I’ve been looking at estimates for the past week for an orbital welding repair job I need performed in a warehouse that my company runs. The first problem I had in figuring out the best route to take was that I had no clue what that even meant. Someone from our budget department forwarded me the pay order request and I found myself unexpectedly researching the wide world of orbital welding last Tuesday afternoon.
It’s actually a pretty interesting process. Most tubing and piping used for industrial manufacturing purposes have to be fabricated to exact specifications for whatever industry the parts are servicing. That means an arc, the welt made by a highly concentrated gas flame, has to be within a small range of millimeters in order to be useful. Even the most skilled tradesmen isn’t going to be capable of replicating that precise of an arc twice, let alone thousands of times in a row.
So instead of a local union guy, industries rely on machines run by computers that are preprogrammed with the exact arc and material specifications needed for a myriad of applications. While those machines tend to be very expensive, the sheer amount of output they can produce practically pays for the cost of the machine compared to paying the wages of a laborer for a significantly longer amount of time.
Fortunately, however, I didn’t need to authorize buying an entire rig for a single job. I found a company that rents that kind of technical equipment by the day and is willing to ship it anywhere in the country along with someone who knows how to work it. It’s the easiest solution and I ended up learning something along the way.