Hacker News Reader

Comment by binarymax | Hacker News Reader

I suck at welding. I have a tig welder, and I’m not good at it. I’ve taken a short course, but it’s not enough.

As someone who needs more education and practice, I don’t understand how this can help. Like, isn’t the only way to learn how to weld actually welding? Can a simulation be good enough? I have my doubts.

Sure this can simulate holding stuff and what would happen in some conditions.

I doubt this makes a big difference because the things that screw up welding isn’t just the motion. It’s the prep and cleanliness of the material, the shape and cleanliness of the tungsten rod, the position of the rod in the cup, the downdraft, and all kinds of crazy details that I don’t think can be simulated and these things need to be hard won by real practice.

View on HN

I'd imagine this tool is meant for welding schools who want to be able to do something like:

1) Pull intro classes out of their shop to increase capacity 2) Reduce costs associated with power/gas/metal/etc. 3) Give people a taste of what welding is like without having to do safety training

I think that if you made people "get good" on the simulator before they touched the real thing they'd get better at the real thing much faster/cheaper.

I think you overestimate the expense of scrap metal for laying practice beads. This simulator is waaaay more expensive

Wire and gas costs aren't the issue. It's the cost of the welding machine because only one person can use it at a time. You can buy multiples of these for the cost of one industrial machine.

Does a welding school not have multiple welding machines already? Are they buying new machines every year?

Is it actually less expensive than a MIG welder from the same company?

https://www.millerwelds.com/equipment/welders/mig-gmaw/mille...

I've worked with the sub-$1k 200A knockoffs and they are quite usable

Hell, Harbor Freight sells really shitty welders for less than $150, so if someone was looking to practice at home, for cheap, with a slightly different system, it seems you could get a lot of mileage out of that for cheaper than a $3,000 VR system, or having to fight for limited time on an industrial grade system. Obviously it's not the same thing, but practice practice practice.

That's why I specified an industrial machine. No fab shop is going to use a 20% duty cycle machine. Granted, you can weld just as well with a cheap machine.

A trade school is not an industrial fab shop

Why would someone learn to MIG weld on an expensive industrial machine? You can get a cheap one at Home Depot for $200.

I'd imagine that space requirements are pretty significant too. I've never taken a welding class so I don't know how it's normally done, but it seems like having thirty people in a room, even a big one, would be pretty tough to do while maintaining appropriate ventilation and without people arc-flashing each other. Whereas I could see having thirty people in a normal classroom using this augmented reality system. Or using it while they wait for their turn at a real welding station.

Being able to practice at-home seems like a win too. You don't have to booking time at a busy workshop if you rented the VR system as part of your class. You need to finish X hours in the sim and Y hours in person in order to graduate, but if you can do the X hours at home, at your leisure then it becomes that much easier to finish on your schedule, boosting completion rates and skill level.

If you're teaching people, you give them crappy little stick welders. $200 each, maybe.

That's how I learned, and oxy acetylene

Ah this must be why I never really figured out how to weld in high school.

The consumables are basically free. The cost is all in kitting out and compliance of running the hot work facility. Lots of nickels and dimes to add up.

If I'm paying for welding classes it's damn well going to be on actual gear.

Only someone who hasnt welded would think this is something amyone wants.

Welding is a very "real world" activity. Cleaning things properly takes a non insigificant amount of time and you really need to get a feel for the materials.

I'm pretty sure this thing is exclusively for people who haven't welded before...

Yea and it wouldn't get them any closer to actually welding. Just have them... Actually weld? It was pretty easy for me to pick up multiple techniques in high school, no augmented reality system needed

I think getting them to learn how to do the repetitive motion properly without having to actually weld or get input from an instructor to know what they're doing wrong (angle/speed/distance/motion) would speed the process of teaching up a lot.

Technology can be used to augment and speed up human cognition and learning. Take it as a guide, not as the end all be all tool.

Reduce costs by charging another 3-4k for new equipment? Brilliant

If you need (1), you're doing well enough to rent a new space. If you need (2) and want to offer (3), you probably never welded before and people should stay the hell away from your course.

