Fit Right Into the Welding Chat with These Essential Phrases

Common Welding Slang Terms and Phrases.

In the construction world, newbies often find themselves lost in common phrases and welding slang is no exception thrown around by fellow workers.

Here’s a guide on welding slang and fabrication slang in the workforce.

People & Characteristics

Golden Arm – A welder with excellent technique and end results.

Bugger – Welder’s helper, cleaning up and prepping weld in advance; it might run additional passes after the weld is completed in advance of visual inspection.

Meat Hand – Derived from the term “bead hand.” A root pass welder on a pipeline job. Usually a good welder that can run slick root passes (stringer beads) in x-ray pipelines in production mode.

Drinking Hand – Welder that drinks alcohol in excess. Not necessarily a bad connotation.

ROMF – Welder whose services are no longer necessary.

Shield Arcer – SMAW welder

Shoulder to the Holder – Welder who uses more brawn than brain for work.

Potato Face – welder with flash burned eyes.

Green/Green horn/Rookie – Any welder new to the trade.

Zorro –Welder trying to un-stick the SMAW electrode.

Equipment & Techniques

Weld Beads and Pools

It’s not surprising that so much of the lingo relates to the weld and the weld pool. After all, they are at the core of the process. Here are some terms you may encounter on the job site. Stringer bead A narrow, straight weld bead that is created by moving the SMAW electrode straight along the weld joint. A quality stringer bead should have good tie-in on both sides of the weld.

Root pass

The first weld bead placed in the weld joint in a multipass weld.

Fill

Also referred to as a fill pass, it is the amount of weld bead necessary to fill the weld joint. This pass comes after the root pass and before the cap pass (see next term). In some applications, multiple fill passes are necessary.

Cap

The final weld bead in a weld joint. It may be completed in the form of a stringer bead or by a weaving motion back and forth.

Fisheye

The shape of the puddle while welding. It is sometimes also used to describe the shape of the crater at the end of the weld.

Keyhole

The shape of the hole that is formed while welding an open-root joint, particularly with an AWS 6010 SMAW electrode. It allows for good penetration and tie-in in the completed weld.

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We gathered this information from Welding Slang Sources

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