Show Notes

Passing the CWI exam is a huge accomplishment — but it's only the beginning.

In this episode of the Arc Junkies Podcast, Jason Becker sits down with veteran welding inspector Daryl Peterson to discuss what new Certified Welding Inspectors really need to know after earning their certification.

From ethics and inspection authority to metallurgy, code interpretation, and non-destructive testing, this conversation breaks down the real challenges that many new CWIs face when they step into the role for the first time.

Daryl shares insights from 40 years in welding inspection, including the importance of mentorship, understanding QA vs QC responsibilities, and why gaining experience in NDT methods like PT, MT, UT, and radiography can dramatically improve your effectiveness as an inspector.

They also discuss common industry myths, welding metallurgy concepts that inspectors must understand, and how unethical decisions early in your career can have serious consequences.

If you're a welder thinking about becoming a CWI — or a newly certified inspector trying to figure out your next move — this episode is packed with practical advice from someone who's spent decades in the field.

Topics include:

• What new CWIs should focus on after passing the exam

• The difference between QA and QC inspectors

• Why ethics and integrity matter in inspection

• How NDT experience can accelerate your career

• The metallurgy concepts inspectors must understand

• Common welding myths and misunderstandings

Show Transcript

Jason Becker (00:01.682)

All Darrell, good evening. Great to have you back on the show.

Daryl Peterson (00:04.492)

Hey Jason, how are you tonight?

Jason Becker (00:06.13)

We just saw each other over at the IEC there in Austin.

Daryl Peterson (00:09.71)

In Austin, yeah. It's not like you're too far away. You're an hour down the street from me, so we get to see each other a lot.

Jason Becker (00:11.836)

Great presentation.

Well, yeah, periodically. That's the funny thing. I don't know if you've ever met Jim Bollinger. He lives like 15 minutes from me. He's do right fabrication on Instagram and YouTube and all that. he literally lives like 15 minutes away from me. And the only time we get to see each other is at Fabtech. We have to go out of town to see each other. Yep. No, no, it was great seeing you over there. You had an awesome presentation. I think that entire week was

Daryl Peterson (00:31.04)

out of town, Go to Chicago and you're see him.

Jason Becker (00:41.446)

Well, wasn't a full week, like three days, three and a half days with the pre-seminar, was definitely worth the trip out to Austin.

Daryl Peterson (00:48.078)

You know, I got a lot of comments that the past two years that it was a little dull and they weren't sure if they were going to come back. But this year they thought it just rocked. So, yeah.

Jason Becker (00:59.526)

Yeah, it was packed. Are you going to do the shipbuilding and aluminum conference in April?

Daryl Peterson (01:03.726)

I'm not planning on it. I'm very busy, dude. Very busy.

Jason Becker (01:08.05)

Okay, that's good. Izzy's good. I'm gonna do that one. It'll be my first time at the shipbuilding conference, so that'll be pretty cool. Then I wanna learn some more about aluminum. Aluminum's especially down here in Florida. There's just so many different nuances. Aluminum, yeah, everything. Well, and then like the theme park here. So it doesn't matter where you're putting the aluminum. mean, just just welding it up has its own nuances that I've kind of found out as I've been testing. One of the, I think it was during your presentation, I think you asked how many people would...

Daryl Peterson (01:15.65)

Yeah, the boats and everything.

furniture.

Daryl Peterson (01:27.886)

Yeah.

Jason Becker (01:34.886)

tested M23 material and didn't machine it down to an eighth of an inch. And there was like a sea hands that went up.

Daryl Peterson (01:41.966)

That's just not something that's commonly known right and like I said I back in my younger day We'll talk about this in a little bit as a part of tonight, right? What you don't know right because I tested a bunch of and I if any of you Florida DOT guys are watching that apologize But I failed a bunch of Florida DOT guys that were trying to get their 6061 T6 cert because I kept for for one I kept cutting three eighths and strips

And then I was bending them to an inch and a half ID and they were snapping and snapping and snapping. These guys can't be that bad, right? Years later, I read it and I'm like, oh man, I was supposed to machine that down to an eighth inch and open it up to two and a 16th. I'm like, ooh boy. Yeah, that's how you learn stuff.

Jason Becker (02:28.882)

I just started doing half inch thick test because at that point it allows you to do side bends and with that all I got I can cut like a perfect eighth inch. But I did, I had one group that I tested probably last year, M23, so 6061 T6 material, 4043 wires, all spool gun stuff. And it was all three eights plates. I was like, man, I had to machine it down.

Daryl Peterson (02:34.222)

Yeah.

That's right.

Daryl Peterson (02:53.934)

Yeah, you start getting those F numbers, right? So, you the you go to 5356 or, know, 4043. Aluminum can get tricky really fast, you know, and that's crazy. And so. And again, we're going to talk about it here a little bit. What do you need to know to, you know, once you get your CWI, what do you really need to know? But metallurgy is going to be a big one, right? Because, you know, how many people when when I learned.

Jason Becker (03:04.38)

Yeah. Yeah.

Daryl Peterson (03:21.932)

Now we're going back to the 90s, right? Early, mid 90s. You you study metallurgy and you study the curves and at 1333, you go to a phase transformation. But what does that really mean? Right? And, you know, you get around most, if you're like 90 % of the CWIs, you're going to be working around A36, mild carbon steel. And it doesn't mean squat for that, right? It really doesn't. And all that stuff, you know, you got to preheat and all that.

Until your carbon equivalent or your carbon well equivalent as well, but till your carbon starts really creeping up You know and you get into some fine steel like a 514 a 517 You know, you really don't need to worry about a lot of stuff. I mean how many times have you how many times? I'm not gonna ask you how many times you do but I you can take you can take a weld coupon Straight after the guy gets done welding it dunk it in water and go test it and no

Jason Becker (04:19.718)

I've done it a hundred times.

Daryl Peterson (04:19.982)

Right? We just, you know, but it's 836. It's right in as a vanilla steel, right? You wouldn't do that with 514. Yeah.

Jason Becker (04:24.882)

Yeah. To be clear, just somebody, no, no, no, no. Just to be clear, I've only done that on plates that I've welded because when I would, and the funny thing is, I've got a group of students that I'm going to go test tomorrow and I tested them a couple of weeks ago on stick welding. like, hey, should I quench it? And I was like, no. And I kind of explained the reasons and stuff like that. But like when I was teaching at the school,

Daryl Peterson (04:33.006)

Not for something you're charging for, right?

Daryl Peterson (04:47.02)

Yeah. Yeah.

Jason Becker (04:51.504)

I would always, I never let my students quench their A36 place before we did bend test. Just good practice not to do. But I would always, yeah, when I, you're good. I would do the demos and I'd say, here's how to do the root pass. And I'd quench it and I'd throw back a bit because I'm like, I'm pressed for time trying to, you know, show them how to do all these seven passes, you know, root, fill, inner passes, cap, all that stuff. And then I would like quench it in between or like every third weld. And then we'd cut it up and bend it. It'd bend just fine. But it's not.

Daryl Peterson (04:57.454)

Yeah, but you could, but you shouldn't.

Jason Becker (05:18.93)

a common practice that I would do. Typically, if somebody comes in my well, shop and it's, it's a 36, just, just, you know, I'll do the visual inspection to say, leave it right there on the table. Once it cools down, I'll go back and cut it up.

Daryl Peterson (05:29.89)

You know, it would have been fun, you know, when you did the stringer versus weave. Take one that you quench and see what it does on the short piece. That'd be kind of cool to see, right?

Jason Becker (05:37.728)

yeah?

Yeah, I'll have to let Austin know about that. can probably swing that.

Daryl Peterson (05:42.702)

But you know like with stainless so your young CWI right and You if you're not very well versed or you don't do it with stainless a lot, you know 300 max interpass, right? And why is that? Because you know the way I like to explain it and I Over 40 years. I've learned to I hate to use the word dumb things down, but I

Jason Becker (06:09.554)

it now.

Daryl Peterson (06:10.38)

I've learned to explain it to welders. How's that? That might even be worse than saying dumbing it down. But so when I'm telling, when I talk to people about this, especially when it comes to stainless, I use the Keebler cookie, right? And I don't know if I told you this one or not, but you know, when you, here in Florida, we get 90,000 % humidity all the time, right? So if you've got a Keebler cookie and it's covered in chocolate,

Jason Becker (06:14.652)

Same thing.

Daryl Peterson (06:40.43)

You can leave it out on the counter and the humidity can't get to it because the chocolate is protecting it That's what chrome does in your in your stainless, right? It protects it. That's why it doesn't rust All right, because you got you've got carbon and you've got all the kinds of other things in there But you got added chromium. So chromium is like the chocolate on a Keebler cookie But once you bite into it or let's make it even worse Let's say you left it near the stove and the stove heated up and it melted the chocolate off

Now the humidity gets into your chocolate and it makes it soggy. Well, that's what happens if you don't let your stainless cool to under 300 before you put your next passes on. That's the same thing that happens. So I give my little Keibler cookie speech and people seem to understand that because you can talk about the metallurgy all day long and there goes a lot of things that are technical go over people's heads, right?

Jason Becker (07:36.498)

It goes over my head unless I can visually see the words that you're saying and like read along in a book or something like that and then have you give me an analogy. I'm the same way. It's like, it's like I tried to read that book, Metals and How to Wild them 100 times and like I get to chapter two and it's like, I start dozing off. like I need somebody to like explain this. I think Larry Zerker on YouTube is one that like I've watched a couple of his videos and I was like, okay, it kind of makes sense. He's explaining everything that's in this book is just a different presentation.

Daryl Peterson (07:39.19)

Yeah.

Daryl Peterson (07:44.504)

Yeah. Yes.

Daryl Peterson (07:50.424)

Ta-ta-da!

Daryl Peterson (08:06.254)

Larry did that one, that's like 14 or 15 years old now. And he did the one about the trailer, the Wyoming Weaved, have you seen that one? Oh man, he's had every CWI in there just twisted backwards. They were saying the wrong thing every time, right? You're like, no, no. He was talking about 514 trailer, talking about A514, right? know, putting that hippie 60K rod on 120K steel and.

welding it at Christmas in Wyoming, you're not preheating it. Everything you could do wrong is, he was explaining that and at every step, almost every CWI in there said the wrong thing. They were gonna do the wrong thing. And that leads into what we're talking about tonight. How do you as a new CWI, how do you take the next step? And we talked about a little bit pre-show, especially,

Jason Becker (08:47.89)

Mm.

Daryl Peterson (09:02.798)

Like one of the worst things that can happen to you is like you get, let me back up. One of the things that typically happens, you got a smaller shop, right? And, um, and they take on some work that's code work and they're going to have a third party QA and like, Hey, do you have your, your, uh, WPS is your PQRs and all this. And, and like, Oh my God, you know, we need to see WI. they,

They tap their best welder. Usually they go, Hey, you're the best welder we got. We're going to send you to school. And, you know, you go to 40 hour class and you fail. You become one of those statistics, 75 % failure, because you didn't study for six months to two years before you take the test. And that's unfortunate, but that, that, is the truth. And so now you end up getting it right. You've taken it three, four or five times. You get your CWI. You have no mentors.

That is one of the worst spots you can be in. you, you know, whether you like it or not, you pretty much have god power because even engineers kind of revere, they lean on the CWIs a lot, right? Cause they don't know. Yeah. I mean, you would think, you know, cause we, we tend to revere, I don't anymore, but we revere engineers because like, my God, you know, they went to school for four years and they know everything. I mean, they can solve, they know it all, right?

Jason Becker (10:14.77)

a lot more efficient, yeah.

Jason Becker (10:25.276)

Yeah. I know it. I know it all.

