Hello folks, this past week our welding staff hosted the semi-annual get together of our Washington Welding Instructors Association meeting. We arranged for a couple of tours for the group. One of these tours included Airgas's local fill plant. This is the first time that my partner and I had toured this part of their facilities. It has been in it's current location for a number of years, yet like so many other things it seems that we just hadn't thought about it before now. If you have a facility such as this in your area I believe you would benefit greatly to take such a tour if at all possible. I have a series of photos of various aspects of the operation, the first photos are of a cut-away showing carbonic acid induced erosion of the internal portion of a C02 cylinder, oddly enough they told us that the bottle passed a hydro-test, yet after a UT scan they found the defects shown in the photos. A few of the next photos show the hydro-test equipment, we were told that they generally only use this system for bottles that are special issue and generally not in the data base of their UT machines. Since hydroeing is a lengthy process with many different steps it has been largely replaced by the UT systems. The final series of photos show the 2 different machines that they use for UT'ing all of the various sizes and types of bottles generally used by most everyone. They also showed how they used "calibration" bottles to verify the accuracy of each unit. The larger of the two machines includes a wheel-a-brator to clean the old paint and stickers off of the bottles before they are inspected and to facilitate the process so that they can be painted and restamped before being put back into service. Additionally, we viewed the other aspects of the "fill lines" and got a run-down on the various safeties employed in the process. A very informative and great tour. Hope you folks enjoy the photos. Best regards, Allan