Hello.

I am in a discussion with the organization I work for regarding D17.1 GTAW PQRs and the requirements for base material alloy qualification.

This company is a smaller Aerospace machine and weld shop and have been in business since the 90's. All of their procedures were written, qualified and approved by our customers back then, and we are NADCAP accredited for Fusion Welding and perform Class A, B and C welds. I am aware that Class C welds do not require a qualified PQR. 

The issue I've found is that we only have a handful of PQRs for the entire span of materials we weld. Two for each of the B group materials as listed in Table 5.4 to cover different material thicknesses. So we have two PQRs qualified with 4130 (IB) in two different thicknesses, two PQRs qualified with 17-7ph (IIB) in different thicknesses, so on and so forth.

These PQRs have been the foundation for every single WPS used on literally any material we weld on, depending on the material group found in Table 5.4. They just change out the filler material using the tables found in section 6 or whatever they google is the appropriate filler material for that alloy.

My understanding of the D17.1 specification is, that up until 2017, manual GTAW welds did not require a qualified WPS (D17.1:10 Para 5.4.2). However once 2017 was released, this statement no longer appears in the texts and there is now Table 5.2 which states "A change from one base metal alloy, to another base metal alloy, except a change from one alloy to another within M1" (M1 being B2.1's M1 material group)  None of the jobs we get have an M1 alloy.

My interpretation of that is; Since 2017, we are required to have a PQR and a qualified WPS for each base material alloy we weld on, regardless if it's a manual weld or not AND regardless if Current and Amperage is not required to be listed on the WPS (D17.1:17 Table 5.1).

I have raised this interpretation to the President of the company, the director of special processes and the quality manager. The director of special processes reached out to a couple other similarly sized shops in the area we network with and they've said they handle the PQRs the same way we do currently, only having a PQR qualified on one base metal alloy in the "B" group designated in table 5.4

The quality manager has also pointed to D17.1 Para 5.1.2 which states "WPS, PQRs and Welder Qualifications that were written and qualified to previous editions of this specification need not be revised or re-qualified, within the limits specified herein".  They state that we do not have to update our PQR matrices because of this paragraph.

So I feel like I am either being an idiot and looking for a reason to be alarmed and have missed something, or I've discovered something that not only my organization, but other organizations have failed to address and exposed a rather large compliance issue just waiting to explode on us during a NADCAP or customer audit.

What do you all think?