Daryl Peterson (10:28.59)

And they can solve world hunger and everything. But at the end of the day, they're very disconnected from the work, right? Even though they design it. they don't. If you can't say something nice, don't say anything, right? How's that? But as a CWI, need to be able to speak engineer and understand it and turn around and change that language.

to a whole new language where you gotta speak slang, welder slang to the welders, right? So, and then you gotta take welder slang and turn around and talk engineer to the engineers. And I can't tell you how many times, you know, as a CWI, now again, I'm 40 years in now, and I still, you still gotta know your place, right? But I can, I feel like I've perfected the art of

Jason Becker (11:03.57)

Mm-hmm.

Daryl Peterson (11:27.724)

making the engineer think it's his idea to do something, but I'll feed them enough information to get to there. And, you know, because we don't, as a CWI, you should never ever make engineering decisions, right. And know your role. And that's going to go into another thing. QA versus QC. Holy cow. You know, if you're QC, you work for your, you work for the contractor.

Jason Becker (11:33.799)

Mm-hmm.

Daryl Peterson (11:53.622)

So if you got tapped on the shoulder, right, and you work in your shop or whatever, regardless if you have mentors or not, your job is to do 100 % of the grunt work for welding inspection. And I'm going say QC in general, right, when it comes to welding. So you do 100 % of the inspection, you guys certify your own people, all those things that are considered welding inspection related within the code.

You're responsible to do all that stuff. And so you're QC. QA works for the owner, right? Typically is what's going to happen. And you could work directly for the owner, so the buyer of the part, or you could be a third party. So they're going to hire a company to come in and go to your shop, right? Well, now you're not in shop, but you're to go to the shop that's making it. And you're going to go audit for the most part. You're going to audit what's going on.

Jason Becker (12:48.945)

Mm.

Daryl Peterson (12:54.03)

So you're gonna audit and say, hey, that guy right there, what's his name? Well, that's Joe Welder. Can you show me Joe Welder's, he's welding flux. Can you show me his flux for a cert? Okay, so they go get the cert. And you say, what procedure is he using? So can you show me the WPS? So they bring the WPS out. You look at it, it okay, it says it's 7525. Oh, what's he doing welding C10? He's got 10%, right? Or straight argon, or straight CO2. So is he following the WPS?

Jason Becker (13:19.378)

You too.

Daryl Peterson (13:24.13)

You know, show me his continuity. Is he current? So you're auditing, right? So and you use the what's going on. So, hey, your your quality manual says that you're going to put his stencil every three feet. How come it doesn't have a stencil anywhere? I don't see it anywhere. So you're going to All right. When your QA, you should never ever, ever.

Jason Becker (13:27.538)

That's a big.

Daryl Peterson (13:53.368)

talk to the welders about anything job related. Talk to them about fishing, talk to them about guns, talk to them about, you know, where's the good party place to go to on Friday night. Don't talk to them about the work ever. All right. And, you know, if you tell somebody that that welds bad and they misinterpret that, or you tell them to grind it out, then you are directing their people and they can back towards you.

Jason Becker (14:24.081)

Really?

Daryl Peterson (14:25.306)

Yes. the only people that can tell them what to do is their supervision. Now you can talk to the supervision. That's what you're supposed to do. And you, you should as QA figure out what that line of communication, who is your contact person. Right. And then the other thing you really need to do is to learn how to talk to people. Right. you are, you are the new sheriff in town, but you don't need to be the jerk sheriff. Right. Say, Hey,

Jason Becker (14:39.122)

Mm.

Daryl Peterson (14:53.838)

We're over here, I noticed this, the code says this, if we don't get this fixed, I'm going to have to reject it. And you really don't want to let them do a whole bunch wrong before we get it fixed, but you don't tell that to the welder. You just don't, especially if you're QA. If you're QC and you work for the company, the expectation is that you can talk to the people. Now, it depends on your shop dynamics, but...

you the faster you stop something going wrong, the better off the whole shop is, right? Yeah. So again, you got to really know your place as a new CWI or any CWI. You got to know your place, right? What is your real authority and who can you talk to and who shouldn't you talk to? Right. So from a QA to QC standpoint, especially a young CWI that doesn't really have that

Jason Becker (15:27.762)

People are just going to be in a run.

Daryl Peterson (15:51.426)

that dynamic down, that could be tough. it's usually pretty, it's not that common to see young CWIs in a QA role. I mean, usually you should have served a lot of time in the QC role and know how everything's done in the shop before you start auditing shops. But they say, hey, you should be a welder before you ever become the CWI, right? And that wasn't how I worked.

I mean, I went from inspection, NDT straight into CWI. So, you you catch a lot of grief for that, but at the end of the day, if you're a CWI, you really should, there's a lot of things you should learn before, especially before you strike out on your own, right? But I will say, if you don't have mentorship, you're in a world of hurt, right? Because you don't know what you, first of all, you don't know what you don't know.

but you don't have anybody to tell you what you don't know either. Right. And so in that case, I would tell you to seek out CWIs if anybody's offering to be a, you know, a mentor, take them up on it, watch a ton of, a ton of videos, you know, wild.com back when you were on it, man, I learned a lot from that stuff, right. And a lot of stuff I use to teach.

Jason Becker (16:51.141)

Right.

Daryl Peterson (17:18.754)

So there's a ton of stuff out there where there's some outstanding videos that you learn metallurgy, you learn a lot of stuff that you didn't know. And one thing I will tell you that you'll never stop learning. If you don't learn something new every day, you're not in the right profession. Right? And I've been doing this for years. I learn new stuff every day. Right? So yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So.

Jason Becker (17:41.574)

My problem's remembering. It's like, what did I learn yesterday? yeah.

Daryl Peterson (17:49.728)

You know, if you don't have mentors around you, seek them out, seek them out on the internet and go to your AWS, find your local AWS section and go to it because you'll learn who the movers and shakers are and you can strike up friendships there and, you know, make friends with people and get guidance, right? That's so critical. It's absolutely critical.

You know, I can't tell you how much it is. And I know you, you and I have bouncy stuff off each other all the time. Right. And, um, and we have a lot of friends in common and whatnot. Uh, so just find other people that you can get fresh perspectives on, you know, um, I can tell you, learn the codes that you're working with, right. For sure. Because there's, you learn it when you take the test, but there's exceptions to every.

Right? You know, if I ask the question, and the audience, you know, can answer this, how long can low-hydrogen electrodes stay out?

Jason Becker (19:00.998)

You asking me? Okay. So, well, it depends.

Daryl Peterson (19:01.302)

How long? Yeah, go ahead.

It does depend, but how many of your people know that?

Jason Becker (19:07.268)

You got H4R, you got H8R, you got H16R. What does the manufacturer say? Does the manufacturer supersede code or does code supersede?

Daryl Peterson (19:17.062)

So all right, so if you just had a 7018H4, no R, how many hours can that stay on?

Jason Becker (19:24.474)

eight hours outside of the oven.

Daryl Peterson (19:26.582)

Alright 7018H4R

Jason Becker (19:29.532)

Four hours. Is it nine?

Daryl Peterson (19:33.378)

Nine hours. Under, if you're going by D1-1, atmospheric exposure limit.

Jason Becker (19:36.303)

Okay.

I'm thinking tensile strength. So as you go up in tensile strength, it reduces by 50%.

Daryl Peterson (19:44.241)

So H4R, the R means that it's moisture resistant, by the way. So if the supplemental designator is M or R, M is more military, so it's even stricter, but R is the, so it can stay out for up to nine hours. So it was shift, right? I got a story about that too, because I was ready to hammer somebody and they're like, can you, so you gotta learn how to audit too. And I'll tell you about that in a minute. But,

Jason Becker (20:07.378)

you

Daryl Peterson (20:10.698)

I was ready to hammer because I watched them weld these welds all day. The guy went to lunch and he came back and he picked them up, started going. I'm like, gotcha. But I was more diplomatic. I had learned by then. But I said, hey, can you show me, know, how long are you allowed to leave these out? We use them all shift. I said, can you show me where it says that? And they called us QC and the QC got the manager and manager showed me in their quality manual. Like, really? He goes, yeah, let me show you the code. Open the code up and there it is. I'm like, man.

For 20 years, I've been thinking it was, you know, four hours. Well, four hours. I've been thinking four hours, because that's what we all learn, right? That's what you learn in CWI school. So, but you go up. So if you go up to 80, what's the, how many hours can it stay up? Regardless of if it's H4R not. If it's 80, 80, 18. Two hours, 90, 18.

Jason Becker (20:44.114)

Eight hour max. Area four hour.

Jason Becker (20:59.186)

Is it two hours?

One hour.

Daryl Peterson (21:05.614)

118, half an hour. It gets cut in half. now if you're welding on, you ever done any P91 work? So.

Jason Becker (21:07.442)

Half hour? better roll with it right out of the box.

Jason Becker (21:19.16)

Nope. Thank God. If I did, I'd call bill Newell and be like, bill, got myself here. Help me out.

Daryl Peterson (21:22.998)

Hahaha

So even some pretty smart folks can't put two and two together, right? So there's a big thing called hydrogen bakeout, right? So doing a hydrogen bakeout. So you got to preheat it to 400 to weld it. They weld it when you get it. You got to keep it at 400 the whole time, right? So typically you're going to have a heat treat company coming out.

They're going to wrap it with their chicklets. They're going to put their TC's, the thermocouples, for anybody that doesn't know, thermocouples, they're going to put it on there. And they got a machine that's going to read it, right? So you'll have test strips showing that it's at 400 degrees. When you're welding your one, it's going to take excursions a lot hotter, right? But at the end of the day, you have a record to show that you stayed at 400 during the whole time you were welding it. And then...

you have to bring it down to under 200. Usually bring it down about 175. If you're going to do any testing, like a lot of times you'll do mag particle just to see, make sure nothing's wrong with it. Penetrate is still too hot to do penetrant. So you do mag particle before you take it to 1375 to 1425. So 1400 is a sweet spot for that, nine chrome. So at the end of the day, you get

Before you do that, you got to drop it down, take it up to 600 and bake it for one hour at 600, then bring it back down. If you don't bring it down under 200, it won't go through the phase transformation it's supposed to and your hardnesses will be no good when you're done because you have to hardness test it. So I say all that to say you weld that with 100 or 110 or 120. A lot of times they'll

Daryl Peterson (23:18.09)

If you have good rod control, they'll let you, if you can prove you got good rod control, then they'll let you not do the bake out. But they think four hours or eight hours in an H4R situation or nine hours is rod control. But at that tensile strength, you you're only allowed to keep them out of the bucket for literally you got to take it out of the bucket wealth, right? Take it out of the heated rod oven. So.

Jason Becker (23:43.779)

Use it.

Daryl Peterson (23:48.046)

And when I say bucket, want to make sure I'm clear about that. This is a heated rot oven. That's at 250 degrees.

Jason Becker (23:52.316)

portable ones, hold roughly 10 to 15, well, think anywhere from 10 to 15.

Daryl Peterson (23:55.31)

Well, they can hold probably 50 easily, Some of them pretty good size.

Jason Becker (23:58.524)

Yeah. Well, you did about 49 and a half in there.

Daryl Peterson (24:02.638)

I know we had some in Central that were big enough to put a whole can in there. But they need to be kept at 250 degrees. And then now you get into, is it calibrated? Are you checking if it's calibrated? Honestly, I shouldn't be saying this, but the rods don't know the difference between 235 degrees and 250. It all runs off hydrogen. It's staving it off.

Jason Becker (24:06.706)

the whole cannon.

Daryl Peterson (24:31.64)

but they have to have a number in there that you can audit. I get it, but you know, what?

