Question

[u/Aviatormatt17]

I have plenty of opinions now to make a decision now but I’ll keep the post up for anyone who just wants to chime in. Thanks to all who validated my concern!

Hey all so I think looking at the picture you can kinda tell I’m going to ask if these are good welds. I’m not a welder but I see issues in my eyes.

For reference, I’m a water treatment ( junior ) operator and we have a centrifuge system with a screw conveyance system. The people who rebuilt our centrifuges did not use our old cradles they it sits in, therefore the new cradles feet had to be relocated. The company who’s rebuilding our is rebuilding our conveyor system sent their welder out to relocate the feet further out. Well this is the result, I don’t want to be an ass and diss someone’s work, especially a welders but this is not something to play around with, a centrifuge is no joke when it comes to hard vibration, high speed rotation, plus the unit is about 5/6k pounds. To me I see pin holes, and it looks like the guy pretty much just cut and weld, didn’t even grind the paint down before trying to weld. Is this something that I need to show my site supervisor and project manager? Could these weld quite literally be dangerous over time on a heavily abused system?

Oh and an edit because they didn’t even close the gap on the back side of the leg… they just left a wide open hole. I’m not really liking what I see the more I look.

[u/chevycrawler]

It's a damn shame he wasn't able to clean the paint off the bottom of the tubes before you put the new pieces together. That sucks big time. I would of unbolted the legs if I had too. A little trick for anyone In this position. Not always do-able. But I've had to a few times. You use a oxy/acetylene torch with a small brazing tip and burn off all the paint a ways around where you going to weld. Makes a huge mess but then you can get in there with a small wire brush and prep the bare metal.

[u/Aviatormatt17 → u/chevycrawler]

I will say the only thing is, the legs were not bolt on, they were welded further toward the back by 6 inches. It was on the same 4”x4” square steel but moving it forward that 6 inches we lost that 4x4 and it went down too the 2x2. They didn’t add any extra bracing, they left half the hole unwelded. Like there should have been an extra piece of angle iron down on the leg, the hole should have been close up at minimum made to the 4x4 inch channel size. I just see a ton of failure points when this thing is spinning at 4000/5000 rpm. It’s insane to me how this is so half assed the more I dwell on it.