Our course ran from 9am to 4pm. I thought it was a bit light-weight to be finishing at 4pm..... until about 3pm when you realise that actually this is quite tiring! Not only on the muscles, but on the concentration and also the eyes. So 4pm seemed like a reasonable time to pack up when you got there.
I was also surprised that there was no tea or coffee available (there was a sarnie van over the road) but on reflection, there just wasnt enough time to stop for trivial things like a cup of tea - this was full on welding. Tom demonstrating, us attempting, Tom guiding, us attempting..... practice practice practice.
The great thing was that we had endless consumables (gas, filler rods, tungsten electrodes - and man we consumed our fair share of those) and endless material to weld together. The TIG machines we were using were the size of a chest freezer and had an endless duty -cycle so there was simply no excuse not to practice welding.
On reflection we must have both welded for 6 hours a day - for 2 days..... thats 24 hours of nonstop welding (if you dont count the numerous pauses to regrind the electode tips that we kept burning off) - so at an estimated welding rate of say 3mm/second (if i learnt anything these last couple of days, its that TIG welding is a 'gentle' process) - thats 250 meters of welding between us [that cant be right can it? the numbers stack up, and we didnt do anything other than weld - even if you halved that figure to account for grinding tips and watching Tom demonstrate - thats still a heck of a lot of welding practice for a couple of amateurs]
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