Safety training for new welders

The Davis-Bournonville course of 1919 put its lecture on the care of the eyes and safety considerations last, after cutting machines and before the glossary. A modern course puts it first, before anyone strikes an arc, for a simple reason: a trainee meets every hazard of welding in the first hour, and knows least about them. New welders face the same fume, ultraviolet light, electric shock, burns and fire as experienced ones, without the habits that keep experienced welders safe, and they put the people around them at risk too.

This chapter sets out what safety training for new welders must cover, how to build safe habits into practice rather than teach them separately, how much supervision trainees need, and how the fabricator dealt with two incidents in its training booths. It names Safe Work Australia’s model code of practice for welding processes, which, as adopted in each jurisdiction, sets out the duties and controls for welding hazards, including information, training, instruction and supervision.

The hazards a trainee meets

Every welding process brings a set of hazards, and a trainee meets them all at once:

• fume and gases, from the weld metal, the consumables, coatings and the shielding gas, which can harm the lungs and, for some metals, other organs;
• ultraviolet and infrared radiation from the arc, which burns the eyes (arc eye) and the skin, and harms anyone nearby who looks at the arc unprotected;
• electric shock, from the welding circuit and the mains supply to the machine;
• burns, from hot metal, spatter, slag and hot coupons that look cold;
• fire, from sparks, spatter and hot metal reaching combustible materials;
• compressed gases, in cylinders and hoses, as Industrial Gases by the Numbers describes;
• noise, from grinding, chipping and some processes;
• manual handling, from lifting plate, positioning work and holding awkward postures.

Arc Welding by the Numbers deals with fume, radiation and electrical safety for arc welding in detail, in its chapter on fume, radiation and electrical safety. This chapter is about how to teach them to people who are new.

Before the first arc

The fabricator’s safety induction for trainees takes about a day and comes before any welding. It covers each hazard in the list above, the controls the shop uses for it, and what the trainee must do: wear the right protective equipment, position the extraction, check leads and connections, keep screens closed, put hot coupons in the marked cooling area, report faults and incidents, and know the emergency procedures. The induction ends with a practical check: the trainee sets up a booth, with the instructor watching, and shows each control in place before striking an arc. A trainee who cannot set up safely does not weld until they can.

Figure 1The fabricator's set-up check before every practice session

• Avoid: Helmet, filter and clear lens correct and undamagedauto-darkening filters tested
• Avoid: Gloves dry, jacket and boots on, no synthetic clothingsleeves and collar closed
• Avoid: Extraction on and positioned at the archood within its working distance
• Avoid: Leads, clamp and gun undamaged; work return on the workno makeshift returns
• Avoid: Screens closed; nobody exposed to the arcwarn before striking
• Do: ? Combustibles cleared; extinguisher in placecooling area for hot coupons clear

Safety built into practice

Safety taught once in an induction fades like any other learning (Chapter 8). The fabricator builds it into every practice session instead. The set-up check is done every time, by the trainee, and the instructor confirms it in the first weeks and spot-checks it later. Inspection of coupons includes inspection of the booth: an extraction hood pushed aside, a lead lying in water, a hot coupon on the bench, are corrected on the spot, in the same way as undercut on a weld. Safe habits learned in the booth from the first day become as automatic as the welding movements, and for the same reason: they are practised hundreds of times with feedback.

Fume in the training booth

Training booths can have higher fume exposure than production, for three reasons: trainees often hold their heads in the plume, because they are leaning in to see the pool; they forget to move the extraction hood as they move along a weld; and practice coupons may be of unknown or coated material. The controls are to teach head position from the first session, to make moving the hood part of the set-up for each run, and to control the material that becomes coupons, as the failure below shows.

This is an illustration. If a trainee’s welding generated fume at about 0.3 g per minute of arc time, and a local exhaust hood captured 90% of it, the remaining 30 mg per minute would need about 30 m³ of fresh air a minute, about 0.5 m³/s, to dilute it to 1 mg/m³ in the booth. With the hood pushed aside and capturing nothing, the same dilution would need ten times the air, far more than general ventilation gives. Arc Welding by the Numbers works through the same calculation in its fume chapter; the point for training is that the position of the hood, a habit, decides most of the trainee’s exposure.

Electrical safety habits

Electric shock from welding equipment is less obvious than arc light or fume, and trainees need explicit habits. Gloves are kept dry and changed when wet, and nobody welds standing in water or leaning on damp steel without insulation. The welding leads, clamp and gun are inspected at every set-up, and damaged insulation is reported, not taped. The work return clamp goes on the work, close to the weld, never on a bench leg or a pipe that carries current somewhere else. And the machine is switched off and isolated before changing a contact tip, a liner or a drive roll.

The people nearby

A trainee’s arc is a hazard to everyone who can see it. Welding screens around each booth, closed whenever an arc is struck, protect others in the shop, and the habit of calling a warning before striking an arc protects the instructor and anyone else inside the screens. Trainees are also taught to protect themselves from other welders’ arcs, by keeping their own helmet on or turning away when someone nearby is welding.

Supervision

New workers are generally recognised as being at greater risk of injury than experienced ones, because they do not yet know what can go wrong or how to recognise it. The fabricator therefore sets supervision levels by stage, not by the calendar.

