Welder Productivity

Does the productivity of welders vary from country to country, then? That's interesting. What about province to province?

Yes to some extent,Productivity is the function of ambient temp

Depends! Is he spot welding? Filling by making several passes? Fitting pipes for a nuclear reactor? Bottom line is, are the other welders producing as much work and do you have any problems with the quality of his work. If you find him sitting on his haunches and screwing off or does he constantly have his stinger buzzing. If he's new maybe he just needs time to get up to speed. Take him aside and speak to him about his quantity of work and see if he improves. If your not happy let him know. Have him sign a paper stating you've had this discussion and keep it on record.

Good Luck

You must provide more information.

If the welder is just welding the same thing that is brought to him/her over and over then his productivity could be as high as 90%. On the other hand if he/she also needs to collect and prepare the material, weld it, clean it then move it to another production line then his productivity could be as low as say 10%.

There are too many unknown variables and without more information we can only guess at the figure (10-90% welding efficiency).

A few more specifics will help.

Our company factors times for aligning and setting parts. Then we use a base metric for inches per minute for MIG and TIG welding. Continuous welding takes less time. repositioning takes more time.

As a metric we use approximately 5 seconds per inch of MIG welding. TIG welding has a large matrix depending on material, thickness, and precision.

hi chennaicivil,

you'll need to provide more details, such as industry you are in, working hours per day, material consumption, etc., as indicated by the other responders to your question. this is not to put you off, but even if you did, this AWS (American Welding Society) report dated May 2002, indicates that:

"There are no consistent measures of welding productivity currently being used in
establishments where welding is a critical enabling technology. Nearly one-half (47%) of the firms responding to this study's survey reported the use of no welding productivity measures. Of the 53% of establishments that did report some type of welding productivity measure, no single metric was used by more than one-half of those firms."

in short, you may have to gather your own data that is specific to your company and industry, and derive your own productivity quotient. IMO, this is your best approach.

If you're comparing MIG to TIG, MIG is far more efficient at depositing pounds of weld / hour.

As has been previously posted, there are too many variables involved for an instant answer. Short-arc or spray-arc? Manual or automatic wire feed? Positioning or pre-jigged? Not that there are any standard answers to this.

Is very diferent if you have to weld small bore or 30 inces, and if you have to weld in positios 1G high production 4G less, or if you need to preheat and control the interpass Temp. What kind of welds you have?

Hello,

As discussed the productivity of welder's depends on many factors ie. welding process, climate condition, type of work ( piping small or big bore , thickness or tankage & vessels) and a lot on welder also.

You can considor for TIG process approx 30 inch dia ony for Root per day.

approx. 50 inch dia for MIG.

Regards.

As others have pointed out, productivity depends upon many factors, In GMAW process: a. more with 1.60, 2.0 mm size than with 0.80 & 1.20 size filler wires b. more in heavy thickness joints than in less thick ( say below 16 mm) joints c. more on straight line joints than on any contours, d. more in down hand / flat and less in other positions - comparatively, e. more in spry transfer and less in dip/short circuit or globular modes, f. more with atomization and average with semi atomization g. more in fillet joints than in butt joints h. more with 600 amps power source than with 400 amps equipment i. more with Argon or mix gases than with pure CO2 gas j. more with use of fixtures than in free joints etc. Again you have to consider the efficiency of an arc hour shift. In GMAW process it could around 60% ( semi-auto mode) on an average and in GTAW process it will be less than 40%. With all above constraints, we could get a productivity of 5-6 kg of weld metal with semi- automatic (30-32 volts & 300 – 350 amps) spray transfer mode and a maximum of 8 kgs (rarely it was 10 kg) output with automatic mode on heavy wall thick carbon steel plates in flat position (36-38 volts & 400–450 amps) and with 1.60 mm wire on heavy thick plates (above 30 mm) in down hand/flat joints for a arc hour shift. In contrast, the GTAW (manual) being a slower process relatively, we could achieve app. 1.60 to 2.00 kg output with 2.00 mm and around 2.50 kgs with 2.40 mm size wires for an arc hour shift. The welding was done manually on SS pipes (full TIG) and if it is a automatic process (cold wire feeding) it could have gone up further. Above productivity may go up or down as it is depending upon human factor also. Hope above details will give you an insight of the productivity in both processes. Sridhar.