I think the article misses the mark by not highlighting the huge difference between say, construction / site welding and manufacturing welding. It's sort of a "category error" to lump all jobs together where you happen use a welder.
A lot of manufacuring welding was already low paid and boring, you sit there with your mig gun and make the same welds over and over. Often the hiring pool is "unskilled" labour (i.e, you take people who didn't have the job title "welder") and they train you to operate this one station. These jobs are robot fodder and honestly that's probably a good thing.
Site or construction welding requires a lot more adaptability, e.g. ability to read plans, resolve issues when the plans are wrong, handle different materials, do layout, alignment, jigs etc and provides an endless stream of "one off" work.
(Of course there are a lot more niches than these two!).
These are barely the same market so you'll be confused by the numbers if you consider everyone to be in the "welder" labour pool.
All good points, but I do want to add context for users of this site who don't have any experience with manufacturing or physical trades - the commentary above about manufacturing welding should not be interpreted as welding being a low skill activity.
The same distinction between "manufacturing" welding and "construction" welding should probably just be applied within all types of welding in general. It's all about the application. Welding just sticks two pieces of metal together, so to use glue as an analogy - it can be used to stick macaroni to paper for a primary school activity, or used during surgery to save someone's life. Same action, two wildly different skill levels required for a successful result.
Having spent some time with prototyping shops and custom product manufacturing houses - those welders are insanely talented. There is an wild amount of knowledge required (metallurgy, chemistry, physics, electronics) to be used in practice, and the physical demands (fine motor control, holding pieces or your body under complete control at various angles/positions) should not be underestimated. Couple that with the understanding of the product being produced and how their actions can improve the end design, and you're left with what I tend to see as the closest thing to a wizard as we have in the modern era.
It's like the old saying goes - "Give a man a hammer and everything starts to look like a nail. Give a man a welder and everything starts looking like whatever the hell he wants it to be."
One effect of increasing automation of mass produced parts is that the value of labor goes up because it could otherwise be employed operating mass production. As a result it can become uneconomical to perform the one-off tasks. Even though the assembly line and the on-site are different categories, they're part of the same economy and partially compete for some of the same labor and jobs.
So for example, in the past you might have had a machinist one off you a part. But now that same skilled operator could be programming (or feeding) a couple CNC mills that put out dozens of parts an hour. So the one off machined part is suddenly uneconomical.
(Fortunately 3D printing has reduced the specialized skills needed to produce many kinds of parts, temporarily reversing the trend for some things...)
Same happens elsewhere, I assume: pipework that might have been welded on site 50 years ago is now often assembled from bolted flanged segments (which are now cheaper due to mass production) or whatever-- even though they're more likely to leak/fail over time.
Good news for the people doing the work is that they stay busy regardless. But for those who need the work done, the increased cost of one-off work can be problematic and make some kinds of project impossible to do profitably.
You are right that construction is done in artisanal, small batches. That's part of why construction is so expensive.
That's why prefabricating and manufactured buildings are such an important development: they turn artisanal into mass produced. (Alas, manufactured homes are nearly outlawed in the US. See eg https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2012/10/mobile-homes-the... or countless other articles.)
Related: this is also part of the story of why nuclear power plant construction continues to become more and more expensive, instead of cheaper.
Welding for high stress, corrosive, high vibration, high heat and high safety requirements is extremely difficult and highly skilled labour. And rightly so.
Regarding house building, there is only so much that can be pre-produced. Assembly is still on site, and that will always require rework, nobody can affors the site preparation and parts manufacture at the required tolerance levels to avoid that.
> Site or construction welding requires a lot more adaptability, e.g. ability to read plans, resolve issues when the plans are wrong, handle different materials, do layout, alignment, jigs etc and provides an endless stream of "one off" work.
Also coordination between trades, MEP systems in large spaces need lots of coordination to avoid conflicts.
I agree, it’s hard to imagine instances in which automated welding would help out pipefitters, for example. Automated welding above ceilings or inside a mechanical chase doesn’t seem like it would save much time. The welding robot would need to get onto a lift or be hauled inside the chase. A lot of the battle with pipe fitting is wrestling the large diameter pipes into place so they can be welded. Same deal with tinners, ductwork is generally in places that aren’t easy to access.