Jason Becker (24:36.786)

You know what I prefer to check mine with? Because I don't trust the infrared guns and any of that stuff is just a regular temple stick. I got a 250 degree temple stick. I'll open it up, reach inside the rot oven, strike the side of it. Okay, yep, we're still at 250. Everything's good.

Daryl Peterson (24:43.5)

Yeah.

Daryl Peterson (24:51.276)

Yeah, I mean that works. mean you can do that. You can use calibrated thermometers. That gets expensive. But at the end of the day, you

Jason Becker (24:57.17)

I just had to pay for recalibration on my Fluke meter. You know it's actually cheaper to buy a calibrated Fluke meter than it is to get your Fluke meter recalibrated.

Daryl Peterson (25:08.82)

I just got mine calibrated.

Jason Becker (25:11.026)

it's like I went in to pick it up from my vendor because I have to outsource the calibration. They're like, oh yeah, we can handle that for you. And because I tried to go directly to the calibration company, they're like, no, you have to go through an approved vendor. I was, okay, cool. So I found my approved vendor and went through them and I went to go pick it up and they're like, hey, Jason, sorry, it wasn't this much last year. But I was like, ah, how much could it be? 500 bucks. And I pulled up the, went to Amazon. It was like calibrated flute meter. It was like 250, 275. And I was like,

Okay, so next February, I'm buying a new calibrated Fluke meter instead of paying twice the price to get it calibrated. And then I'll probably just donate that Fluke meter to one of the schools because all the students get, man, when you bust out a multimeter, like, what's that? And like you show them how you can check your amperage and voltage, you know, while they're welding and stuff. It's pretty neat.

Daryl Peterson (25:59.374)

Yeah, and you know, and now when you're buying these Fluke meters, I mean, you can buy them pretty much anywhere. You can buy them at Home Depot and everything else, right? You still got to get them calibrated, but you got to buy a DC amp clamp meter, right? So and a lot of young guys don't know that either. So I'll run out and go, oh, the AC clamp meter is, you know, 49 bucks. I'll get that one, right?

Yeah, so that doesn't work on the the leads because you're well in DC, right? DC, electric positive DC, electric negative DC. Yeah, but what you don't know you don't know, right? So so yeah, just another one of those things that as a as a new so you just got your ticket. You got a lot to learn. You really do. You're a small gut being a large ocean. So.

Jason Becker (26:30.214)

works every time on aluminum.

Jason Becker (26:52.092)

Yeah. And that's why I wanted to get you on because one of the things like, and that's kind of how this topic came about is I always try to, you know, I work with AWS to come up with specific topics for Weld Wednesdays. And I was just driving down the road and I was thinking about it because I get a lot of questions from new folks that are CWIs and more especially recently, hey, where can I go to work? Who's going to hire me? And it's like, just pump the brakes first. What do new CWIs need to know? So like you mentioned earlier, a lot of shops, what they do is they pick their best welder or,

whatever they think the smartest guy is that stands a chance to take in that test. And I think a lot of the employers kind of undervalue how difficult that exam is to begin with. They don't understand it like the equivalent of an attorney taking a bar exam or a contractor state, you know, a state contractor's exam. There's a lot to it. But if you are, I don't want to say lucky because there's, I don't know anybody that's lucky enough to pass the CWI exam. It's a lot of hard work and dedication, late night studying. You know, you tutor a lot of people to go take that exam.

Daryl Peterson (27:29.71)

for sure.

Jason Becker (27:50.45)

If

Daryl Peterson (27:51.02)

I toot a lot of people that didn't pass it the first or second time.

Jason Becker (27:53.796)

Right. So if you put all that time and investment and money and effort into it and you pass the CWI exam, right, whether it's the first time or the fifth time or whatever, you're all excited. You get your little wallet card. They send you your stamp. You got your certificate. Like you said, there's a new sheriff in town. You really don't know enough to do the job. You know enough to pass the test and it's, know, kudos to you because it is not an easy exam as we've discussed. You have a license to learn now. And again,

Daryl Peterson (28:18.742)

You get a license to learn,

Jason Becker (28:23.206)

Be very careful. You have to understand your roles and responsibilities because what a lot of people think is within the realm of the responsibility and authority of a CWI is not. That's just like tribal knowledge that's been passed down from folks working in the field. man, that guy will pull your shirt. No, he can't do that. That guy will make you fill in the blank. The CWI is, I like to equate it as, I don't want to undersell the CWI program, but you're kind of like the Paul Blarton Mall Cop, right?

You observe and you report. You document. You really don't have a whole lot of authority. You go in, you observe what's going on, and then you report back to whoever you hired or whoever hired you, whether it's the contractor, the owner, third party, whatever. And you say, here's what I found. It's not up to you to provide corrective action or disciplinary action or pull anybody's search. you like understand, you know, go back into what's a QC9.

Understand your roles visit QC 9 or QC 7? Do you want okay? I'm soliciting

Daryl Peterson (29:22.21)

QC1. It's B5.1. B5.1 if you're looking for the list of what you're qualified to do.

Jason Becker (29:31.354)

Okay, check out those documents, but also look into whatever code you're working to. Because again, you know, like what you're going to find in one code may be, you know, there may be something in another code that's kind of takes that away. So just be careful. Know your roles and responsibilities first thing. Be very familiar with what you can and can't do and the limitations of your authority. But also, like you mentioned earlier, find a good mentor. That was one of the things that I didn't have, I still don't.

Daryl Peterson (29:36.003)

Yes.

Jason Becker (30:01.778)

have one in my shop. No, I have have several virtual but when I was at the school is like I got my CWI and then everybody was turning to me for all the questions Waldeck related and it's like, okay, you pass the test. Yeah, you pass the test. You must be the SME. So now that you've got your card, we need to set up a testing facility. Okay, hold on. Let me let let me me dry first. Yeah, let's let the ink dry on the certificate first. But understanding, you know, like

Daryl Peterson (30:04.952)

Hahaha.

Daryl Peterson (30:12.43)

Amazing how that happens, right? You're suddenly the expert that you don't know.

Daryl Peterson (30:24.814)

Back up.

Jason Becker (30:30.886)

Finding a mentor is like the biggest thing. A lot of times, like you said, they pull the best welder out of the shop. Let's say, you know, he studies hard enough, he's, you know, got some gray matter in between his ears. He goes and passed the test and he comes back and they're like, cool, we need you to write WPS's PQR, certify all these guys. You're like, what? No, like, I don't know how to do all that. Yeah, think by the end of the day, I had to look at the back of my calculator with a sticker to write my own name down.

Daryl Peterson (30:49.656)

can spell WPS.

Jason Becker (30:58.374)

But when that happens or when you pass that exam, it's like you're still not ready to do the work. You really need to find a mentor. Hopefully the shop that you're working with, you fall up underneath somebody that can kind of take you under the wing and keep you out of trouble. But for a lot of folks, know, they're like, hey, you know, I've been doing this welding thing for 10, 15, 20 plus years. Everybody keeps telling me my next step is to go get my CWI. Currently working for a company. They spend

the time, the money, the investment, they study really hard, they go take that test. Now they got their CWI card and they want to branch out and go do CWI work. But it's like coming out of welding school. Nobody wants to hire me because they don't have any experience. You got the certificate, but you don't have the experience to get hired anywhere. So what should new CWIs start off with? They get their card. Let's say it's not somebody that has access to a mentor. We talked about going to section meetings. That's a big one.

Daryl Peterson (31:39.148)

You ain't a journeyman when you get out of school.

Jason Becker (31:55.654)

Because I know a lot of our section meetings are heavily attended by CWIs as well as students. But a lot of folks, don't have active, unfortunately, don't have active section meetings and they may not have somebody at their facility, you know, to be able to guide and mentor them or like they're going out on their own. They're one person on an island. Like what's the best steps for them to break into CWI work?

Daryl Peterson (32:21.006)

So my number one piece of advice, now I come out of the NDT world, right? Because in the mid 80s, I went into NDI in the Air Force. I thought it was the coolest thing. it's still the best job in the Air Force by far, in my opinion. But it is the best. Huh?

Jason Becker (32:33.81)

I don't know, PJs are pretty cool. I don't know, PJs are pretty cool.

Daryl Peterson (32:38.722)

So they get shot at, right? mean, when they go in and they save special forces, you know they're badasses, right? So we got the chair force and then we got the elite of the elite. it's like the dynamic is, somebody once said that, yeah, the Air Force is the toughest basic training. I'm like, what basic training did you go to? Because when I went through it was six weeks, right? Yeah. So.

Jason Becker (32:45.743)

yeah.

Jason Becker (33:00.913)

I saw that meme the other day on Instagram.

Daryl Peterson (33:06.466)

We don't go in the Air Force to, you know, to become a Marine. you know, unfortunately the Gulf War made it where it's a couple of weeks longer now. They go through beast week and all that. But at the end of the day, I mean, I was in Arizona. We had one of the two air conditioned shops on the whole base. You know, they brought us stuff and it was, it was clean. The tire shop would tear stuff apart.

vapor degrease it when that's kind of outlawed now. But everything came to us pristine clean. Like I could wear a white lab coat and never get dirty. It was that good, right? And went out and did it commercially in a pulp and paper mill. And it was the exact opposite. But I would tell any CWI, if you have the opportunity to go to work for an NDT company for a year or two, I you'll make good money. So think about how many welders there are.

And then think about how many NDT folks there are. mean, those guys are always busy. Like they're working, they're working 80 hour weeks and, know, Saturdays and Sundays, they're always getting called out. You know, you will never be not employed if you're working at an NDT lab. I can tell you that. But get your PT certs. You you want to get, you want to get your certs. You got to have hours. Like you went to my PT class. So there's a, you got to have,

Jason Becker (34:17.82)

Mm-hmm.

Daryl Peterson (34:33.678)

you know, 12 training hours become a level two. You got to have like 130, I think. I don't remember what it is off the top of my head. PT specific hours. So all together 270. And then you got to have like 450 or something like that. Somebody's going to, you're going to get a lot of complaints because I don't know what the numbers are off the top of my head, but that's all right. That's it. Talk to this guy. So, but there's,

Jason Becker (34:56.786)

I'll just forward it right on over.

Daryl Peterson (35:03.234)

There's total hours in NDT. Well, if you're doing any welding, you're looking at your own welds. That's visual inspection. So you can count those, right? You just make something up. You'll be just fine. But you need specific PT hours. MT is a little bit, you know, it's kind of the same thing, mag particle, especially with the yolk. And, you know, the spray can and the yolk aren't the only, the method C.

Solvent removable PT out of a can is not the only PT method. And you learned that when you took the class, right? Cause I don't do, I don't do limited certs. But mag particles kind of the same way, right? Like you got bench units, you got coils, you direct, and then you got the, what everybody knows is the yolk. But getting experience in those,

Jason Becker (35:42.418)

Hmm.

Daryl Peterson (35:59.234)

becoming an X-ray safety guy. First, you're going to be kind of tagging along with a level two and doing safety stuff. You'll be learning a lot. But you work up to becoming a radiographer and learning how to read film. That's indispensable, Because you got a level two there teaching you as you're there. And then UT as well. And UT is really coming on strong, especially with phase array.

because you don't have to stop working like you do with x-ray. But if you learn basically those four methods, you'll be set for life when it comes to being a CWI, especially an effective CWI, right? So if you take a year or two and you join an NDT company, and they would love to have you because you got your CWI and they'll abuse you. But you also, the great thing about working for an NDT company, you get exposure to structural, you get exposure to bridge.

Jason Becker (36:48.816)

Mm.

