Good morning Allan,

wow, that's one of a good post and much more very good question(s).

I've just a few minutes before I have to run, but I just would like to mention - believe it or not - that I had a discussion recently with a welding educator, working for a very - even in these times - successful welding company.

As we passed the scrap box I saw 'tons' - o.k. this is a bit exaggerated - let's say a bunch of electrode stubs which certainly could have been classified as 'too long'.

Many of them were just once ignited, then the student obviously had problems with 'sticking to the plate' and the rest of the electrode, which was however actually almost a complete one, had been thrown away.

I asked the trainer how this behaviour could even be accepted, as this is pure money being thrown away. He said. "Well, he said, we have enough of this stuff. And why fighting battles with the students if they are not willing to follow my advice?"

I must emphasize that I very much appreciate this educator, he's both an outstanding teacher and welder, too. But I guess, he became only tired over the years of permanently stressing the students to something they are not willing to understand. I am honest, If I was him, that would be one of the first things I would change. Perhaps however, the main cause may also be another one?

Perhaps it is part of a general tendency rather, to be observed in our human society, following the slogan:

'If have not to pay for it? Who cares?!'

Not to understand in my eyes. During my personal education we had to use the electrodes until shortly before the coating has ended. And that helped and accompanied me during my whole occupational career. And to say the least, it was no fault to have learned to use an electrode as far as even possible.

If I would have thrown away such long stubs I wouldn't have like to see my educator, who was an excellent one, but who did explicitely hate dissipation.

He always told us: "The stick electrode suppliers are quite similar to the mustard suppliers! Their true turnover comes from the rests!"

No offence versus the stick electrode suppliers, anyway!

I know, you have asked many more very reasonable questions. But I am already running out of time, so I have to go.

Anyway, so far my humble .02$, but your post will certainly produce an outstanding thread - as usual! :-)

All the best,
Stephan

Allan,
I have been questioned on my rod use habbits from time to time. Never thinking of rod  cost when I throw a long one away. It seems like depending on circumstances of each job its different at least for me. A lot of my work is tight , out of position with poor access. I work on a lot of construction machinery that is complex and costly to get it torn down for easier repairing. Many times I have put a bend or two in a new rod just to get 3-4 inches of weld from it then chuck it. Some jobs require many rods to repair and I throw away most of a box in partialy used rods. Thats the extreme. I usually just use them untill the flux gets fragmented if running hot or the arc is burning through my glove. I have done frame repairs on scrapers where 2 boxes of rod were required, 3/4 of a box of stubs is usual.

In the past I have done cert work where reworking would mean getting run off or not be accepted as you mentioned and in that case the costs do not come into play at all. Then even fit up and prep time did not matter in the least. Working a lot on my own would I have found myself using expensive rod a little more than standard rods. I hate to throw away any usable stainless, hard face or nickel. A lot of times I keep a small grinder to touch the tip of an electrode to to insure a decent start, kind of like cutting off a tig filler rod to remove any impurities. Just a habit I have gotten into.

Wonder how the schools aproach your questions.
Uphill

Allan,
We encourage our welders to use as much of the rod as possible, within reason. Many of the guys keep a striking block handy to warm the rod up on before re-striking on the work. This brief burn of the rod on the striking block allows the rod to get up to temp and then when you re-strike on the work there are less chances of starting with porosity on the work.



....And then some of the guys use the leg of the table which is not perferred but it still happens. (sarcasm on)I suppose it's too much trouble to walk over to your toolbox or scrap barrel and get a piece of scrap to use as a striking block.(/sarcasm off)

Our guys like the E7018 (even for tacking and fitting) vs the E7028 ever since Lincoln changed the E7028 over to a new formulation or whatever they did to it. Since that rod was stopped in manufacturing a while back and then brought back, it just hasn't run the same and restriking is awful. Whereas in the old E7028 could be laid over and stood up and the rod would take off and light easily using this technique, but now you scrape and tap the rod to get them to fire off again. Many times when you restrike the E7028 it would peel a couple inches of flux right off the side of the rod making it worthless for anything except the scrap tub. The bead appearance looks more like an E7018 than the E7028 used to look.(very ropy looking like an E7018 vs smoother looking bead caps like E7028's used to look.)

