ABIBLOG USA: ABICOR BINZEL's Welding Blog

Let's face it: for most people looking at Fume Extraction, many of them have never seen fume extractions solutions before aside from extractor arms. 

That means most Safety Managers, Production Managers, or business Owners - and I may be talking to you directly - don't even know what questions to ask themselves before getting started.

The robotic fume extraction landscape has featured few lean, advanced, and cost-effective solutions for manufacturers. While fume extraction for manual welding has experienced a significant spike in new solutions entering the market – from high-vacuum systems to multi-gun units, to countless new fume extraction gun concepts – robotics has remained ignored and mostly unchanged with minimal innovation to speak of.

Fume extraction systems are not all created equally for welding. While the basic premise of a system is the same, and from the outside many look similar, like any product there are a variety of features and specifications that impact fume extraction welding performance in an industrial setting. The factors you will be looking at when sorting through all the choices will be items like:

Fume extraction is becoming a more necessary solution for industrial companies in the wake of continued research findings and government recommendations. Having a good grasp on what fume extraction systems are and how they work is important as you begin to consider fume extraction in your plant.

With fume extraction systems in welding, the filter is usually a non-consideration. After all, it’s the fume extraction system doing all the work, right?

When I read this article from The Atlantic last week on welding salaries and the posits of people proclaiming over the last few years that welders can make $150,000 USD a year, I remembered the countless Instagram and Facebook memes I see claiming similar promises of comfortable lifestyles by getting into one of the more admirable and skilled trades professions out there, and all the welders commenting about that decidedly not being the case.

Welding guns and MIG welding in general come with a lot of talk regarding best practices and how to do certain things right.

GTAW, or TIG welding as the American Welding Society officially calls it, is a welding process where the joining of metals occurs through the electric arc established between a non-consumable tungsten electrode and the base material, both protected in the welding zone, for an atmosphere of inert gas.

If you know welding, then you know, one of the more complicated types of materials to work with is aluminum. Preparation, wire feeding, and shielding gas play a big role in successfully welding with aluminum.

In today’s environment it is absolutely critical to minimize downtime and operate in the most efficient manner. Reasons for downtime are many and varied, particularly in the welding fabrication field. Grounding problems, gas leaks, contaminated material, machinery malfunction and worn components represent a few of the many issues confronted. In MIG welding, one of the most frustrating is wire feed problems and MIG gun liner issues in general.