Daryl Peterson (36:56.546)

to pipe, because their customers, take everybody, right? So you might be working in oil field one day, you might be working shipyard another. So you get exposure to everything and you have the opportunity to make contacts in the field, right? You learn who's who. They might hire you later on down the road, right? So that's one of the things. So I would say NDT is probably the number one advice that I have to anybody. When you first get your ticket,

and assuming that you are not locked down to a shop, right? So they paid for it, they're going to expect a return on their investment, right? Especially if they spend three, four grand on a school for you, two grand on you staying at a hotel and another, what was it, 12, 13 hundred bucks now just to take the test. So.

Jason Becker (37:35.547)

are alive.

Daryl Peterson (37:53.007)

They could wrap 10 grand. by the way, you buy the books? Yeah, so you can spend 10 grand pretty easy becoming a CWI. So they might want to return on investment, but I would tell anybody, learn NDT. And the best way to do that is work for an NDT shop. If you're not tied down, you're a welder and you want to become a CWI eventually, just go get a job at an NDT lab.

the same amount of money or more. Like initially you're not gonna make, you're not gonna be right up there. It's like an apprentice welder, right? You're not gonna make the big bucks right off the bat. But go into an NDT shop and learn a lot. You'll be exposed to a lot of different industries. And you know, go, you know, I thought structural was it, but man, I really like this boiler stuff or I really like piping, right? So you might find your next big lifelong interest.

by doing that because you get exposed to everything. Plus, you become very, very versed in non-destructive testing, right? And companies really value that a lot. If you have a command, if you've been a level two in the past, they like that. They really, really like that. So that's my number one piece of advice. And I will say this, pay attention to

Ethics right out of the gate. you know, and for full disclosure, I'm on the ethics panel. like Tim Kinneman and myself, and there's a few others, but we listen to cases. So whenever somebody complains about a CWI and they, they actually file a case against the CWI for breaching their ethics, it goes to an ethics committee and they decide whether it's worthy of being heard or not.

Jason Becker (39:24.101)

Yeah.

Daryl Peterson (39:49.76)

And if they decide that it gets forwarded on, and then we listen to it. And I like to believe I'm fair and impartial, but I go by the code and I go by what the ethics are. And so I don't think I'm speaking out of turn here, but we had a case where a CWI who got their CWI in 2025 was told to sign for work that they didn't witness.

Daryl Peterson (40:23.826)

And my understanding is that her boss, is a, what I was told was a 40 year. Now I didn't see his cert tonight because he wasn't really, he didn't file it. So his cert and his certification number didn't come up, but they referenced him as a 40 year CWI. Had advised the manager who was also a CWI that they,

weren't going to sign for work that they didn't witness. And I think the case kind of hinged on active supervision, right? So one of the things about that is that active supervision, is clause 11.25 says that you cannot sign for work that you didn't witness unless, right? There's a comma in there. unless it's...

you provide active supervision as defined in the spec. It's in QC1. And then when you go to active supervision, it only applies to a CAWI. It doesn't apply to a welding inspector. Notice I didn't say certified, but you know, in D11, you got CWI past or present, Canadian equivalent, level two, VT. Then you get down to number five and it's...

A person with training and experience, blah, blah, you know, to get out of jail, free card. So it doesn't apply to those people. It only applies to CAWIs. So you can only provide active supervision over a CAWI. And the people that were doing the testing were not CAWIs. But this had come up like four or five times. They had protested it, right?

And so they filed a case, right? So that was sent up to us to hear. So understand your ethics, know what you're doing. Unfortunately, especially new CWIs that don't know the difference are frequently

Daryl Peterson (42:41.496)

put in a place where they're asked to do unethical things. And you have to, it takes a strong person right out of the gate to say no, right? And I tell anybody, if you don't know, reach out to other CWIs, know, reach out and talk to a bunch of them and explain your situation and see what they think. Cause you don't want to be that new guy with the ticket.

And and you got your CWI and now you do something unethical and you could lose it for life You know you did all that studying and paid all that money for nothing, right? Because you can use it for life. You can use it. You can lose it. You can get reprimanded Nothing at all could happen to you you could get reprimanded you can lose it for The rest of your three-year term. So if you're like one year into it, you can lose it for two years You lose it for a full three. You can lose it for six. You can lose it for nine

We had one guy lose it for 10 or you can lose it for life. So understand what your ethics are and don't compromise on your ethics. That's the one thing that we as CWIs hold near and dear is to make sure that you don't compromise your ethics. Right.

Jason Becker (44:02.85)

I mean, your ethics and integrity in this industry as an inspector are huge. And when you sit down and take the CWI exam, you actually have to read that ethics contract and sign it basically stating you're not going to do any of that. you know, for young new CWIs getting into it, not necessarily young, young as in they just passed the exam, got their card and everything, you have to be very careful. Don't be manipulated. Like you had mentioned earlier, you know, this company

Daryl Peterson (44:07.176)

is your name. That's your thing.

Jason Becker (44:32.476)

They sent you to school, they paid that $10,000 overall cost for room and board and food and travel and testing and training and books and all that stuff. You can't let them put you into an unethical situation where they're like, hey, we paid for this. You need to sign this document. Because that's yours. Regardless who paid for it, it's in your name. That's you. That's your reputation. Because if you get terminated from that company because you're not going to violate your ethics,

guess what, you still have your CWI card, you can still go to work. That company can't take that from you. But if you start violating your ethics, because there's a lot of unethical companies out there, they're like, we'll send you in there. Now we've got a fox in the hen house. We're good. we'll just get, know, Mike's the new CWI, we paid for his training. We'll get him to sign off on all this stuff. No, do not violate your ethics because again, you could lose your CWI. And it's not just a little wallet card. That can be a very, very promising career.

Daryl Peterson (45:02.242)

That's right. That's right.

Daryl Peterson (45:08.94)

There are a lot.

Jason Becker (45:29.412)

if you maintain your ethics and integrity, you know, while you're working throughout your entire career, you maintain that like you could work indefinitely. But you know, signing things like you said, work you didn't witness, you know, signing off on tests that you didn't conduct, signing off on welds that you didn't actually visualize. And because even if you're third, you come up after, yeah, you come up after the fact, like you weren't there during the work, you're there inspecting like post weld

Daryl Peterson (45:37.741)

indefinitely.

Daryl Peterson (45:50.99)

11.2.5, QC1.

Jason Becker (45:58.662)

you know, signing off on welds that you didn't actually inspect. I mean, that can easily verify it.

Daryl Peterson (46:03.63)

And those welds are there forever, right? And I know one of the panels that we heard, the guy that wrote a report and the report indicated that he looked at 43 different locations with over 300 welds is what I would guess. And then the complaint came in and all these, we had 700 pictures of welds. And you're like, how can anybody?

look at this and think it was RA. And it turned out he went up one station instead of 43 and he looked at like two wells. But the report made it appear the way it was written that he had looked at a bunch. Right. So that that didn't fare so well for that person. And I will say this, I mean, because we're not allowed to reach out and talk to anybody. But if the if the CWI

If you're a CWI and you went through what I just talked about you got your You got your certification in 2025 in this case sounds like what you know So this person was a complaint. I'm trying to be very capable what I say This person should know what I'm talking about. I want to say thank you Very much for having the guts to stand up and do the right thing

You know, I'll leave it at that, but that was a post commentary from all of us that this person may have in one year, maybe not even a full year by the time that this complaint was filed. We were highly impressed with that person. So I'll leave it at that. If this person ends up hearing it, you'll hear me say that, you know, kudos to you.

And we encourage that with everybody. Keep your ethics. Keep your ethics. So let's move on. Strengthen your technical competency. Learn every day. Learn every day.

Daryl Peterson (48:19.542)

I will say this. I've been 40 years in here and there are areas of welding that I have no clue. Like I don't know anything, literally nothing about thermite welding, railroad tracks. Dude, I'm a bystander. I don't know anything about it. I've watched it. I've watched it on YouTube, right? I stayed at the Motel 8 last night. Yeah, but...

Jason Becker (48:33.67)

Mm-hmm.

I know a little bit. I've seen a bunch of videos. I've watched... YouTube's your friend.

Daryl Peterson (48:46.646)

To say that I know anything about it other than it's a chemical process, I know nothing about it, right? I stay in your lane. Now, fortunately, over the years, I've been fortunate enough to be structural, ASME boilers, ASME pressure vessels, ASME piping, 1104 piping. So, you know, I've had a pretty good, the standard stuff I'm pretty good at.

been exposed to a lot of alloys, right? Because you get out of A36, your standard vanilla steels, that can go pretty crazy. Nine chrome, we talked about that quite a bit. So at the end of the day, make sure that whatever you're dealing with, that you understand, that you have a firm grasp on what's going on there, right? And I can't tell you in the course of 40 years how many times

that I've made stupid mistakes because I didn't know what I didn't know. And I'm sure there's things I still don't know. But at the end of the day, I'm a lot more confident 40 years in than I was 15 years in or 10 years in. So make sure you really know and don't be afraid to ask. mean, that's the one thing. The member network, you can go on there and ask a question and you will get people that know what they're talking about to answer it.

Now, sometimes there are some things that are way out there and you only may get one or two answers because everybody else is like, I don't know nothing about that. Right. And I've seen that happen. But you will eventually get somebody that has some experience. Right. So and, know, don't be afraid. I'll say this to you. Don't be afraid to share what you do know and ask for what you don't. Right. This isn't one of those careers that you. It won't serve you well to.

Jason Becker (50:34.002)

Mm-hmm.

Daryl Peterson (50:40.75)

say, well, I'm the only guy that needs to know this, right? And I don't need to share it with anybody else. that, mean, yay, good for you, whatever. But this is a career field that we need to watch, watch each other's backs and, you know, elevate every CWI up to the same level. Cause there's so many, mean, how many times you, hear, oh, the widest you can, the widest you can weave is three times the diameter of the rod. Well, what, what code is that in, right? Other than pre-qualified. Where does that show up?

Where do get that from? It's old wives tale. You can't say certified. It's wives tales, right? And somebody heard something somewhere and then it carries and these things, half the CWIs out there believe it, right? And that's just wrong. So make sure you understand, if you're gonna take a stance on something, make sure you really understand it, right?

Jason Becker (51:34.994)

I mean, that's a lot of, know, because you do have a lot of welders that, you know, come from industry, and they might have been trained in the field. That's the only way they know they didn't go through a formal school or anything like that. And so all they know is a lot of those wives tales. There was so many things that when I got into being a CWI or just sitting in the class with Dr. Scott Helzer the first time, I was like, wow, like somebody's been lying to me.

Daryl Peterson (51:50.83)

Hahaha

Daryl Peterson (51:55.928)

Yeah. What? What? You can have a bend test and have an eighth inch indication and still pass? What?

Jason Becker (52:02.844)

Yeah, he's been lying to me for the past 15 years. Especially when we got into the inspection portion in like clause eight. I was like, when it says, there's like a practice question, how much porosity are you allowed to have per linear inch on this? I was like, none. And I was confident. Didn't even open the book. No porosity, no undercut, no none of this. And I was like, wrong, wrong. What do you mean you can have porosity? You can have undercut. You can have certain amounts of discontinuities before it becomes a defect.

Daryl Peterson (52:08.438)

Yeah. That's allowed?

Daryl Peterson (52:17.006)

Hahaha!

Daryl Peterson (52:23.02)

No!

Jason Becker (52:32.082)

I didn't know that. Coming from the field, going into becoming a CWI, there's a lot of things that... Oh, the same thing with rod ovens. Oh, you can just put it in an old refrigerator with a 60 watt incandescent bulb. No. If that refrigerator's not 250 degrees, you're just blowing smoke. So there's a lot of wives' tales, myths, misconceptions about the welding industry in general.