Allan,
     That is a very good topic, when I would teach welding class I would always touch on this.  What I would teach (what I was taught by someone way older and wiser, that and I would get a boot to the head), was to have a strike plate (just scrape).  A rod that has just broke an arc will restart 95% of the time with no problems.  When we weld, not all of the welds are X-rayed, but they will be either UT'd or MAGed.  BTW myself and the guys that I weld with, when we do weld burn the rods to 1-1/2" stubs.  This is especially true with underwater welding electrodes, they are kinda expensive to the customer and to produce.  That and when the project manager figures out how much we will need for a project we get roughly 10% over what we need.

Charles

Allen:

I have to laugh!  You asked an excellent question!  An age old question!  Stub Waste, one situation that I guess every welder has had to deal with sooner or later!

I remember years ago, when I was working for someone else, "You need to burn those stubs shorter"  "Your wasting electrode"!  Man, I thought I was getting all I could get out of them.  My stinger was getting burnt.  I was burning them as much as I could, and still get a good stop.  The boss was hard, and tight with $.

I say that to say this:  If I'm working on something very important, and it needs to be perfect, I don't concern myself too much with stub waste.  The job quality out weighs the waste cost.  But, those statements from the boss kept me thinking, how can I reduce electrode waste?

The rest of this story (and my idea) can go to someone like a (Welding Engineer) or someone who can actually develop a flux, that when you dip or paint your stub with it, it will coat the whole stub.  At the end of your welding rod, let it freeze in the puddle.  Tack the stub to the new electrode and keep welding.  I know this would not be acceptable for high quality welds, but if your working on something that is not that critical, it sort of works.

I experimented with this idea a little.  What I would do, is at the end of my electrode, I would leave it in the puddle and let the stub freeze in that spot.  Then I would get a new electrode and strike an arc on the end of the old electrode and tack it too the new electrode.  (Understan this is bench work).  Two problems, (1) I have about 1" of exposed electrode, no flux. (2) Where I tacked the two together, kind of messey.  This adversly effected the weld, but it was do-able.  I tried attaching brazing flux and other paste fluxes to the exposed metal, but getting the flux to stick to the rod didn't work too well.  If one could just figure a way to renew the stub and get it on the new electrode, fairly quickly, and cleanly It might work in certain situations.  Call it recycling your stubs.

Now I say that to say this.  I remember a big job in the Model Shop where I had to build aluminum frames.  Mass production type.  I was tig welding 1/8" aluminum on 1/8" thick angle.  My filler rod was 4043 1/8" X 36".  Not critical work.  I welded aluminum frames 10 hrs per day 5 days a week.  I got in the habit of stopping with 3" or 4" of filler rod left, and let it freeze in the puddle.  I then got a new rod and tacked it to the old rod.  For this particular job, and since I was tig welding, this process worked really well.  I don't know how many frames I welded up but it was in the hundreds, maybe a thousand, I really don't remember.  The good news is when I finished, I had so little stub waste, it even surprised me!  Of course there was a small bump in the bead where my tack was, but on this job it didn't matter.  It was all covered anyway.

Engineers, Chemists?  Help!

I'd like to here someone else's idea on that.  If you could figure out how to recycle stubs, patent it, and get rich!

Your Friend:

Steve

I rarely do any welding these days but I vividly recall my days as a fitter/welder in a structural steel fab shop.

All of our tacking was with 7018 and those rods would get burned down almost to the stinger.  Not because we had to; it just seemed to be that way.  Using the stab & scratch light-off method you could get several tacks per rod (and without arc-strikes - most of the time). 

When I had a tack that required more care, a fresh rod was used.

If I was welding, I would try to avoids lots of start/stops - so then I would use a fresh rod instead of using up stubs.  A 3" long weld with a start/stop in it doesn't look as good - acceptable but not as good.

Having been out to sea in ships where you may not be able to get a fresh can, I became proficient with rescuing my stubs.  If there was anything remaining beyond the taper I saved that, sometimes could just get a tack out of it, but if it kept me from dipping into the new rod I was happy.  I simply drew the tip up a medium bastard file with a twist before lighting up, and for the most part it started as well as a new stick.

In costing formulas. There's a formula to input electrode deposition efficiency. This includes both stubbies and spatter (it can add up)

the last I saw SMAW would never get above 70-85% tops.
GMAW is around 95-99%
manual GTAW is around 90-99
and so forth.