I’m much less familiar with the sort of welding that ironworkers do (95% of the construction work I oversee is remodel/working in existing spaces) but perhaps that could benefit from automation.
As a construction professional, construction automation beyond simple things like automated CMU machines seems like a very difficult problem to solve in general, in both the field and management sides.
Totally. On site welders are often more like fabricators too. Also many are specially certified for specific things like pressure vessels, water tanks, oil pipe, underwater, etc. That's all wildly different than the production line welding I've been around.
I agree with your points but still found the article interesting - was also a bit thrown off since "construction" more commonly applies to the site welding you mentioned rather than manufacturing/fab.
Disclosure: I work for General Motors, anything written here is solely my own experience and opinion. I'm not an expert on welding automation, but I've been around it quite a bit.
I think the most important thing to say is: Automation doesn't solve problems; to use automation, you have to solve all the problems that automation will encounter. This is called Design for Automation.
From the article:
> "Manufacturers adjusted their upstream processes to produce more uniform parts with less variability. Part tolerances were reduced in things like metal stamping, jigs and fixturing were made more precise, new handling methods were introduced to prevent parts from being damaged moving between stations, and parts were thoroughly cleaned before welding."
Some notes: the welder may be the cheapest part of the automation solution. A welder is deployed in a 'station' in a 'cell' in a 'zone'. Each of those has it's controller (PLC, robot controller, weld controller) of some type. The station includes some kind of conveyance or handling. There's also a jig or parts holder for every weld station.
There's about 1 skilled tradesperson (electrician) per zone or two. There's also various kinds of monitoring, from cycle times to weld tip temperature. Fun fact: the aluminum welders have little 'pencil sharpeners' that shave the copper weld tips to keep the welds consistent. Aluminum spot welders don't spark like steel welders do.
Every so often, a part is taken off for destructive testing with a hammer and chisel.
In addition to welding, a lot of glue is used in the body shop. Glue is great because it has a lot of surface area, and it stops squeaks, rattles and other noises.
This is all exactly in line with my own experience. Welding itself is a very small fraction of producing welded articles, the prepwork is by far the majority of the work and consistency is an enormous part of that. Without consistency in the supply chain (size, thickness, impurities, surface cleanliness, pre-heat and so on) and in the environment you can just about forget about automation.
Ever see a Macintosh IIci? That was when Apple tried design for automation. It's a rectangular box. Every part is installed with a straight move. There is no wiring harness. The power supply plugs directly into the motherboard. Made in USA, in Fremont.
But it wasn't cool-looking.
There have been phones designed for automation. Some Motorola and Nokia "brick" phones were a stack of boards, with cutouts for thick parts. The stack was compressed together into a rigid block. No wires inside. Very rugged.
Then everybody switched to hand assembly in countries with cheap labor.
Humans are flexible and reprogrammable in a way you can't really understand until after you've tried to deploy and work with automation.
It turns out that "robots are cool" is not on the chief engineer or product designer's list of priorities.
Which is why car plants use robots for a limited number of tasks, almost always involving relatively non-flexible parts that can be placed in a straightforward way.
Paint shop automation is still impressive anytime I see it, even after years of watching it though.
I read this article with interest and was glad to see it mentioned laser welding. When I was about 17 years old (*having lied about my age) I got a remarkably well-paid job in a Silicon Valley laser welding shop, fabricating thermally sensitive fuses of some exotic materials that were fairly difficult to attach to a standard electronics package, hence the exotic method. Fun times, once the lead tech mixed up the gases for the laser machine and we had a nice 50-foot tall pillar of fire on the shop floor that sent us all running for cover.
I feel like I experienced the tail-end of something that was once quite common in the USA, and I was able to afford a decent apartment in Silicon Valley back then on my own with no college degree, though I did see that the folks upstairs in the R & D division were much better paid and had better jobs (I was once sourced to them as a gopher for a couple of weeks) so I went off to college and graduate school and never really told any of those people where I had come from, just nodded and smiled along and used my assembly line background to great effect in getting things done at scale. I pretended I was one of them, and that was a good move.
See what happens when you let the rats out of their cages, governor?
Feels like this article was cut in the middle just before the interesting part, where he's supposed to explain why welding for construction was not automated a much and how all this is relevant to AI...