You learn welding by actually welding, and getting it spectacularly wrong for a while. Sometimes quite a while. Sometimes forever.

in the most constructive way possible - you're just being lazy

it just takes practice as you say, and its the kind of practice where feedback is good and nearly instantaneous. it also goes pretty fast. by the 40th hour of welding you should be doing a passibly good job.

yes, you will have to struggle some with issues like bridging, undercutting, porosity, and under-penetration. all those are tractable and pretty easy to debug.

and yeah, if your major problem is cleaning the work or your tungsten, then maybe welding isn't for you...but I kinda doubt it

finishing is where you can really distinguish between the professionals and the weekend warriors.

yea, obviously learning is doing. but this looks to me like a product targeted at trade schools, to be used in the very very first stages of an introductory class. instead of using workshop space and materials to do intro concepts it can be done in a normal room, freeing up the workshop during that time slot for other uses.

schools are a continuous pipeline of new students to graduates.

IDK I’d say high school. I took a semester welding class at community college and we only spent 3 sessions on MIG (what this appears to be) before moving on to other processes. Most of the learning was around dealing with PPC, listening for the sizzle, identifying a good bead and common mistakes. This seems expensive for a one-class tool, especially since they still need the regular welders to complete the training.

Hi, as a fellow amateur tig-er, I'd highly recommend checking out Weldingtipsandtricks on YouTube, the guy is a great teacher, and there are plenty of troubleshooting topics for new welders. He helped drastically improve my aluminum welding

Hell yea Youtube U.! That's how I learned to weld as well, saw an open box arc welder at harbor freight and started watching and sticking rods.

Meltin' Metal Anthony has a good channel, though he's gotten super crass the past year (maybe i didn't notice it before?) but still relevant.

WeldTube and their videos are good too, those guys are great at teaching and are good for a laugh sometimes too

All those above can be seen on youtube. I don't tig but have watched a lot of videos on it and there's so much to learn from what's out there

It looks like this AR welding product from Miller is specific to MIG. A TIG simulator would be interesting, but it would probably be a lot more work to pull off convincingly.

(For the non-welders reading this: with TIG welding you hold a "torch" in one hand that has a tungsten electrode and it blows an inert gas such as argon at the work area, and in the other hand you have welding rod that you periodically dip into the pool. MIG, on the other hand, uses a torch where the filler rod is the electrode, and there's a motorized feeder that's constantly extending the filler rod as you weld.)

edit: It looks like Miller do also have a virtual TIG setup, someone else posted a link to it. It looks pretty good, actually.

My father was the director of a vocational school and for the beginner those system seems to help.

I myself took some lesson for tig - as other have said, a big part of it was cleaning up and prepping. Prepping the tungstène every minutes made you motivated to improve fast :D

With practice, I can weld in some complicated position. The inconfortable way of working is the biggest issue (under a tube with a mirror for example, with my left hand holding the electrode as a right handed man… ). Nothing can teach you that beside doing it. And it will happen, only more often in a boiler room :D

My first thought watching this video was that its primary use is probably going to be weeding out people who would never be good at it e.g. because they lack a steady hand or lack hand eye coordination.

In my experience (learning aluminum TIG at a hobbyist level) having a "steady hand" is all about setting things up from the start so your torch hand always has something stable to rest against.

There will, of course, be people on either extreme who either have a stable enough hand that they don't need to rest on anything, or who have hands that are so shaky that propping against something doesn't help, but I think for the ordinary able-bodied person it just takes some practice and careful attention to workspace setup.

I've never done MIG, but I imagine it's a bit less of an issue since you aren't constantly trying to get the electrode as close as possible without ever touching. I could see this product being pretty good at telling students "hey, you're holding the torch at the wrong angle" or "you're going to fast" or whatever. Basically, teaching students a few good habits from the beginning.

That seems... great? If I can buy a Groupon and play for a couple hours on a sim for $100 and figure out if I have the aptitude for it, and if I enjoy doing it, before dropping a couple grand on a class I won't finish and will refuse to pay for, then that seems like a win for all parties.

Yes, it seems like a good idea.

These aren't used as teaching tools so much as "demo" tools. They are the rough welding equivalent to running a flight simulator on a laptop with a single USB joystick. They are good for bringing out to trade shows, job fairs, and other marketing venues to sort-of simulate what it's like to weld something, with all the dangers removed.

The only advantage i see for this system is that it eliminates the liability of students working with real welding equipment.

I learned to weld in high school. The first priority is safety education. While this is neat, that is a very massive missing element that students must become familiar with when learning to weld.

I'm an amateur welder too. I suspect this is helpful for bringing down the cost for initial training. You'll still need hands-on, but this will get you the first 40% to 60%.

Beyond the welder and material for training, facilities also need to have robust electrical supplies, welding tables, and inert gas supplies. This cuts all of that out.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com