Figure 2Supervision of trainees by stage

	Supervision	Work allowed
Induction and first modules	instructor present throughout	booth practice only
Fillet modules	instructor in the area; checks each session	booth practice; no hot work elsewhere
Supervised production	mentor at the job; instructor checks daily	low-risk shop welds only
Qualified, first months	normal supervision; first site jobs with a mentor	production within qualification

Trainees do not do hot work outside the booths, on site, at height or in confined spaces until they are qualified for the welding and have been trained for the additional hazards of that work. Confined space entry, in particular, has its own training and permit requirements, and welding in a confined space adds fume, gas and fire hazards that are far more dangerous than in the open shop.

Reporting near misses

A trainee who hides a minor burn, a tingle from a damp glove or a flash from a neighbour’s arc deprives the business of a warning. The fabricator tells trainees from the first day that reporting near misses is expected and that nobody is blamed for reporting, and the instructor reports their own. Each report is discussed at the weekly review with the trainee’s coupon log. Over the first year, the trainees’ reports led to two changes: a second extinguisher between the booths, and a rack for hot coupons that keeps them off the bench.

Health checks

Some welding hazards affect health slowly, and some people are more vulnerable than others. Where the risk assessment or the regulations require it, welders’ health is monitored, for example for the effects of particular fumes, and hearing tests may be needed where noise is significant. Trainees are asked at induction about conditions, such as asthma, that may affect their work, so that controls can be adjusted, and they are told what symptoms, such as persistent coughing or the flu-like symptoms of metal fume fever, they should report.

Heat and fatigue

Welding is hot, heavy work in protective clothing, and trainees, who hold awkward postures longer and more tensely than experienced welders, tire quickly. Fatigue makes both welds and safety worse: a tired trainee lets the hood drift, rests a forearm on hot plate, or misses a lead lying in a puddle. The fabricator limits practice sessions to about two or three hours with short breaks, provides drinking water at the booths, and moves practice to the cooler part of the day in hot weather. The instructor watches for trainees who are pushing on when they should stop, and stops them.

Safety and quality together

The habits that make welding safe and the habits that make it good overlap more than trainees expect. A trainee who positions the work and themselves comfortably, with a clear view of the pool and the head out of the plume, both breathes less fume and makes better welds. A clean, dry, well-organised booth is safer and produces fewer defects from contaminated plate. Proper clamping of the work return reduces both the risk of stray current and the arc instability that causes poor fusion. The fabricator’s instructors teach these as one set of habits, so that trainees see safety as part of welding well, not as a set of rules that slow them down.

Training the instructor

The instructor carries the safety of the trainees as well as their training, and needs to be competent in both. The fabricator’s lead instructor holds current first aid training, knows the shop’s emergency procedures and the safety data sheets for the consumables and gases used in the booths, and is trained in the shop’s risk assessment for welding. When the instructor is away, the cover instructor must meet the same requirements, and trainees do not practise without one.

Records

The fabricator records each trainee’s induction, the date they passed the practical set-up check, the supervision stage they are at, near misses and incidents, and any health monitoring. The records show that the business has met its duty to provide information, training, instruction and supervision, and they show the trainee, the instructor and the manager what each trainee has been trained to do safely and what they have not yet been trained for.

A failure: the galvanised coupon

This is an illustration. In the third month, Ana took an offcut from the scrap bin to use as a practice coupon because the coupon rack was empty. The offcut was galvanised. She welded on it for about twenty minutes with the extraction poorly positioned, and that evening developed the shivering, fever and aching of metal fume fever from the zinc oxide fume. She recovered within a day and a half, but the episode could have been worse.

The fabricator’s response was not to blame Ana but to fix the system: the coupon rack is now restocked weekly with clean steel of known material, galvanised and coated offcuts are kept in a separate, marked bin, the induction covers coated materials explicitly, and the set-up check includes confirming that the coupon material is clean steel. The instructor also checked the extraction positioning habits of all four trainees that week.

A failure: the open screen

This is an illustration. In the first month, Ben struck an arc while the screen between his booth and the next was partly open, and the labourer working beside the booth, who had no eye protection, received a mild flash burn and had sore, gritty eyes that night. The labourer recovered, but the incident was reported and reviewed.

The screens were changed to self-closing curtains, the warning call before striking an arc was added to the set-up check, and the area beside the booths was marked as a zone where eye protection is required. Nobody was blamed; the system had made the mistake easy, and it was changed so that the mistake became hard.

Exercise: hood position and fresh air

Using the illustrative fume figures in this chapter, calculate the fresh air needed to dilute a trainee’s fume to 1 mg/m³ when the hood captures 90%, 70% and 0% of a fume generation of 0.3 g per minute of arc time. What does the comparison teach?

At 90% capture, the remaining fume is 0.1 × 300 = 30 mg/min, needing about 30 m³/min of fresh air. At 70% capture, it is 90 mg/min, needing about 90 m³/min. With no capture, it is 300 mg/min, needing about 300 m³/min, or 5 m³/s, an enormous airflow for a small booth.

The comparison shows that the hood, and the trainee’s habit of keeping it at the arc, does most of the work. A 20-point drop in capture, from a hood left slightly out of position, triples the fresh air needed. Teaching hood position as part of every run is the cheapest and most effective fume control in a training booth.