September 12, 2019
I would like to begin with a brief overview of AS/NZS 1554 ‘Structural steel welding Part 1: Welding of steels structures’. An excellent standard, AS/NZS 1554.1 states that a welder must be qualified, by welding a coupon in accordance with the relevant acceptance criteria as outlined in the standard. For shutdown work, particularly where welders move from site to site, this can impose a significant cost impost (especially in time delays) due to the need to requalify every time they commence work on a new site. While this is not so much of an issue for workshop-based fabricators, where the shop will have ready access to the welder’s qualification records, it is a major problem for organisations within the resources, power, defence, and oil & gas industries, who will often employ teams of specialist welders to undertake program-specific on-site…