Welcome to another on-site episode of Weld Wednesdays with AWS brought to you by the American Welding Society. This recording took place at the AWS Inspection Expo and Conference November 8th-10th in Austin Texas. This was by far my favorite event of this year because I got to network with so many legends in our Industry  like Dr. Rick Polanin, Bill Newel, Richard Holdren, Richard Campbell, Brent Boling and many more. The opening ceremony kicked off with the presentation of colors by the Distinguished Navy JROTC from Stony Point High School from Rock Round Texas followed by a keynote presentation by Gregg Boss Woolridge, the only commanding officer to have led the Blue Angels for three tours. Greg’s speech was all about teamwork and operating at peak efficiency. Right after the Keynote we broke out into 3 full days of back to back sessions and networking opportunities. Session topics included, What A CWI Needs to Know, Updates to current codes and standards, Intro to Mechanical Testing, Remote Inspections, Field Heat Treatment, Visual Inspection gauges and many more. It was a great event, if you didn’t have an opportunity to make the conference and you are an inspector or your planning on becoming an inspector, I highly recommend attending the IEC conference next year, it’s well worth it. While attending the conference, I had the opportunity to chat with my good friend and mentor Scott Witkowski, vice president of Republic Testing in Houston Texas, Scott and his team serve many clients in evaluating welders for certification and developing procedures. Scott is a wealth of knowledge and when I run into an issue that I can’t solve, he’s usually one of my first phone calls. In this episode we talk about some different resources and how to avoid some common pitfalls as a new inspector.

 

Visit AWS.org for more information on upcoming conferences.