This author tends to write series on a topic, rather than a single article. This first one is probably just a background on welding and welding automation. The next part will likely delve into the specifics of construction welding, why it hasn't had the same level of automation, and attempts to change that.
- Number of welders declined as US manufacturing has declined in the US. Manufacturing that remains utilized robotic welding extensively. You can be sure the demand for welders in China has been the inverse of the United States.
- Welding use in automotive declined as US manufacturing started using more plastics, metal foams, fasteners & automated spot welders in their operations. It also declined as casting & powder technology advanced, and it will decline further as more car makers adopt mega-castings.
- He cites ship building, but does so somewhat incorrectly. Welding is still widely used in ship building, but there are few ship builders left in the US.
To the larger point, yes, of course AI will displace welders, but its very unlikely to do so for repairs, small runs and specialized applications. Its actually a well paying and in-demand skill, especially if combined with other mechanical skilsets.
Not to mention advanced stamping! Modern automotive stamping (turning sheet metal into complicated structural parts) is an amazing technology that reduces the number of welds required.
^ This. And more advanced design and manufacturing methods that have come as a result of the proliferation of CAD design and analysis software. Also, metallurgy in general has improved leaps and bounds in the past few decades.
Regardless, there is a lot of ways for welding to go wrong. That's a design consideration that engineers try to drive out of the equation, especially in a situation where they're responsible for the safe usage of a multi-ton piece of machinery that can move at 100mph.
You have a ton of different kinds of welding and these are not all the same. Welding up new stuff in series production, welding for reparations to existing structures and welding when producing one-offs are all completely different both from an environmental aspect as well as from the technology and techniques available.
Only the first readily lends itself to automation, the other two are still the domain of manual welding and even the stuff that is automated quite often requires experienced welders to fix up after the robot for things that didn't quite go as they should have to ensure the welds pass muster. And welding robots can't fix their own mistakes (yet).
Welders are artists at making the tools to do the job, jigs (even one-off jigs) and fixtures as well as creative ways to manipulate the tooling (for instance in cramped or inaccessible spaces), pantographs and all kinds of material knowledge go into the mix for a complex welding job. Welders as a rule are highly opinionated (not unlike software people) about how they approach their job, they take substantial pride in what they make and by the time they reach their pension are more sought after than they can handle work-wise. I've seen enough of this world to know that even though the stuff that I make doesn't break and looks reasonably ok that I'm a rank amateur at best compared to a real welder and that it takes me 10x longer and what I make is inferior compared to what an experienced welder can do with their eyes closed.
Welding diverse materials, different positions, material that varies in thickness throughout, material that has been work hardened by cutting (for instance by using a plasma cutter or a blowtorch) and a whole raft of other little details including prepwork and ability for the welder + tools to be brought close to the job make me think that this kind of work is going to be off the roster for automation for a long time to come.
I've done some welding, both with gas and electric. I discovered that doing a good weld requires a lot of experience and skill. Usually, I just made a heap of slag with my welds.
In contrast, soldering pipes is easy. I've done a modest amount of plumbing work, and never had less than a perfect soldered pipe connection.
This article seems circa 2019. Laser welding with flexible, lightweight heads and 1-3kW fiber lasers are poised to change methodology by removing parameters. Smaller, handheld units area easier than glue guns to handle.
Yes, they are easier than glue guns to handle.
But you know, a lot more dangerous.
Particularly since the lasers currently used are invisible and reflected light will still destroy your eyes (or someone elses) at 50+ft, easily. Not to mention the actual laser danger itself (you can easily get a 4th degree burn in an instant).
So despite being easier to get right/handle from a welding perspective, they require significantly more safety precautions. Almost all videos show how easily and quickly they weld or clean or cut. Which is true! It's really easy and fast to get right.
But they also often don't show that you need laser curtains, etc.
You also have to understand what kind of laser is being used to understand what safety equipment to get. It's not as easy as mig/tig where you just get a welding helmet and declare victory,
you have to understand the laser wavelength and required OD to protect yourself.
They are also still really expensive, but that will change.
But using laser welding on like a construction site or whatever the same way non-laser welding is would be quite dangerous.