Having welders return stubbies has been shown to increase rod use just from the psychological factor. Its more punitive, but you can enforce maximum rod length, or at least frown or hassle long rods found in stubbie cans.  However This can back fire as some critical work or O.O.P work might require only using portions of welds and increase defects.

When I did costing I figured a 70% deposition efficiency into the pricing. If we picked SMAW over another process we were comfortable with rod use still being efficient money wise.  Likewise with some very expensive materials and situations it becomes cheaper to use GMAW or GTAW over SMAW, but never from rod efficiency alone. there's no excuse to waste money, but if it took you an extra minute of time to save 6" of rod you would be losing out in the long run.

It's very interesting to see how everyone latches onto consumables use with welding operations, whether it's getting stingy with cups and collets, or wire use and stubbies.  I have study after study that shows consumables cost between 3-15% of weld cost on average.  Labor and Overhead make up the rest.  More expensive consumables will win out nearly EVERY TIME, if they can prevent just one defect or increase welding rate by a marginal amount. overall I would say deposition effiency is very marginal on welded cost (under 1% of total) for most manual processes. The welding cost estimator I posted last year lets you plug in the numbers including deposition efficiency and puts out a pie chart showing L&O to consumables cost.

Now in situations like school where there's no product and budgets are tight we were encouraged to use as much as possible, and practice stops, restarts. It's generally considered par for the course that beginning welders are gonna burn through material like no tomorrow and not produce anything tangible.  I thought that was the whole deal with those virtual welding systems, to eliminate the gross waste that beginners do?

I learned to weld by My Dad showing me how, and reading "Lessons in Arc Welding" a Hobart trade school text. Both Dad and the book said to burn rod stubs as short as possible without burning up the holder. I have never done any really high quality welding where a restart was a big deal, and altho I might have had 40# of rods on hand, when they were gone, I would be paying for the next box.

I learned to braze from My Grandpop. When a rod got too short to hold it was just brazed to the next one. The same idea was used when I learned to gas weld, and later on with TIG.

Allan,  Great thread.  Super question, situation for consideration.  And I am really learning a few things from some of the tips and personal experiences of others here.

For myself, doesn't matter rather we are talking about GTAW, SMAW, even GMAW (have you ever seen guys that stood there pulling the trigger and snipping off the wire as a bad habit while they stood there talking?) I have always tried to be 'THRIFTY'  with my supplies.  This was not dependant upon WHO was supplying the electrodes.  People need to learn, overal (not always I know) if you are making money for the company you stand a BETTER chance of getting raises, at least cost of living increases.  If they don't make money, how do you expect them to pay you more.  Every inch of 'WASTED' rod was money out of my pocket.

Now, having said that, all situations are different.  It depends upon how easy the weld area is to access, what type of code I am working to, what process and electrode is in use and if I am running at the top end of it's amperage (may burn the flux off back from the arc so the rod is no good before you get right down to the electrode holder, especially with 7018 downhill or 6010 running really hot).

Another point that can be made, it is extremely important to know your own skills and have a proven track record of what you are able to accomplish when needing to make the decision to restrike or start with a new electrode.  Look at the X-rays of your work if possible.  Watch the UT tech check it.  Is there something there?  Or did you get a clean start? 

I generally use similar restarts to other posts here, I scratch start ahead of the area where the weld needs to start letting the rod get ignited if you will, heated up, and pull into the area to start, build my weld puddle and then burn out the arc strike as my weld progresses back up through the seam, rather fillet or groove.  If the electrode is shorter than about 3-4 inches it isn't worth it.  You don't get enough distance out of it to make it worthwhile.  But, I often hang onto some of these shorter electrodes to tack, place fitting/welding aids, and other items that only require a short weld and the quality isn't an issue, as long as they are safe for the usage intended, as they will be removed from the finished product. 

Just my two tin pennies worth.

Have a Great Day,  Brent

When I was teaching welding it would drive me crazy to see the students throw away long electrodes, so I would save them and either have them use the discarded stubs only, for either a welding test or a welding contest. This would force them to use up the electrodes, but also force them to do lots of restarts, which was always difficult for the students to accomplish. Of course the best way for the students not to have to use the short stubs only was to use them up correctly in the first place. I think it was revelant to teach them to conserve as much of our resources as possible, not only for the school but for future employers.