Daryl Peterson (52:46.062)

250 degrees, baby.

Jason Becker (52:56.946)

that you'll learn once you get in there and actually open up a code book. Don't take anything at somebody's word or face value. I mean, there's stuff, you you've told me.

Daryl Peterson (53:01.87)

And then everybody's like, the max undercut you can have is a 30 second. Well, are you talking about statically loaded or dynamically loaded or cyclically? They call it cyclically nowadays. dynamic or cyclically loaded. wait a minute. What if you only have one inch on a 10 foot area that's greater than a 30 second, but less than a 16th? Is that acceptable? There's always an exception.

Jason Becker (53:10.864)

reloading.

Jason Becker (53:29.938)

Mm-hmm.

Daryl Peterson (53:29.974)

Right. And if you don't read, you get you. We all tend to read till we get to the answer, but we don't read past that. And there's the exception. And that's what I'm saying. Make sure as a as a young CWI that you read all the way through. And we preach it when we teach the CWI class. We preach it. Read it, read it, read it, read it, read it. But our our as humans, we get to our answer and we go, OK, got it. Right. So there's always an exception. Right. And I keep saying I could probably argue both sides of any argument.

Jason Becker (53:35.186)

And that's.

Daryl Peterson (54:00.11)

So depending on what side I want to be on today, I could be devil's advocate.

Jason Becker (54:04.562)

Right. I mean, there's stuff that you've told me that Scott's told me, that Bill's told me, and it's like, I take that at face value, but I also say, is that in the code book? And then I'll go back and grab my code book and open it up and, oh, okay. at least now I know, because it's hard to memorize all this stuff, but if I look at the book, more visual. So if I can open it up and say, okay, I've seen the clause, I've seen the table, I've seen the figure. Okay, now I know exactly where to look. So when that situation arises again,

Daryl Peterson (54:11.31)

You go look at it. Where does it say that?

Daryl Peterson (54:21.048)

Table eight one, baby.

Jason Becker (54:33.938)

I where to find that information because the last thing you want to do, know, especially somebody that once you get a mentor, don't ask them the same questions over and over again that they've already answered. So now I'll go back, I'll highlight it. I'll put a footnote in there, a little sticky tab or something just so I don't reach back out because it's happened. I think I've probably called you up before or Scott, a couple of them. like, hey, I'm virtually certain I've already asked you this question and I need to you again.

Daryl Peterson (54:43.554)

Right, right.

Daryl Peterson (55:01.656)

I done forgot.

Jason Becker (55:03.814)

Don't burn that bridge. Write that stuff down. That's one of the things I was talking to somebody the other day. was like, when you have a question that you're not sure of, go ahead and write it down. Start making yourself a little notebook of where to find things. Don't keep calling your mentor up and asking them the same question over and over again, because you're going to wear out.

Daryl Peterson (55:20.85)

I personally don't mind it until you do it like the 10th time, but because you know, I forgot stuff, you know, and I, me personally, I would like to make sure that all CWIs are doing the right thing all the time. Right. And my personal thing is, that if I can help anybody else do better and save them some of the grief that I've been through, I'm all about it. So,

Jason Becker (55:24.37)

Mm-hmm.

Daryl Peterson (55:50.776)

But yeah, so understand the code, make sure you're reading it, reach out, get consensus on stuff. So understand more of the visual, understand your NDT, make sure you have a sense about that. Make sure you understand welding symbols. And you're gonna find once you become fairly fluent in welding symbolism, you're gonna find so many prints because detailers don't know what they're doing.

They're not symbols experts.

Jason Becker (56:23.704)

I had a job that I was asked to consult on and it was the engineering firm sent me the blueprints and I was like, okay, these prints look great. How are you going to weld it up? we want to, we're going to use, we're going to use short circuit MIG. And I was like, not on two inch thick steel. You're not. And I said, on top of that is where's there's no welding symbols. And so like they, I don't know where they pulled these symbols out from. These are new symbols. And

Daryl Peterson (56:38.529)

Nope.

Jason Becker (56:52.442)

I said, yeah, no. gave them the guidebook and everything. was like, reference the symbols off of that. And I said, plus the joint configurations are listed in D11, because they were working at D11. And so they just started putting the joint configurations. They would just draw a weld symbol or quasi-weld symbol, just the arrow and the reference line with the tail. And then they would put the joint configuration details in there. And it's like, no, how big does this weld have to be? What's the joint prep?

like all this stuff because there's a range as you know when you start flipping through the pre-qualified joint details, there's a range. What's that angle going to be? Or the bevel angle, depth of fill, like all that stuff. And so I had to walk through and teach a group of engineers how to read and write welding symbols. I was like, okay, what do you want done here? Okay, this is how you need to draw it out. And you would think they would know that, but they don't. So yes, welding symbols are a huge one. I mean, you got to study that pretty extensively.

Because I think in part A, mean, they harp on welding symbols pretty heavily when you sit down to take part A. So you should be pretty fluent in welding symbols. But if you're not, go ahead, like keep those books just because you passed the exam. Don't throw them away. They don't change much every five years. Keep your back copies. So, you know, if you're working to 2020 and then they release 2025, like what just happened last year, I still have my 2020 edition. I still have my 2015 and my 2010 edition.

Keep those, that backlog. Yeah, you got all yours right there behind you. Keep that backlog of code books because there's certain times when you're working to specific codes or specific projects that you can actually fall back and use previous code books. And if you don't have it, now you gotta hop on the eBay and buy it again.

Daryl Peterson (58:21.294)

You

Daryl Peterson (58:35.21)

Or I can't tell you how many times. So, and one of things I'm going to tell your, tell your listeners is to, read the contract, right? Read the contract, read the contract, see what you're actually supposed to be doing. I can't tell you how many times smaller companies take on jobs. and they don't understand the contract. and so they think that I got one right now.

swear to God, we were talking about it right before we got on here. So I don't want to go too much in depth, but they're doing a job for a city government. Um, they took it on, uh, they didn't, they weren't required to be AISC shop. They let them have it, but, um, they didn't understand that when it calls out the Florida building code, right. And then it, then it references. that code references, uh, AISC 360, which then throws in D one one when you're talking about structural steel. Right. So.

Now they got to certify their welders. They got to have WPSs, PQRs. In this case, we did pre-qualified WPSs because we could, but the way they wanted to weld it, they were going to take the route. That's not pre-qualified. So, you you got to educate them. And then, you know, one of the things is in the Florida Building Code, they rated this thing for risk category two.

They got a 10 % radiography or ultrasound volumetric. They didn't know that. So they didn't quote it that way.

Read the contracts and understand. Yeah, so, you know, learn to read the contract, learn to go through those things and see what's actually required. Be able to interpret fabrication drawings, understand, fit up the tolerances and dimensions. And again, you know, if you got a pre-qualified, those dimensions are kind of laid out for you. You fit up and then as fit, right? That's a whole nother dimension.

Jason Becker (01:00:12.018)

details.

Daryl Peterson (01:00:39.822)

because you love some slop there. But if it's not pre-qualified, know what it is in the fabrication section of D11 clause seven, right? So learn metallurgy, especially again, for the metals that you're welding, right? A36, you've shown it. Again, if anybody wants to go back a few years and look at stringer versus weave, right? You did that. You took them up. What was that?

Ohio or where did you take those to? Troy. Yeah, SelectArt. So the Ben Test passed on both of them. The Tencel, even though it was kind of weird, like one kind of looked like it was gonna fail, but it hung in there, right? So the Tencel's passed, but when you got down to Sharpie Vs and understand that Sharpies are required when you're gonna work in really cold environments, right? So they're not normal, but it's for brittle fracture. You got the...

Jason Becker (01:01:10.726)

Yeah, Troy Ohio for SelectR.

Jason Becker (01:01:23.27)

Mm-hmm.

Daryl Peterson (01:01:38.904)

Weave plates so hot that you cooked it and those failed miserably. Whereas the Stringer plate passed with flying colors. So, and that's not a test you would normally do, but those are things you need to understand, right? And when you watch that, I use that video when I teach CWIs because it's like, that's not something that you know, but when I can show it to them, hey, this is what happens. This is why we want to, this is why we do heat control, right? This is why it's so important. yeah, when you weave,

Jason Becker (01:01:43.922)

Mm-hmm.

Daryl Peterson (01:02:06.626)

Your forward travel goes down. So let's say that your forward travel, you're weaving three times the width. So now you're going three times as slow when you do amps times volts times time, and then you divide it by your travel speed. When your travel speed goes down, your heat input goes up. So if your travel speed is 1 third, your heat input's three times. It's inverse, right? So if you had 33,000 joules, 33,300,

Jason Becker (01:02:27.346)

you

Daryl Peterson (01:02:35.15)

When you were doing stringers and now you're doing three times the wide you're 100,000 joules. You got a ton of heat in there. So understand those relationships. I mean, that's, that's tough. mean, I know tons of CWIs that still can't put that two and two together, right? But that's one of those things that you need to start understanding those relationships.

Jason Becker (01:02:42.631)

Mm-hmm.

Daryl Peterson (01:03:00.0)

understand carbon equivalency, right? I know we got to test on it, but nobody does it. Unless you're in something where carbon is a big deal, right? And the code, our past president, Dick Holdren, and the D11 committee is really looking at changing the preheat tables to be carbon-based, what your carbon content is, to determine what the preheats are. And that's

That's something that I think is going to have a lot of traction to come out maybe 2030, maybe 2035. That's a five-year code, right? But those are things that they're talking about, basing it on carbon equivalency or carbon content, which you can throw equivalency in there because your carbon goes up. Using carbon dioxide bumps your carbon a little bit, right? Versus inert gas. Why is it important to know the difference between inert and active gases? Because it can change your chemistry and your well.

Jason Becker (01:03:58.982)

Mm-hmm.

Daryl Peterson (01:03:59.182)

Right? How the heat affected zone behaves. And that has to do with how much heat input did you put in there? How big is your heat affected zone? Did you preheat it? There are a lot of things that go into that, right? Hydrogen cracking, controlling your hydrogen. That's one. Hydrogen diffusion. It's a video on, it's a 10 minute video on YouTube, hydrogen diffusion. Go watch that thing. And I teach that all the time and I don't know that, you know,

Jason Becker (01:04:22.908)

That's a great video. That's a great video.

Daryl Peterson (01:04:28.814)

Man, I wish I could give a nickel every time I use it in training, right? But that's one of those things that you can see, you know, when they weld bead on plate and they put it in oil and you can see it bubbling up and then, oh, this well maintained 7018 has very little bubbles and a 6010 is bubbling like crazy. And a 7018 that hasn't been maintained in an oven bubbles like a 6010, right? And then, hey, it doesn't bubble anymore, but then we put it in oil, it's at 250 degrees, now it bubbles like crazy.

Jason Becker (01:04:50.386)

Cooking out.

Daryl Peterson (01:04:58.67)

Right? It's showing that that's what it releases a thousand times faster than at room temperature. So that is a fantastic video. It's way underrated. Preheat and interpass control. And when we talk about interpass, know, a lot of people don't know. Hey, we talk about when we're talking about regular carbon steel, we're talking about minimum interpass, right? You can't let it go below whatever your preheated.

But then you get to stainless and you have a max interpass, like 300 degrees, right? For your standard flavors through a 4308, 316, you know, don't let it get over 300 before you put your next pass in or let it cool down under 300 before you put it in the Kepler cookie thing, right? So...

Jason Becker (01:05:32.306)

Mm-hmm.

Jason Becker (01:05:45.778)

think there's some reference to that with aluminum too in D1 too.

