During my life, I welded, supervised welders, engineered welds and inspected welds in many industries. Some welds were acceptable and some welds were rejected. It is important to note these terms, “accept and reject”. Every person (company and personal) involved in the welding operation needs to perform their assigned duties (design, materials, processes, and compliance). When there is a weakness in any one of these functions, the “welder” gets blamed for a bad weld.“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder”. This is also true for welds.

Welding joins pieces of metal by the use of heat, pressure or both. Welding is among the most dangerous industrial activities. It requires an enormous degree of precautionary planning because of the risk of personal injury. Gases and fumes can be significantly reduced with process controls and shielding gases.

With the explosion of welding and metallurgical websites on the internet, why should anyone use a forensic welding engineer/expert?  It is so easy to go online and find welding engineering data, equipment specifications, electrode parameters, welder blogs and perhaps even examples of weld failure assessments by others in many countries from years ago?   Who would want to present these findings in court?

The internet is a great tool for legal research, especially if all you need to do is find a quick answer to a non-consequential welding question or a single failure incident that was classified as “failed weld”, or a list of questions to ask when cross-examining the opposition’s expert witness.   However, seasoned attorneys prefer inputs from a proven welding engineer when organizing a complex court case that spanned multiple years and without precedence in any court.