All of this is why serious safety interlocks/etc are used on laser welding equipment, even handheld, by everyone not making some crazy youtube video.
" A human welder is less productive, but remains more flexible than a robot, and evidently enough welding tasks require that sort of flexibility that much welding in the US is still done manually. Interestingly, the pitch for a lot of robotic welding systems is often more focused on the difficulty of finding skilled welders, rather than on the potential cost savings of a welding robot."
Obligatory reference to the XKCD automation time savings matrix. Most tasks in construction and repair and other low-volume medium dollar activities aren't worth automating because you only do them a few times, and the cost of setting up the automation to work correctly would be significantly more expensive. The value of automation in these domains in quality, which is why you also see it in low-volume high-cost domains like aerospace. If you're going to go to the cost of x-raying every weld anyways, having a welder set up the welding bot to do the actual work makes a lot of sense given the cost of rework.
As an additional note - the cost of the robot is only part of the cost.
You have to bring the parts to be welded together to start with (i.e. some sort of conveyor system - decent conveyor is like $4-5k per meter) and the cost quoted there also doesn't include integration, programming, maintenance, project management, M&E, and support.
As soon as the payback is compelling companies will put it in - but I suspect the quoted $100k here actually ends up being more like $300k-$500k by the time it's installed and all costs are pushed in. Then there is probably a $30-50k maintenance contract that sits on top of it.
> Then there is probably a $30-50k maintenance contract that sits on top of it.
When the Soviet Union tried to get into CAD/CAM, they managed to crank out a high volume of CAM stations, but neglected ancillary things like training and maintenance, so many/most of these machines went somewhere where they sat in a remote corner until someone figured out how to use them, saw brief use, then got put back in the corner the first time something broke.
The maintenance contract is probably very relevant in day-to-day business operations but easy to overlook otherwise. I'm not intimately familiar with this type of work but get the impression most (structural) welders are responsible for their own equipment (and operate their own company/business) or Big Construction Co. rents whatever welder they need from Enterprise Rental Co.
The needs of location-static manufacturing (building a vehicle in a factory; fabrication) will always be different than location-dynamic building (structures etc.)
Readit News
A lot of manufacuring welding was already low paid and boring, you sit there with your mig gun and make the same welds over and over. Often the hiring pool is "unskilled" labour (i.e, you take people who didn't have the job title "welder") and they train you to operate this one station. These jobs are robot fodder and honestly that's probably a good thing.
Site or construction welding requires a lot more adaptability, e.g. ability to read plans, resolve issues when the plans are wrong, handle different materials, do layout, alignment, jigs etc and provides an endless stream of "one off" work.
(Of course there are a lot more niches than these two!).
These are barely the same market so you'll be confused by the numbers if you consider everyone to be in the "welder" labour pool.
The same distinction between "manufacturing" welding and "construction" welding should probably just be applied within all types of welding in general. It's all about the application. Welding just sticks two pieces of metal together, so to use glue as an analogy - it can be used to stick macaroni to paper for a primary school activity, or used during surgery to save someone's life. Same action, two wildly different skill levels required for a successful result.
Having spent some time with prototyping shops and custom product manufacturing houses - those welders are insanely talented. There is an wild amount of knowledge required (metallurgy, chemistry, physics, electronics) to be used in practice, and the physical demands (fine motor control, holding pieces or your body under complete control at various angles/positions) should not be underestimated. Couple that with the understanding of the product being produced and how their actions can improve the end design, and you're left with what I tend to see as the closest thing to a wizard as we have in the modern era.
It's like the old saying goes - "Give a man a hammer and everything starts to look like a nail. Give a man a welder and everything starts looking like whatever the hell he wants it to be."
So for example, in the past you might have had a machinist one off you a part. But now that same skilled operator could be programming (or feeding) a couple CNC mills that put out dozens of parts an hour. So the one off machined part is suddenly uneconomical. (Fortunately 3D printing has reduced the specialized skills needed to produce many kinds of parts, temporarily reversing the trend for some things...)
Same happens elsewhere, I assume: pipework that might have been welded on site 50 years ago is now often assembled from bolted flanged segments (which are now cheaper due to mass production) or whatever-- even though they're more likely to leak/fail over time.
