Welding & Gases Today Editor’s Blog 
  

Here is an interesting tidbit that might spark some ideas for additional sales of gases and welding equipment in your area.

Local jewelry manufacturers in New Mexico have been given an opportunity to be more competitive, thanks to the Socorro County Chamber of Commerce and a grant from the USDA Rural Business Enterprise fund.

The Chamber purchased $54,000 of state-of-the-art manufacturing equipment to be used cooperatively by local jewelers who meet certain small business criteria.

The equipment includes a laser welder, milling machine and vacuum casting machine.

The community qualified for the grant because it meets federal guidelines of being located in a rural area with high unemployment, low wages and few manufacturing or production jobs. The primary goal of the grant program is to encourage economic development in rural communities by retaining and creating additional jobs.

All the equipment purchased is the property of the federal government. Quarterly reports detailing its use must be submitted for three years as a condition of the grant.

It’s a major annual event for the Gases and Welding Distributors Association—the announcement of the new GAWDA board of directors, who will help lead the association through the coming year.

For 2009-10, we thought we’d handle the introduction a bit differently than in years past, when we would publish photos along with brief Q&As to help association members get to know the board a little better.

This time around, we centered the introduction on the theme of the board of directors as “superheroes” of the association, giving of their time and sharing their industry expertise to help make the association and the industry stronger.

In keeping with that theme, this year we developed a five-page comic-book style treatment to introduce the board, which you can see online at http://www.weldingandgasestoday.org/content/1q10/meetboard2009.pdf.

I hope you like it.

George Clooney may be the lead star of the new Hollywood film Up in the Air, but a major supporting role was provided by planet Earth through some amazing footage shot by the movie’s aerial director of photography, Dylan Goss.

Clooney plays businessman Ryan Bingham, a man who spends the majority of his life in airplanes and hotel rooms as he crisscrosses the country for his job as hatchet man for corporations that are downsizing and laying off employees.

During many of the airplane scenes, the audience shares Clooney’s airline-window view of the dazzling Earth below.

To capture these images, Goss spent a week in the ice-cold backend of a Cessna airplane flying at 15,000 feet (aerial photography is typically filmed at less than 1,000 feet), wrapped in winter clothing and breathing oxygen through a mask connected to a gas cylinder.

To keep his camera lens from clouding over in the frigid temperatures, Goss sealed the camera in a glass sphere that was attached to the plane’s fuselage. The sphere was then pumped full of argon gas to prevent the lens from fogging.

The result? Some amazing aerial cinematography that would not have been possible had it not been for Goss’s resourceful industrial gases applications.

The clock is ticking for NASA to stock the International Space Station with all the oversized parts necessary for the station to continue to function beyond 2010, when the Space Shuttle Program ends. After that, according to NASA, there will be no U.S. spacecraft big enough to carry large replacement parts to the station.

Atlantis docked at the space station on Nov. 16. Shuttle and space station astronauts are now hard at work unloading a staggering shopping list.

There are two express logistics carriers (ELCs) that are being installed on the station’s truss. Bolted to the ELCs will be 27,250 lbs. of spare parts, including two 600-lb. control moment gyro assemblies; a 415-lb. latching end effector; 1,702-lb. ammonia tank assembly; two 780-lb. cooling-system pump module assemblies; and equipment for future experiments. 

Crucial parts related to the industrial gases industry that were included in the Atlantis payload were two nitrogen tank assemblies weighing 550 lbs. each that will be used to pressurize the ammonia tank assemblies for the station cooling system; and a 1,240-lb. high-pressure gas tank filled with 220 lbs. of gaseous oxygen for the station’s ventilation system.

A significantly emptier Atlantis will return to Earth on November 27.

.

Are correctional facilities among your gases and welding customers? If not, it’s definitely an avenue well worth exploring—both for the products you sell and for welder training and certification.

Correctional facilities have long strived to provide programs that teach inmates skills they can use once they have are released. Among the skills being taught at some of these facilities is welding—a smart move at a time when the welder shortage in the United States is so severe.

An example of this is taking place in Newcastle, Wyoming, where the state’s Department of Workforce Services has partnered with the Wyoming Department of Corrections to bring welder training to incarcerated individuals so that when they are released, they will be better prepared to enter the workforce.

Most recently, according to the Wyoming Business Report, welding training was offered at the minimum-security Newcastle Honor Farm. A similar program was conducted earlier this year at the Women’s Center in Lusk, Wyoming, to train inmates in heavy equipment operation.

Jeff White, the Employment Training for Self-Sufficiency Program manager for the Wyoming Department of Workforce Services, told the Wyoming Business Report: “The idea behind the program was to partner with Department of Correction. We contacted Eastern Wyoming College and arranged to use their mobile welding lab. They took their mobile welding lab to the Newcastle Honor Farm and conducted a six-week welding certification course on the Honor Farm site.”

The program just graduated six inmates at a ceremony at the Newcastle facility. The inmates participating in the training program were short-term felons who were incarcerated in Newcastle’s low risk facility.

