Hawke wrote:

"Ignoramus32025" wrote in message
...
Signed up for the fall for a welding class, 6-10pm one day per
week. Should cover all welding processes such as stick, mig, tig, and
O/A. I am sure that I will learn quite a bit of stuff and maybe will
get "re-educated" on things that I already learned to do incorrectly.
Would be nice to be introduced to MIG and O/A, also.

i

Which do you want first the good news or the bad news? Okay, I'll give you
the good news. Taking a beginning welding class is in general a good idea if
you plan to do much welding. I took one a year or two ago and since I knew
absolutely nada about welding at the time it was a necessity that I learn
the basics, which I did. The bad news; unless you are very lucky you will
not get nearly as much help from the teacher as you need. There will be a
bunch of other people constantly asking him for his help, so you have to get
in line. The other thing is that all you will learn is the most basic
principles of each type of welding so you won't get very good at any of
them. What it does most is prepare you for the next class where you will
learn a lot more because after the first class you will know what's going
on. So you really need to take about a year to really get things down pat.
I'm glad I took the class, for sure. But I didn't get nearly as much as I
wanted to out of it. Then there was the part of reading the book and taking
tests and having to be graded on everything. Maybe you won't have that to
worry about but I went to a community college and they make the whole thing
like the rest of the curriculum. Have fun and get the fundamentals down as
well as you can because that's all you will probably glean from it.

Hawke

I expect it varies quite a bit. When I took a similar evening welding
class the book portion was pretty much limited to the first class and
just about everything after that was practical hands on time. The
student to instructor ratio was low enough to get an adequate amount of
time with the instructor. There is usually an advanced class or welding
II you can continue in, or given the low cost of most of these classes,
you can easily take it twice if you need more instructor time.