Good news for the people doing the work is that they stay busy regardless. But for those who need the work done, the increased cost of one-off work can be problematic and make some kinds of project impossible to do profitably.
That's why prefabricating and manufactured buildings are such an important development: they turn artisanal into mass produced. (Alas, manufactured homes are nearly outlawed in the US. See eg https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2012/10/mobile-homes-the... or countless other articles.)
Related: this is also part of the story of why nuclear power plant construction continues to become more and more expensive, instead of cheaper.
Regarding house building, there is only so much that can be pre-produced. Assembly is still on site, and that will always require rework, nobody can affors the site preparation and parts manufacture at the required tolerance levels to avoid that.
Also coordination between trades, MEP systems in large spaces need lots of coordination to avoid conflicts.
I agree, it’s hard to imagine instances in which automated welding would help out pipefitters, for example. Automated welding above ceilings or inside a mechanical chase doesn’t seem like it would save much time. The welding robot would need to get onto a lift or be hauled inside the chase. A lot of the battle with pipe fitting is wrestling the large diameter pipes into place so they can be welded. Same deal with tinners, ductwork is generally in places that aren’t easy to access.
I’m much less familiar with the sort of welding that ironworkers do (95% of the construction work I oversee is remodel/working in existing spaces) but perhaps that could benefit from automation.
As a construction professional, construction automation beyond simple things like automated CMU machines seems like a very difficult problem to solve in general, in both the field and management sides.
I think the most important thing to say is: Automation doesn't solve problems; to use automation, you have to solve all the problems that automation will encounter. This is called Design for Automation.
From the article:
> "Manufacturers adjusted their upstream processes to produce more uniform parts with less variability. Part tolerances were reduced in things like metal stamping, jigs and fixturing were made more precise, new handling methods were introduced to prevent parts from being damaged moving between stations, and parts were thoroughly cleaned before welding."
Some notes: the welder may be the cheapest part of the automation solution. A welder is deployed in a 'station' in a 'cell' in a 'zone'. Each of those has it's controller (PLC, robot controller, weld controller) of some type. The station includes some kind of conveyance or handling. There's also a jig or parts holder for every weld station.
There's about 1 skilled tradesperson (electrician) per zone or two. There's also various kinds of monitoring, from cycle times to weld tip temperature. Fun fact: the aluminum welders have little 'pencil sharpeners' that shave the copper weld tips to keep the welds consistent. Aluminum spot welders don't spark like steel welders do.
Every so often, a part is taken off for destructive testing with a hammer and chisel.
In addition to welding, a lot of glue is used in the body shop. Glue is great because it has a lot of surface area, and it stops squeaks, rattles and other noises.
Ever see a Macintosh IIci? That was when Apple tried design for automation. It's a rectangular box. Every part is installed with a straight move. There is no wiring harness. The power supply plugs directly into the motherboard. Made in USA, in Fremont.
But it wasn't cool-looking.
There have been phones designed for automation. Some Motorola and Nokia "brick" phones were a stack of boards, with cutouts for thick parts. The stack was compressed together into a rigid block. No wires inside. Very rugged.
Then everybody switched to hand assembly in countries with cheap labor.
It turns out that "robots are cool" is not on the chief engineer or product designer's list of priorities.
Which is why car plants use robots for a limited number of tasks, almost always involving relatively non-flexible parts that can be placed in a straightforward way.
Paint shop automation is still impressive anytime I see it, even after years of watching it though.
I feel like I experienced the tail-end of something that was once quite common in the USA, and I was able to afford a decent apartment in Silicon Valley back then on my own with no college degree, though I did see that the folks upstairs in the R & D division were much better paid and had better jobs (I was once sourced to them as a gopher for a couple of weeks) so I went off to college and graduate school and never really told any of those people where I had come from, just nodded and smiled along and used my assembly line background to great effect in getting things done at scale. I pretended I was one of them, and that was a good move.
See what happens when you let the rats out of their cages, governor?
Deleted Comment
- Number of welders declined as US manufacturing has declined in the US. Manufacturing that remains utilized robotic welding extensively. You can be sure the demand for welders in China has been the inverse of the United States.
- Welding use in automotive declined as US manufacturing started using more plastics, metal foams, fasteners & automated spot welders in their operations. It also declined as casting & powder technology advanced, and it will decline further as more car makers adopt mega-castings.
