We have a situation where we need to fix a large structure welded to AWS d1.1 due to ship out next Friday in a big hurry (someone forgot to put a bunch of beams on it!). Anyway, the material is A572 - grade not specified, and it will be fillet welded around its base (prequal joint type L-F12).  I suggested since we're in a pinch that we go to a prequal WPS and weld it with SMAW, as they have spec'd 1/2" welds on the 5/8" flanges. That way we could just do a pre-production welder qual and get the thing done quickly.

The problem is that the structure has a bunch of softgoods attached to it, like plastics and Kevlar that the engineers are really worried about getting burned up so they want to weld these 5/8" flange I-beams with GTAW. Unfortunately,   the only WPS/PQR we have for GTAW is for A36 to A500, so I am interpreting that we would need to do a new PQR for the Group II to Group II steels, write a WPS to that and qual the welder to the new WPS. Am I making this harder than it needs to be? My welder is a bad mofo with a TIG torch, so I am 100% confident he'll lay perfect beads, but I need to be able to show a good papertrail because the thing this supports is a multi-million $$$ piece of equipment, and the structure will be used to transport it. My one thought is that we get the engineer to over-ride the spec on the face of the drawing and let me write a WPS for the A572 based on our PQR for the Group I.

Any help or guidance is appreciated!

Thanks!