Unbelievable!

I mange the property maintenance department of a nearby municipality and I had received a call that a chain link fence gate needed attention. I was a double gate 8 feet high and each section 8 feet wide for machines to pass through to access a baseball field. I have never in my lifetime seen such a poor example of welding!!

All of the welds were severely cracked and one cross tube had actually fallen off. There was next to no penetration and wire was just gobbed into the joint. I don't know if these gates were built on site or in the shop but either way they were unacceptable! The install was done during a period I was laid off.

I had the gates brought back to my shop so I could work on them during spare time and under good conditions. I was able to knock out most of the poor welds with a chisel and then cleaned the remainder with the grinder. The notches appear to have been cut with a torch and weren't very close tolerance. I had to do a lot of filling to make a good joint. See photos below:


This is one of the joints, there were a total of 12 joints between the two gates and this was one still intact.







This is one of the gobs of welding wire I knocked out with the chisel

Here's the repaired joint. I painted it with cold galvanizing paint and sent them back to be remounted. I can't believe a fencing company would turn out a product like that!!

I'm not a skilled welder by any means and even I could gob weld better than that!

no prep and galvie will reject metal as well as kill you when you don't remove it.

You sure that was weld and not something out of a birds rear end?

I would be embarrassed to show pictures of my attempts at welding but at least it would look good compared to that pile of bird droppings!

Ask them to use a helmet next time.....

Ray Charles welded that with his feet.

This is the sign post at the local Sonic.

The first weld I ever struck in my life was worse than that.........I was around 13 yrs. old so I had a good excuse.

Old Doug said:

This is the sign post at the local Sonic.

Click to expand...

Pretty good for a 9 year old . . .

It helps to grind the galvanizing off but that so called welding could have been improved with a couple wraps of duct tape.

Ever since the metal squirters appeared, it has been surface weld only.

This guy did not understand, you have to melt the metal together.

That's why Lincoln was very late to the Mig party.

The Sonic sign,could anyone be that haywire ? It must be a modern art sculpture.

It has a tin base around it that covers up all this.