- He cites ship building, but does so somewhat incorrectly. Welding is still widely used in ship building, but there are few ship builders left in the US.
To the larger point, yes, of course AI will displace welders, but its very unlikely to do so for repairs, small runs and specialized applications. Its actually a well paying and in-demand skill, especially if combined with other mechanical skilsets.
Regardless, there is a lot of ways for welding to go wrong. That's a design consideration that engineers try to drive out of the equation, especially in a situation where they're responsible for the safe usage of a multi-ton piece of machinery that can move at 100mph.
And the author completely fails to mention the welding that goes into buildings...
Only the first readily lends itself to automation, the other two are still the domain of manual welding and even the stuff that is automated quite often requires experienced welders to fix up after the robot for things that didn't quite go as they should have to ensure the welds pass muster. And welding robots can't fix their own mistakes (yet).
Welders are artists at making the tools to do the job, jigs (even one-off jigs) and fixtures as well as creative ways to manipulate the tooling (for instance in cramped or inaccessible spaces), pantographs and all kinds of material knowledge go into the mix for a complex welding job. Welders as a rule are highly opinionated (not unlike software people) about how they approach their job, they take substantial pride in what they make and by the time they reach their pension are more sought after than they can handle work-wise. I've seen enough of this world to know that even though the stuff that I make doesn't break and looks reasonably ok that I'm a rank amateur at best compared to a real welder and that it takes me 10x longer and what I make is inferior compared to what an experienced welder can do with their eyes closed.
Welding diverse materials, different positions, material that varies in thickness throughout, material that has been work hardened by cutting (for instance by using a plasma cutter or a blowtorch) and a whole raft of other little details including prepwork and ability for the welder + tools to be brought close to the job make me think that this kind of work is going to be off the roster for automation for a long time to come.
In contrast, soldering pipes is easy. I've done a modest amount of plumbing work, and never had less than a perfect soldered pipe connection.
Yes, they are easier than glue guns to handle. But you know, a lot more dangerous.
Particularly since the lasers currently used are invisible and reflected light will still destroy your eyes (or someone elses) at 50+ft, easily. Not to mention the actual laser danger itself (you can easily get a 4th degree burn in an instant).
So despite being easier to get right/handle from a welding perspective, they require significantly more safety precautions. Almost all videos show how easily and quickly they weld or clean or cut. Which is true! It's really easy and fast to get right.
But they also often don't show that you need laser curtains, etc. You also have to understand what kind of laser is being used to understand what safety equipment to get. It's not as easy as mig/tig where you just get a welding helmet and declare victory, you have to understand the laser wavelength and required OD to protect yourself.
They are also still really expensive, but that will change.
But using laser welding on like a construction site or whatever the same way non-laser welding is would be quite dangerous.
All of this is why serious safety interlocks/etc are used on laser welding equipment, even handheld, by everyone not making some crazy youtube video.
Obligatory reference to the XKCD automation time savings matrix. Most tasks in construction and repair and other low-volume medium dollar activities aren't worth automating because you only do them a few times, and the cost of setting up the automation to work correctly would be significantly more expensive. The value of automation in these domains in quality, which is why you also see it in low-volume high-cost domains like aerospace. If you're going to go to the cost of x-raying every weld anyways, having a welder set up the welding bot to do the actual work makes a lot of sense given the cost of rework.
You have to bring the parts to be welded together to start with (i.e. some sort of conveyor system - decent conveyor is like $4-5k per meter) and the cost quoted there also doesn't include integration, programming, maintenance, project management, M&E, and support.
As soon as the payback is compelling companies will put it in - but I suspect the quoted $100k here actually ends up being more like $300k-$500k by the time it's installed and all costs are pushed in. Then there is probably a $30-50k maintenance contract that sits on top of it.
When the Soviet Union tried to get into CAD/CAM, they managed to crank out a high volume of CAM stations, but neglected ancillary things like training and maintenance, so many/most of these machines went somewhere where they sat in a remote corner until someone figured out how to use them, saw brief use, then got put back in the corner the first time something broke.
The needs of location-static manufacturing (building a vehicle in a factory; fabrication) will always be different than location-dynamic building (structures etc.)