Daryl Peterson (01:05:49.846)

Yes, yes. So, and it depends on what flavor you're doing. Add endorsements. know, straight out of the gate, that's kind of tough. But consider it. Like, what is your five-year plan? What's your 10-year plan? Where do you want to be? If you don't have a goal, you won't start going there, right? You just won't start going there. So, add certifications, get endorsements, get your D1. So,

Jason Becker (01:05:53.554)

Mm.

Daryl Peterson (01:06:18.414)

If you don't know what the plan right now is that the CWI program is going to change in 2027. They keep saying 2027 might be 28. I don't know. Maybe 29. You know, the way things go with AWS. the goal is they're going to have the part A is going to be all by itself and you don't need to take it. You can take it at any time. Right. It's going to be a standalone.

the fundamentals and it's going from a two hour to a three hour test. Okay. You'll take that fundamentals before you take your CWI or your CWI or whatever it be for the stepping stone for a lot of different platforms or a lot of different certifications. And then the CWI is going to go to a two part test. It's going to, they're going to drop the C right. And it's going to be part two. I don't know what they're going to call it for now, for the purpose of this we'll call it part B.

And we're going to ISO based, right? So everybody has to take the same test. Well, right now your part C, you can take it on 1104, you can take it on D11, you can take it on, you know, section nine and B311, B313, whatever. Everybody has to take the same test. So they're going to expand the faux code that we have in part B and they're going to wrap the code part into that. everybody, you'll have a faux or fake code.

Everybody's gonna take it and that's gonna be a three-hour test as well. So you're gonna take a three-hour part A and a three-hour part B and whatever they end up calling it might not be part A and part B. But that's the goal moving forward. So anybody taking the test.

Jason Becker (01:08:01.572)

That was part one or part A is that that's just still going to be closed book general knowledge.

Daryl Peterson (01:08:07.084)

That's closed book general knowledge and it goes to a three hour test. They're going to beef it up.

Jason Becker (01:08:11.322)

Okay, I was going to ask if there's more questions because you can, now 150 questions in two hours. That's a lot.

Daryl Peterson (01:08:13.454)

Oh yeah, they're going to beef it up. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So you can look at them. Uh, you can look at them adding about another 75 questions to that. uh, I mean that would make sense, right? So 225 would give you three hours. Yeah. Um, but, and they're gonna, they're gonna, they're gonna make that substantially, um, more robust, right? So, um,

Jason Becker (01:08:23.538)

Jeez.

Jason Becker (01:08:27.802)

Yeah, about 35 an hour.

Daryl Peterson (01:08:42.862)

But that's gonna be like, you're gonna take it, you'll take it at ProMetrics or if they decide to change that, you know, might be somewhere else, but you're gonna take it at a computer testing site. And then you'll take your second part to become a CWI. As it stands right now, it's still gonna be at a circular station. So if it comes to your town or near your town, you're gonna go take it there. The goal ultimately is to...

get it where you can do virtual inspection. Right? And they, in Chicago, did you see right around from your booth, did you see the Oculus testing that they did right there at the AWS booth? Yeah, I know you were busy the whole time, but where the AWS booth was, and there was such bad reviews on the Oculus system. And I played with it. I mean, it's cool. So you...

Jason Becker (01:09:30.599)

Yeah.

Daryl Peterson (01:09:40.614)

You pick up your fill it well gauge and yeah, I mean there was a video of it. Yeah, you didn't get to try it, but that that is the goal and they've got some better technologies that they're working on right now. But that's the goal because right now the plastic replicas and the tools they only have so many that they can send out right? So now right now the masses go to where that is.

Jason Becker (01:09:40.635)

I know what you're talking about, I think you just have to try it.

Daryl Peterson (01:10:07.904)

in the future, they're looking to really make it computer virtualized so that you can do that virtually. And for the younger people, it should work just fine. Kids that grow up, know, PlayStation and PS5, whatever, they should have no problem with it. It's old old farts like us. Yeah, and I believe that they're well, before I say that.

Jason Becker (01:10:28.092)

I was gonna ask, what about us old folks here?

Daryl Peterson (01:10:37.28)

So you'll have up to two years, they're gonna give you, I mean, you pay to take the test, right? But because you're no longer taking it on D11 or whatever, you got up to two years after you become a CWI to take an endorsement. And it doesn't have to be D11, it doesn't have to be 1104. If you wanna take your WPQ1, which I highly recommend that you take WPQ1. I highly recommend you take WPQ2, though it's really, that one's tough.

But, but I mean, you know, as well as I do that the amount of CWIs that do not understand welder qualification or welding procedure qualification is, it's unreal. They just don't have any concept of it. And, you know, they know this much out of a hundred yards. It's crazy. And that's by far out of the ethics.

Jason Becker (01:11:08.076)

I'm do that one next.

Daryl Peterson (01:11:37.294)

and that's what I spoke on in Austin out of the, ethics panels that I've been on far and away. Wilder qualification is the number one. And I've been to say, well, certification, because it's the record, right? And the records being wrong and how wrong they are, for somebody that should know better. yeah, that's the number.

Jason Becker (01:12:00.338)

I get a lot of calls from CWIs just in my area and they're like, Hey man, if I send you over this WPQR, can you check it out? just like, I think everything looks good, but like another set of eyes because they're not dealing with the PQRs all the time or the WPQRs all the time. And you know, like I don't do a whole lot of in-person inspection on things. So when I have like inspection questions, I'll call them. When they have like qualification certification questions, they'll call me.

Daryl Peterson (01:12:05.038)

Yeah.

Daryl Peterson (01:12:25.944)

Well, you're an ATF. I mean, that's your, that's your... Billywag. Yeah.

Jason Becker (01:12:28.417)

It's working like two sides of the same coin. On one side, you go through the test, there's really not much in the CWI exam when it comes to performance qualification. mean, there's a few questions, but when you get down to it and it's like, okay, now the client wants me to go out there and act as the QA, and now I actually have to start combing through a lot of these documents that I don't typically look at, it's kind of like reading a foreign language. And it's easy to miss something from one code book to the next because

Daryl Peterson (01:12:51.106)

Right.

It is.

Jason Becker (01:12:57.39)

what's acceptable in one code is not the other. Like D1-6 and I think I was asking Richard Campbell about that. Like in D1-6, why if I weld stainless steel in the vertical position, do I not get 1G, 2G, 3G like I do in D1-1? But if you're used to just working in D1-1, you think that, yeah, if you test in 3G, because that's the common thing. you test 3G, you get one, two, and three. know, flats and grooves, you're all good to go. But not in D1-2, not in D1-6, you don't.

Daryl Peterson (01:12:58.158)

is not any other or

Daryl Peterson (01:13:25.656)

You're used to D11, right? So in D11, if you take a test on 3-8ths, what do you get? What does the welder get? If you test on 1-1-1, what does it get?

Jason Becker (01:13:31.218)

8 inch to 3 quarter.

after one inch.

Daryl Peterson (01:13:37.984)

If you test on section nine, what do you get if you test on half inch?

Jason Becker (01:13:41.234)

1.5 inches unlimited.

Daryl Peterson (01:13:43.65)

So depending on what code it is, it makes it all the world, right? And.

Jason Becker (01:13:45.146)

Exactly. And the same thing with B2.1 because you go off, because you go wealth thickness.

Daryl Peterson (01:13:50.409)

That's three quarters inch there.

Yep. So, and that's the big thing about B2-1 and so B2-1 and section 9 are deposit thickness. D1-1 is material thickness. So in theory,

Jason Becker (01:14:01.735)

Mm-hmm.

and then you automatically get that weld reinforcement is kind of like a gimme.

Daryl Peterson (01:14:09.954)

Well, think about it like this. If you test on half inch plate under D11, you can't weld on anything thicker than half inch plate.

That's the thickness of the plate you're allowed to weld on.

Jason Becker (01:14:22.493)

On which code?

Daryl Peterson (01:14:23.96)

D1 one if you if you if you take a quarter in also 3 8s would be 3 quarters, right? So so if you take a 3 8s limited thickness, you can't weld on a 1 inch blade

Jason Becker (01:14:35.431)

correct. I thought you said if you test on half and that's all you get. was like, what?

Daryl Peterson (01:14:36.846)

Yeah, no, so I'm, yeah, that was my bad. so if you're good up to three quarters of an inch, you're up to three quarters of an inch plate thickness. Under section nine, it's deposited metal. So let's say that you tested on three eights and you're good up to three quarters, because half inch gets you unlimited, but three eights will only get you two teeth, right? So three quarters. So if you're good up to three quarters of an inch,

and you have an inch and a half piece to weld, you can use welder A to weld the first three quarters inch and you can use welder B to weld the other three quarters because they're only doing the deposit thickness. You can stack welders up. You can't do that in AWS. So just to show your young CWIs, know, knowing those differences, there's a lot you don't know.

Jason Becker (01:15:16.988)

Mm-hmm.

Jason Becker (01:15:28.906)

And it's incredible because I mean, you've been at it for 40 years. You're probably one of the smartest guys I know and you still don't know all of it. But I mean, again, as long as you know where to look, that's the biggest thing. like, don't be afraid to crack open that book and check it out. Because like a lot of times, like I mess around on the forums and it's like, I'll look at it and I'll know and answer and I'm just like, I'm not going to respond to that. Even on Facebook, you know, like you get the whole CWI Brotherhood. A lot of times they'll ask you questions like,

Daryl Peterson (01:15:32.642)

And there's still things I don't know. I know, it's crazy.

Daryl Peterson (01:15:41.846)

Or who to ask.

That's right.

Jason Becker (01:15:57.988)

I'm not going to step in that because I don't have the code book right in front of me because I want to state the clause or the figure or the table where I'm that information from. A lot of people want to go off memory and it's like, don't do that because codes change from one code that somebody asked a question the other day on one of the Facebook posts and it was related to ASME. And one person answered and you could tell by their answers what code books they're familiar with. The first guy like just

Daryl Peterson (01:16:11.746)

So, yeah.

Jason Becker (01:16:26.77)

stated, you know, answer to question A is this answer to question B was this. And he was so confidently wrong that it was like, okay, you're obviously referring back to D11. The next guy, was obviously working in B 2.1. And the question was all about ASME 9. And it's like, no, neither one of those apply to the question that's being asked. So you got to know what code book you're working to.

Daryl Peterson (01:16:46.946)

You know, and your audience, especially on the internet, is terrible, right? Because the whole reason that I launched into the qualification versus certification, and you remember back then, it's been five years now, right? Is because I had a welder that she was friends, good friends with my daughter. I taught her how to weld, right? I wasn't going to certify her until...

Jason Becker (01:17:00.421)

I hear.

Daryl Peterson (01:17:14.766)

We have what we call common arc and she had like eight other contractors accepted her. So I didn't have a problem qualifying and certifying her after that, but I wasn't going to be the first one to do it. Right. Cause I had skin in the game. Uh, when she had, when she was on common arc and if you don't know common arc, you, the welder goes into the booth. Uh, they, they put their plate up three G whatever. Um, one after the other, a contractor will come in and they'll sign off a contractor, come in, sign off, kind of tractor come in. So.

one test they get a bunch of contractors. So when every other contractor signed off on her, I didn't feel unethical signing off on her. anyways, years go by, she lets her search lab and she was coming over to Christmas dinner and she said, hey, can I update? I'm like, yeah. So I brought some plates home from work and I've got the $75

Harbor Freight welding table and and I pull it dude that thing's a great little table man it's a great little table so I drug out I had a Thunderbolt at the time for doing stick welding and Miller Thunderbolt and I had a

Daryl Peterson (01:18:36.908)

I'll think of it, but I had a MIG GMAW with gas and under ASME, because she tested under ASME, know, Fluxcore and GMAW for the person are considered the same process. You update one, you update both. So I had her weld GMAW for half of the half inch plate, and then I had her weld stick the rest of it, because those were the two sorts that she had.

