Basics On Underwater Welding

hmm [Music] hey everyone danielle bushcutter here with weld.com today i'm going to be doing some underwater welding here at the ocean corp in houston texas so i'm gonna have a standby diver with me today um that's the other gentleman that's gonna be in the tank with me while i'm diving anytime we have a diver in the water we always have a standby diver so if we lose communications diver gets any kind of trouble our standby diver gets dressed as quick as we can gets down to the diver checks them out then escorts them back out the water today we're in a shallow tank so we're going to have our standby diver uh is also going to be our camera guy so he's going to be down there keeping an eye on her while she's there doing some video stuff and also being her assistant so if she needs help with anything she can radio up to us and we can radio to a standby diver and help her out being a walter myself how many welders do you have like come and take this course and think they're going to be an underwater welder and like how often are you actually welding underwater so we get um quite a few students who went to welding school and they go i want to be an underwater welder and then they get here and day one we let them know that you're here to be a commercial diver not just weld underwater if you're a diver you put your diving hat on your helmet you get down and get that's your transportation to the work site and you weld you burn you do your construction or whatever come up and so it's just transportation to get you to the work site you're a construction worker you just happen to be working underwater as far as the amount of welding um varies quite a bit so if you're offshore in the gulf of mexico not a lot of welding maybe some anodes you might be doing some repair work closer in inland diving you could be doing quite a bit so it just kind of depends on what area you like to do and what you're good at [Music] so for the underwater welding you're going to only use stick welding and we'll only use dc current so we tell everybody we only use dc current underwater we use uh electrode negative and so we want that tip get really hot because the water cools really fast when you start welding you have to turn off your welder brain and turn on your diver brain and a lot of it goes by feel uh because you have the puddle cools real fast and you have bubbles coming up so it's kind of hard to see the puddle but you feel the rod kind of melting down you usually want to do just a straight drag then it's pretty much about controlling your speed and your angle right so we got two brands here broco which is kind of industry standard uh basic's a 60 series electrode and we've got it dipped in wax so you can see the wax at the end so whenever the diver gets ready to start we'll break that off scrape it down otherwise it's not going to light then we have a mako brand this is the new brand we've been testing uh it doesn't have a wax coating but the way they bake the flux on keeps it nice and tight uh these electrodes actually are pretty easy to start and stop and uh they run pretty hot when it comes to underwater welding is there like a major coupon that you could do that would be good for all the positions or do you have to specifically get each certification for the different positions right so here's the school for top side we have everybody start off and they can get a one two three or four f because most of your stuff underwater is gonna be fill it well you're gonna have a lap joint you have repairs that kind of stuff so we have them do that and then in the water you can get a 2f or a 4f here and so we kind of got a in between not the easiest and then a little bit more harder kind of thing to get for your welding you have to get assert for each position that you're going to be welding in [Music] it's not going to be a lot of critical welds you're really not going to be doing any pipe welding if you do then you have to resort to hyperbaric welding which is you have a habitat basically over whatever you're welding on they blow all the water out you've got fans for getting rid of the smoke your diver comes down gets into the habitat takes his hat off puts his welding hood on and welds in the dry everything is done take everything out reverse the process pretty much in the gulf of mexico they don't do a lot of hyperbaric welding because it's expensive way more expensive and a lot more work and you have to have your divers specially trained most of your stuff is going to be wet welding which is basically your diver jumping in the water in the surroundings and welding right there like i said you got your nuts and bolts construction your underwater burning so we use an exothermic rod it's hooked to a welding machine so you're down there and you're ready to cut something up make it hot just like your welding they turn it on hit your trigger oxygen goes through it lights these things heat up to about 10 000 degrees and they can cut through your barnacles iron sharks whatever all right so right now i'm getting ready to go do a night dive see how it is at night right well i just wrapped up my night dive i will say getting in and out of the water was very cold but once i made it inside i was warm it's definitely a lot harder than the day because i could not see a dang thing so trying to figure out where my electrode was in the joint was very hard um but i liked the challenge and it was a lot of fun now probably one of the biggest questions is how much money you actually do make i know there's lots of myths out there of actually how much money you can make i've seen a lot of stuff out there in social media and um you know i'm gonna be an underwater welder now i'm gonna make 300 000 a year and i laugh and i tell the students if it paid 300 000 a year i would either be on my sailboat in the keys or i'd be underwater welding yeah so it doesn't quite pay that much so the way it works is when you come to our school and you graduate you can go two different directions one you can do inland which is rivers dams bridges water treatment plants sewage treatment plants nuclear so for inland when you get out of school you're basically considered a diver okay if you want to be a like a deep sea diver a gulf diver where you're diving on the oil platforms gas