Not an exciting or super cool gig but interesting in its own right.

Things are slow so I took a single hand job on a refactory/aluminum melt furnace rebuild.  One of the owners of the refactory company was there on the job...after about 30 minutes they decided to hire out my rig LOL.  I got there within three days of start of the tear out..the walls and floor were still about 200 degrees.  No offense to bricklayers but after a few days I got them to understand the horrible, nightmare fitting was costing lots of unnecessary man hours on welding...eventually they saw the light and let me and a friend start laying out and fitting.  Way to late and still had to deal with night shift fits but gave us a break from torturing our bodies on the floor.   First five days were spent on our knees or laying on mudboards welding seams in a 1/2" thick floor over beams where I would have it butted tight on one end and 2" gap on the other.  Wire feeders or fat jet rods were definitely needed bad....all we were supplied was 5/32 or 1/8 lohy...YEA!!  First five days we burned 375-400lbs of that....definitely FC2004 was in full effect...nothing was taboo. The floor could have been welded out with a 150 lbs of rod if it was fitted with care.  It drove me nuts but I needed the work.  This job was worked round the clock and different trades were constantly stepping all over each other and tangling up the whole time.  Then we worked on the dam and the front ramp door etc.  Every seam had to have "100%" weld...well "100%" of some metal thrown at it anyway.  The last day I was there some machines were free so they did not want to pay for my rig anymore, they gave me a little air cooled miller on its last legs with leads that were more duct tape and electrical tape then copper.  They also told me the client was bringing over their maintenance crew to finish welding the front, me and my buddy could drag up tonite after 12hrs. I was under the dam trying to nail the overhead and the machine would strike and run about half a rod then steadly get colder till it was about 30 amps to cold by the end of the rod....after about three hours of that crap, thier crew taking my extension cords and unplugging my lights while I was in the dark trying to work and the crapppy unsafe whip arcing off and shocking the beejesus out of my snow/sleet/rain soaked but I drug up.  Man the things we gotta do sometimes to pay the light bill.  The only good thing I can say is they paid my rig and per diem in CASH and I got a pile of expensive firebrick and a little refactory mix for my forge project.

Here is some pics, they could not afford my usual camera crew out there.  I threw in a pic of my last pass on my most recent unlimited 3g plate test for giggles.















My buddy burning rods on terrible coping 1/4" gap or worse.


Good finish to a test plate I reckon

Ah yes, the infamous aluminum smelting furnace did one of these years ago in Michigan what a nightmare. Lots of electrodes those places are mid-evil I still get flash backs of that job.