Under under ASME, you can take it in any position on any thickness as long as you test it, i.e. bend test it. You get back whatever you had. So she had she took a 2G, 3G, 4G originally on half inch. She was unlimited. But the armchair inspectors that came out of the woodwork and I excited where we were doing it. You can't test them in 1G and give them all position. I'm like, she's getting back what she had under this clause under section

And that's where it's like, you can't call it certified. I'm like, where are you getting this from? And that's what launched me into that whole thing. But I digress. Getting more certifications, bolting certification would be a really good one to get. Codings is a, get your amp.

Jason Becker (01:19:54.428)

Coatings is another big one. I had no idea about coatings. was like, what do mean you can't inspect a weld if it's got a coating on it? You can't, it's gotta be bare weld.

Daryl Peterson (01:20:04.302)

And I'll say this, if you have your CWI, it's easy to get codings, level one, level two. It's really tough to take a coding CI and get them into a CWI. And you become far more marketable. The more search you have, if you're a CWI and you got bolting search and AMP search for doing coding inspection, my god, you can write your ticket, right? API 653 for doing tanks. mean, get whatever search you can.

Jason Becker (01:20:18.001)

Mm.

Daryl Peterson (01:20:35.05)

Understand that that gets expensive and if you don't have a company paying for it, that's expensive to maintain every three to five years, right? And credentials, get your OSHA, get your OSHA 10, OSHA 30 if that's what's out there. If you work in the mines, get your MSHA, that's a little bit tougher. know, phosphate card, if that's the industry you're working in. Get your Twic card so you can work by seaports, right?

Twit card transportation worker ID. Get as much field experience as you can and get a broad range if you can. Structural steel, piping, pressure vessels, bridge work. Again, if you go to an NDT company, you'll get exposed to a lot of that stuff.

Jason Becker (01:21:21.212)

Now, are a lot of NDT companies out there, do they hire like fresh new CWIs? Because I remember when I went to, I was dropping off plates because we were doing testing third party prior to me getting my CWI. I'd load up all the plates, I'd administer them at my facility, load everything up, take it over there, have it third party tested and all that. They'd run RT on it. And I'd mentioned, yeah, I'm getting ready to go for my CWI. And they offered me a job on the spot.

They said, if you come back with that CWI card, we will hire you.

Daryl Peterson (01:21:51.854)

So as a level three, I can train and certify PT level two. I can train and certify MT level two. I can train and certify VT level two, right? It's four days is all it is, right? And I can get you to pass the VT level two. I can't get you in that. CWI is like the golden ticket, right? Cause it takes six months to years.

Jason Becker (01:22:12.252)

fast.

Jason Becker (01:22:16.37)

That opens the door.

Daryl Peterson (01:22:20.142)

It's huge. they would absolutely now they might not pay you a lot because you're, they're not going to use your CWI a lot right off the bat, right? Especially if you're untested, right? And you're a helper. You're, you're an apprentice when you first hire it until you start racking up your certs and becoming valuable. I mean, you're, you're a helper, right? It's just like when you're apprentice in welding, right? You're not making the, the $32 an hour that the journeyman is.

You're lucky to make 17, 18 bucks an hour. So understand that, that you take a hit, but while you're young, do it while you're young. Do it while you're young, right? Get into it, get all that experience because invest in your future. Invest in your future, right? Take the hit while you're young, while you can go do a lot of traveling too, while you're young. Chase, chase.

Jason Becker (01:23:16.423)

Mm-hmm.

Daryl Peterson (01:23:18.95)

Turnarounds, chase shutdowns, go to remote sites. When you're young, you can stay in the fleabag motel and you can, especially if you get on a job where you can hook up with three other guys, two guys work nights, two guys work days, hot bucket. You can pay 20 bucks a day for a hotel, right? You pay your one quarter of the hotel, make sure you bring your own sheets or you have a second set of sheets so you ain't sleeping in your buddies.

Jason Becker (01:23:46.034)

Sleep and beg.

Daryl Peterson (01:23:47.214)

At the end of the day, there's a lot of things you could do when you're a young kid that, you know, as you get our age, you're like, I stay in the better hotels, right? So but there's a lot of things you can do when you're young. Right. And go do that. Get the exposure.

Jason Becker (01:24:02.226)

very similar to welding. like once you break out welding, once you graduate from high school, or not high school, once you graduate from your welding program, you got a couple of weld certs, like good, it's again, that's a foot in the door, you're going to go in, they're going to train you, they're going to work with you. It's very similar to being a CWI. know, especially like you said, you know, go do the traveling, you know, while you're young, get as much training as you can. Yes, it gets expensive. Try to hire on with a good company because again, those certs are relatively expensive. I know

you know, if you don't have a mentor, like, because I was looking into once I got my CWI, I was like, well, how do I start getting accumulating my VT and PT and MT training and all that stuff? If it has to be done by level three with, you know, they have to have their quality assurance manual and all that if you don't know somebody. And then it turns out, luckily, I do. I recently found out is ASNT. There you go. Reach out to mirror.

Daryl Peterson (01:24:48.91)

Well, luckily you do.

I'm available for hire, by the way. I'll pitch that.

Jason Becker (01:24:59.076)

AS &T also offers classes. Now what you're going to learn in those classes is very broad as opposed to what you're going to learn like if I went to your class. mean yours was pretty broad as well. I you covered a lot more than you know like most scoped words.

Daryl Peterson (01:25:10.584)

So I actually teach, so I teach the, there they are. I teach the ASNT and I don't do the limited certs. So I teach, if you come through mine and you have the NDT hours, you'll get a level two certification that you can do dip tanks or you can do lipophilic or hydrophilic, you do water wash or solvent removable.

So you can do like for just for PT, I I teach all that. So once you accumulate your hours and you can submit to me that you have the required number of hours per TC1A, I'll give you a test to make sure that you're competent in it, right? The practical, the specific and the general, plus your eye test. That's an annual thing.

And if you pass all those, then IW, a certified user level two. So you have to meet all those requirements. Time in the method, time in NDT in general, which for the most part, like I if you've been a welder for a while, you've looked at a ton of welds. PT is pretty easy to get because it's the easiest method out there, Anybody can spend 20 bucks on a can of PT. And it's prevalent. Yolks are not as prevalent.

You get an ultrasonics. So I don't see it but like I got a bunch of UT machines right there. They're older, right? But I still teach it they still work So I teach UT as well, but it takes a long time to get UT And so I teach it like for instance Digital thickness that's a limited cert. I do a limited cert for digital thickness

And once you start rolling your hours there, we go to analog thickness. If you understand analog thickness, going to soundness is pretty easy, right? Because it's the same thing. It's literally the same thing as thickness. You're just looking for indications in between. And once you get that down, it's pretty easy to go to shear wave. Phase array is another large step. And I don't really go that far.

Daryl Peterson (01:27:28.538)

I can't afford the $70,000 for face-to-face equipment. I can buy those for $1,500 all day long, and I have them so I can teach classes for it. Again, it's one of those things that as a level three, if you're going to do it at your company, you need a level three of record. You need to have a written practice.

Jason Becker (01:27:32.112)

No, not yet.

Daryl Peterson (01:27:57.678)

that says, basically, so TC1A is a recommended practice. If you stray from it, you got to write down where you strayed from it. And then you've got like 9712 is more of a rigid standard, right? So at the end of the day, if you're doing TC1A, which is pretty common in America, and that's what everybody still calls for.

As long as you're following the recommended practice as a standard, if you will, you'll do just fine. But if you're going to do that, you got to have, like I said, written practice. Say, how did you get where you're at that says you followed the TC1A rules? You have to have a written procedure because you can't do NDT without a procedure. both of those require level three. To be certified requires a level three.

But you don't need to have one on staff, right? You can contract one. You can sell contract one. I do that, by the way. So feel free to look me up and hook me up. How's that?

Jason Becker (01:28:57.298)

Mm.

Jason Becker (01:29:03.09)

There you go.

Daryl Peterson (01:29:06.958)

Learn the contractors and the owners perspectives, right? Because a lot of times as a welder, you're thinking about being the worker bee, right? And even as an inspector, you're thinking about the worker bee. What's in it for me? But look at the bigger picture, right? Understand the bigger picture, you know? So a lot of guys...

They grow up, you know, welding stick and they think sticks the greatest thing on the planet, right? Well, how fast can you weld a stick? I understand this literally. If you, if you learn nothing else from this podcast, if the blue light ain't on, you're not making money. And I'm talking about the company's not making money. Right? So if I've got, I've got 15 inches of stick, right? I got to switch it out. I weld it down.

Jason Becker (01:29:41.563)

Not very.

Daryl Peterson (01:30:03.352)

Three inches a minute.

Daryl Peterson (01:30:08.066)

Six inches per minute. Six inches per minute, okay? Then you gotta throw your stub away and how much are you throwing away of that, right? Are they using it? Some shops make you use it, you gotta turn in your nubs. Some shops don't care. You'll see some welders will wrap it around, they just use half the rod, whatever. But at the end of the day,

If you could do a self-shielded flux core, right, you're fighting wind or whatever, now you go to self-shielded flux core and you can get 12 inches a minute and you don't have to stop and switch out, you you can weld all day with one spool of wire. You're welding twice as fast and you're not stopping to, you're not stopping to switch out. So.

Jason Becker (01:30:57.326)

And most of those processes are inherently low hydrogen, so you don't have worry about the special rod storage and leaving it out of the rod oven.

Daryl Peterson (01:31:04.75)

And you so yay and nay. mean, you can buy you can buy lower hydrogen flux core, but if you buy the cheapest stuff out there, it's it's not far off from a 6010. So if if hydrogen is an issue, right, and then it's you got to keep them, you got to keep them in their sealed bags and you should keep them in a cool, dry place. Right in Florida, that's kind of tough. But if you have

Jason Becker (01:31:09.404)

certain ones.

Jason Becker (01:31:14.8)

Mm.

Jason Becker (01:31:18.822)

Thank you man. That's him fully.

Jason Becker (01:31:31.634)

Mm-hmm.

Daryl Peterson (01:31:33.55)

If you have a box that you can keep hydrogen out by having those moisture suckers or putting more heat in there to kind of keep it off, a lot of times these dehumidifiers will work great, right? Because you can get down, you get humidity down to 40, 50%. That's huge. And that's what we have at Central, have those in our broad storage rooms to keep the moisture out.

Just make sure that you, so they're like air conditioners. just work on the backwards. mean, but make sure you can drain them out to the outside. Right. but learn, learn their perspectives, right. And why they might choose to do a process like self-sustained or flood core outside versus a stick. communication skills, huge, huge, huge thing. You know, how do you handle conflict? Don't, don't let somebody get under your skin.

You want to get into an ethics problem, let something bother you. You got to have thick skin. Learn how to communicate deficiencies. It's hard to tell somebody that they're doing wrong. When they make a weld, that's their signature. So be careful about how you approach it. It is what it is. Everybody makes mistakes.

You know, everybody speeds on the road. Everybody does something wrong at some point, right? It's how do we handle that and speak confidently, right? And if you don't know, admit you don't know. Say, hey, I'm not sure, but I'll look that up. I don't like to give an answer until I'm 100 % sure because there's a gotcha to everything, right? We've already exposed those. So always, before you commit to something that you're 100 because even if you think you're 100 % sure, don't be afraid to go back and say, look, I looked it up and I was wrong. There's this exception.

Jason Becker (01:33:10.215)

Mm.

Jason Becker (01:33:15.344)

Yeah, all prints.