“When these guys get released, they will have this certificate in their hands and be able to relocate wherever they desire, White said. “They will work with our local Workforce Centers to try and find a welding job.”

The goal of the program is to give inmates a chance to earn a livable wage and contribute to the betterment of their families, their children and themselves.

Here’s a great story to share with your helium gas customers.

A farmer in England recently took some heat for setting off a nationwide UFO sighting frenzy with helium-filled party balloons he had roped together and set aloft above his property to show people how to get to his home.

Johnny Hewitt, 35, had packed hundreds of colored helium-filled balloons containing miniature LEDs in a net and floated them above his farm. Little did he know that the glowing mass would catch the eye of UFO-spotters throughout England. The “sighting” wound up being reported on local radio and television. Local astronomy experts suggesting it could be a planet or part of a meteor shower.

As news of the mystery sighting reached Hewitt, he knew immediately that all the fuss had been caused by his party beacon. “I didn’t think it would be so spooky and I certainly didn’t expect it to draw so much attention,” he told the London Telegraph.

No sooner had the balloons been sent aloft, than passersby began stopping to watch it and snap photos with their cell phones. Because of all the attention, Hewitt pulled down the balloons as soon as all the guests had arrived and stashed them in his barn. Later, Hewitt began hearing stories about alien spaceship sightings and suddenly realized that it had been his balloons that everyone was talking about, and immediately contacted authorities and owned up.

Here’s an interesting twist on why some gas cylinders may go missing and where some of them may be ending up.

A metal recycling factory has been causing quite a stir among its neighbors because of loud blasts emanating from the operation. The cause? Gas cylinders hidden inside junk vehicles that are exploding when the vehicles are crushed or shredded.

 According to a manager at the British scrap metal company, the reason the cylinders are being hidden in the vehicles is that the people scrapping the cars want them to be as heavy as possible, because extra weight means more money. While all vehicles are visually inspected on site before demolition, if hidden carefully enough, the cylinders remain undetected until the recycling process causes them to explode.

A local businessperson estimated that there had been close to 40 such explosions so far this year. “It’s like an earthquake; everything shakes,” she said.

 The manager said that the scrapping machinery is built to withstand the impact of the cylinder explosions and that there is little or no danger to anyone. He added that the company is working with a government environmental agency and keeps records of all explosions. The recycler also recently suspended deliveries from one supplier after a series of explosions from its metal.

In our ongoing efforts to stay abreast of the latest in online networking, Welding & Gases Today now has its very own Facebook fan page. If you’re a Facebook aficionado, we hope you’ll take the time to visit our page and join our fan club. We already have more than 100 fans, and there’s plenty of room for more. Check it out!

If you’ve been exploring ways to connect with the community through a service project that taps into the expertise of the gases and welding industry, you may want to take a look at recent event that took place in the city of Marion, Ohio.

In an effort to help their hometown, students at Tri-Rivers Career Center in Marion teamed up with the local United Way to perform 16 service projects in honor of Make a Difference Day, which is being celebrated this year on October 24.

Among those who participated in the Marion event, which took place October 19, were welding students, who create steel bicycle racks designed to coordinate with city architecture and reflect the art and culture of Marion’s downtown area. The students welcomed the opportunity to tackle the project because they were given the opportunity to perform the entire task from design through construction.

Created by USA Weekend Magazine more than 15 years ago, Make a Difference Day is held the fourth Saturday of every October. According to the magazine, millions of people have completed thousands of community service projects in towns throughout the United States during Make a Difference Day.

Other student projects included creating floral designs inside the windows of vacant storefronts, cleaning up local parks, digitally cataloguing downtown buildings, painting boarded-up windows and visiting nursing homes.

The Infrastructurist, a Web site for the construction industry, recently took a look at ten infrastructure-related jobs with bright prospects.

According to the site, in spite of the economic downturn, the global infrastructure sector is poised to see $35 trillion in spending over the next two decades. Moreover, the jobs in question tend to be the sort that can’t be outsourced overseas.

“Most infrastructure work is domestic by nature, after all,” the report says. “And these jobs also tend to be tied to real-world technical skills—unlike many that were lost when America’s bubble economy deflated last year.”

As a follow-up to that report, The Infrastructurist recently added five more “hot jobs” to that initial list. At the top of the list—Certified Arc Welding Technician.

“Arc welding is a common technique of fusing metals, and robotic arc welding—as the name suggests—is this process as preformed by robots,” the site says. “Automation ensures a higher quality of the weld—up to 50 percent better—and increases productivity by up to three times. Who maintains these armies of welding robots? A robotic arc welding technician, of course. As Jeff Noruk, president of industry firm Servo Robot puts it, ‘Robots are like babies. They need care every single day.’”

This is very good news for GAWDA distributors, especially considering that before anyone can claim this “hot job,” somebody else has to invest in the technology and the gases and welding products necessary for this technician to do his job.

$35 trillion in infrastructure spending over the next two decades. Now that’s what I call a market!