platforms and pipelines when you go out you start out as called a diver tender so you're kind of the lowest level person uh you're holding the diver's hose you're tending the diver's gear running equipment setting up rigging running the decompression chamber from tinder you make lead tender and i tell everyone the world starts to turn so your respect level goes up your pay goes up some and responsibility goes up so now you're over the crew much more dive rotation doesn't mean you won't dive right out of school but the reason is they're not going to just let you get out of school and you say hey we need to go jump you in 200 feet of water and put this complex stuff together in zero visibility because you don't have the experience it's kind of like any job you got to work your way up like on average how long is that time period that at least you would recommend being a tender to get all that experience before you move up to lead tender right a lot of this is what's really neat that i liked about the diving is it's dependent on you how aggressive are you this industry will weed you out if you're lazy how long does it take from the time i graduated school to make diver everybody wants to know one to three years what is that based on you it's so the way it works is let's say we graduate the same time we go to work at the same company and they go hey we have a six week job really long job great we go out and after three weeks i go hey i miss my girlfriend or my buddies or whatever i'm going in and you stay out well you just made three weeks more money and three weeks more experience so my whole thing is push push push work work work make diver you know that's the whole thing make diver and then you can kind of relax a little bit get in the club and then yeah it's worth the sacrifice and the push to get you know to that level so once you make diver then you can start doing deeper stuff so you can go from surface flight air you go to mixed gas and that's going to be 165 or so depending on the company down to about 300 feet and so you're breathing helium oxygen mixture the deeper you go the less time you have to work okay and so the deeper you go they're expected to produce more that's why we start out 20 feet of water you have all day to work 250 feet of water not a lot of time okay after about five years or so you've got some deeper mixed gas more complex dives you have the option of becoming a saturation diver the difference is you're going 300 to a thousand feet and it's technically if you want to speak one die because what happens is typically it's in the u.s it's going to be six divers get in a chamber and it's basically going to be about nine feet wide 20 something feet long got a transfer lock which is typically where your shower and your toilet is and then your bell attaches to that the whole system is pressurized so if you're diving to 500 feet it's pressurized 500 feet so you're basically living at depth so you look out the window people are walking around you sound like donald duck in there when it's time to dive you and your bell partner getting the bell you have all your gear your hats your wetsuits you take your lunch get in there close the hatch the crane picks up the bell lowers it down and you can see over here we got our bell and our one diver gets out and he works for you around three hours okay and then gets in next time gets out and works three hours gets back in close the hatch pulls it back up it mates back up those two divers get out next two divers get in and keep everything going now how long can you stay in one of those chambers typically it's going to be a three hour dive and a three hour dive so uh julia eight hour excursion total from seal to seal get the bell down coming back up a saturation job so to speak will last about 30 days on average how much can you make 50 000 a year doesn't seem like a whole lot starting out um but again seven and a half months worth of school no college degree once you make diver you know starts going up you know 75 plus once you start getting your mixed gas and everything especially you're sad diving you know six figures okay right but are you gonna be in the two three hundred thousand range if you go start your own diving company maybe yeah and i've got friends who've done that on average like the lifespan of a diver i know that's a big i mean there's a lot of myths out there of oh you you know eight years and on that you know day one after those eight years you're dead total myth misunderstandings of that uh what happens is you have a lot of divers they go into diving in their 20s their 30s their 40s they make a bunch of money you know they pay off their house their condos sailboats and cadillac and gold rolexes which is what divers tend to do and then they go okay i want to have a more stable family life because when you're out you tend to miss birthdays and kiddos first steps and christmas and holidays and stuff like that i'm actually a third generation diver my dad and grandpa were divers 25 years 26 years as active divers so there's real no age limit to depending on your health stay healthy right all right so i just got done underwater welding and burning it kind of sounds like i passed my 2f 4f i might be a little shy on that one getting my certification definitely a lot harder than it looks i give credit to those that weld underwater definitely not the same thing welding side versus bottom side that was probably my biggest hiccup and learning curve was i was thinking of everything i had to know to weld topside and it's completely different when it comes to bottom side i hope you guys learned something from this video if you have any questions drop it down in the comments i hope you enjoyed this video and if you're not learning something new every day you're not living have a good one

Channel: Weld.com

Views: 78,428

Keywords: underwater welding, underwater welder, welddotcom, welding, welder, how to weld, mig, tig, welding and fabrication, welding resources, pipe, welding education, welding community, weld, weldapp, weld.com, underwater welder salary, underwater welder stories, underwater welder pov, underwater welder interview, underwater welder life, underwater welder salery

Id: JOV9MNcd02s

Length: 13min 51sec (831 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 01 2022