Daryl Peterson (01:33:28.492)

right, and it covers this.

Jason Becker (01:33:30.278)

especially as a new CWI because you're going to have to go in there, you're have to talk confidently because you're the person that's got that card in your wallet and all that stuff. I've literally met with clients when I've done consulting work and say, I believe it's this way in the code. And I'll make myself a note and say, as soon as I get back to the shop and get in front of my code books, like I wasn't prepared for that question, but as soon as I get back in front of my code book, I will look into that.

Daryl Peterson (01:33:33.131)

Especially.

Daryl Peterson (01:33:56.268)

Yeah, yeah. Report writing. Become an expert at writing reports, And be tactical and strategic about how you do it, right? Be clear and factual. Be unbiased. Don't be biased about anything. Photos. Include a ton of photos, right? And avoid...

Writing opinionated stuff. Be factual, but don't put your opinions in there. Learn welding procedures. Learn procedure qualification methods. And for God's sake, learn welder qualification. Get your, we said get your certifications, get your endorsements, get those endorsements. 100%, 100%.

Jason Becker (01:34:52.842)

I mean, that's a good way, especially as new CWIs, because you got to meet that 80 hours of continued training between your first year and your nine years. So at your three year, you got to submit your work history and a fee. Six year work history and a fee. Nine year, you got to submit work history, a fee, and then your 80 hours of continuity. So you got to make sure. I think what you... Well, I'm getting to that, but what's last 40 have to come from within the last three years, right? I believe that's what it says. Or...

Daryl Peterson (01:35:19.115)

Right.

Jason Becker (01:35:21.626)

you can get an endorsement during your nine year to satisfy the requirements. what we've been talking about here, the WPQ1, which is the endorsement to test and certify welders, or the WPQ2 and or the WPQ2, which is to qualify welding procedures. So both of those will satisfy the requirements of your nine years. So if you're a couple years into your CWI, consider stacking endorsements. I know that's what our mutual friend Andy does, is he'll go out for his endorsements.

Daryl Peterson (01:35:47.574)

And you just need one, you just need one, but...

Jason Becker (01:35:51.25)

He'll go still take continuing education credits, but he'll still take an endorsement whether it's needed or not. I've adopted that mentality from him. I probably have well over the 80 hours that I'm going to need for my nine years coming up in October. I'm virtually certain I've got plenty more hours than I actually need from all the seminars, conferences I go to, but I also did that endorsement in the meantime. I was going to take my WPQ2 and I was like,

Daryl Peterson (01:35:54.713)

yeah.

Daryl Peterson (01:36:06.126)

Yeah.

Jason Becker (01:36:18.106)

Let me hold onto that one until I submit for my first nine year and then I'll take that the second night. Yeah. Right now is not a good time for me to study. Yeah.

Daryl Peterson (01:36:21.998)

Do it in your second nine year. Do it early in your second nine year because like, you know, a good friend of ours, Scott, and I can tell you a lot of people that, hell, I didn't pass it the first time. I mean, and I'm, that's what I do for a living. And I know a lot of people that's tough. I have challenged AWS to look at that failure rate and rework that test. I'm not a fan of it. I'm not a fan of it.

Jason Becker (01:36:40.732)

heard that's rough one.

Jason Becker (01:36:46.748)

That's another reason I'm Hopefully come out with like 2.0.

Daryl Peterson (01:36:51.232)

Yeah, you know, I, the certification department really needs to look at their failure rate on that because, you know, I know people have failed it three or four times and they've just given up on it.

Jason Becker (01:37:03.878)

Yeah. But I mean, those endorsements, not only do they satisfy the requirement for your nine-year renewals, but that also makes you more valuable and equating it back to being a welder. If all you can do is stick welding, all you're ever going to make is X amount of dollars. If all you can do is stick welding, you're only going to make a certain amount. But if you can walk into a company and I can cut, fabricate. can do...

Daryl Peterson (01:37:12.478)

Absolutely.

Daryl Peterson (01:37:20.398)

And if all you well done is A36, I mean...

Jason Becker (01:37:30.704)

stick, MIG, TIG, flux core, AC, DC, whatever you need to do. know, stainless, aluminum, steel, ink and l, titanium, like the more feathers you can put in your...

Daryl Peterson (01:37:35.886)

Stainless, Inconel, yep. You then are somebody.

Jason Becker (01:37:43.472)

the more money you can charge. It's the same thing in the inspection industry. All you have is a CWI card. You're very limited as we talked about earlier in the episode as to what you can and can't do. Like, got my CWI. Exactly. got my CWI.

Daryl Peterson (01:37:46.99)

for sure.

Daryl Peterson (01:37:52.854)

And nobody wants to hire you, right? Nobody. The biggest thing you hear, green CWIs, how do I get a job? How do I get a job? How do I get a job? You don't realize how much you don't know. You just don't.

Jason Becker (01:38:05.308)

Yeah. And you don't realize that about the third year. And like when I got my CWI, was like, what do mean I can't do dye penetrant? Like I know how to read the instructions on the back of the box. I'm a certified welding inspector. what do you mean? that's a separate endorsement. that's a separate, that's a separate testing entity. It doesn't even fall under AWS. Okay. So like, and that's not things that are like, that's not taught in the program. And again,

Daryl Peterson (01:38:09.449)

Yeah.

Daryl Peterson (01:38:26.382)

Yeah.

Daryl Peterson (01:38:31.01)

No, no.

Jason Becker (01:38:32.902)

coming out of that, you know, once you get your certified welding inspector endorsement and all that, you got your card, you really don't know what you don't know. And that's why again, going back to finding a mentor, getting involved with your section, participating on the forums, finding somebody hopefully at work, or hiring into a new company where you have a mentor, you've got access to somebody you can ask all these questions to because if you don't know what you don't know, you don't even know what questions you're supposed to be asking. And you think you've got all this

Daryl Peterson (01:38:59.448)

You know you.

Jason Becker (01:39:00.786)

this power and authority that you really don't have, you know, to do a lot of things that people are going to ask you to do. I get people that call me up, they're like, Hey, can you do an inspection? I was like, I sure can. Like I'm certified to do that. What do you need? Oh, wait, we need, you know, it's gotta be die-pending. was like, whoa, whoa, hold on. I got a guy you can call. I'm not certified. What do mean? You're a certified welding inspector. That doesn't, I mean, I took Darrell's class, I slept at a couple of holiday ends, but I don't do that stuff day in and day out. And

Daryl Peterson (01:39:04.642)

No. No.

Daryl Peterson (01:39:22.776)

No. Stay in your lane.

Jason Becker (01:39:29.65)

I'm not comfortable writing the report. I mean, I still got the certificates hanging up. Well, they're not hanging up yet, but I still got the certificates from taking your class, level one, level two, PT, MT, and what we do, MT, PT, and VT. I think those three, but I don't have enough hours on there to be certified to go out there and do it. I've passed the test. I got the training. I passed some tests, practical and written, but yeah, no, I'll refer you to somebody again.

Daryl Peterson (01:39:47.042)

to be certified as a level two. But you got the training.

Jason Becker (01:39:57.932)

know what you understand, knowing what you don't know. You know, it's like, know well enough to stay away from keeping myself out of sticky situations. But if you're new CWI and you go out there and you just start spraying stuff down or you buy a mag particle kit and you start turning in reports, you're not authorized to be right. And you're going to get, you know, pulled on the red carpet pretty quick.

Daryl Peterson (01:40:18.734)

Yeah, for sure. You know, if you start going, you start chasing these shutdowns, and one thing, a lot of times companies are looking for the total QC package, right? And so what does that mean? And that's something that's very foreign to CWIs, but you know, if you go to an ASME company or whatever, and they hire you as a CWI in their QC, they're gonna want you to write inspection and test plans.

Well, you need to know the codes. You need to know the contract, if there's any stipulations in there. But you need to find out where it says, you got to do 5 % x-ray, right? And it's got to cover all your welders. So you need to write that into your inspection plan, right? And where are you going to do it? When are you going to do it? At what point are you going to do it? Who's going to witness it?

does your customer need to witness it? So you have, hey, this is what the contractor is responsible for, this is what the owner is responsible for. And they may wanna just review it or they may wanna witness it, right? So inspection and test plans, your project documents, material inspection reports, MTRs, Cutting inspections, fit up inspections.

You maybe have hold points, you fit it up, you hold it, especially if you've got AI involved. If the AI sets a hold point, you can't go past that point until he comes out and looks at it. Understand WPSs, PQRs, welder qualifications, any weld audits that you need to be doing, your visual inspections, your dimensional inspections, non-destructive testing. Hey, when do you need to do the NDT? When do they need to be here?

What's the acceptance criteria for all that? Any painting inspections that need to be done, coatings inspections, any load testing or pressure testing, especially in the ASME world, 1.5 times the rated pressure, M-A-W-P. So you need to know all those things, right? And those things that you don't know as a young CWI, it's pretty rare for a young CWI to know those things.

Jason Becker (01:42:41.222)

That wouldn't

Daryl Peterson (01:42:42.894)

You know, build your, oh, I can't tell you how many pressure tests we've done, right? And so talking about pressure testing, just real quick, like if you don't know what you don't know, you can get trouble pretty quick. So let's say that you've got a 20 foot vessel, 20 foot tall, right? You got to test it. it's 100 W, it's 100 PSI.

So you've to test it to 150 psi. Where do you put your pressure gauge?

Daryl Peterson (01:43:19.798)

at the top because at the bottom you got artificial head pressure. So all that weight of that water is adding pressure. You need to test it at the very top. So you're actually getting more than 150 at the bottom of the tank. But by code, you got to test it at the highest point. So there are a lot of things. say, you don't know, you don't know what you don't know until you do it, right? And hopefully you have somebody has created an ITP that knows what the hell is going on.

Jason Becker (01:43:19.868)

That's it. Okay. Yeah.

Jason Becker (01:43:38.076)

Mm-hmm.

Daryl Peterson (01:43:49.792)

and you're able to, as a young guy, come in and learn on the job, right, under somebody else, so you're being mentored. But that's why you wanna get out and do these things, right? So, absolutely.

Jason Becker (01:44:01.234)

These are all the things that aren't listed in the brochure and like, Hey, CWI, or, know, when they, when the company man taps you on the shoulder is like, Hey, tag, you're at, you're to go take the CWI program. And, you know, if you're, again, if you're a welder out there you're like, okay, I want to take the next step in my career. I think I'm going to go pursue my CWI. These are some of the things you got to consider as to, you know, like what that scope entails, because you've been a welder for, you know, like I was a welder for

damn, like 20, yeah, 20 some odd years before I pulled the trigger to go get my CWI. And it was like, I knew welding. Well, the more I learned about welding, the more I realized that I knew anything about welding. Yeah, like I knew welding pretty well. That helped me out on my CWI exam. But like once I got into doing my CWI, it's literally like changing careers. It's like, there's some nuances. A lot of stuff's very similar, you know, but it's a completely different world. It's a different realm. It's a different ballgame.

Daryl Peterson (01:44:35.565)

The more you realize you did learn.

Daryl Peterson (01:44:47.458)

It is.

Jason Becker (01:44:54.98)

And you also have to be comfortable because everybody thinks that, you know, because that CWI, that's the next step in my welding journey. You may have to take a pay cut initially until you start getting that experience. It's just like any other job. You can't walk into a job and demand top pay right off the rip with having the bare minimum skills. I see a lot of kids that come out of welding school and they think, you know, I'm God's gift to welding. You should pay me six figures because, you know, I

Daryl Peterson (01:45:08.386)

You're the apprentice.

Jason Becker (01:45:21.414)

welded in the booth for the past six months, but I have no experience. But welders are supposed to get paid a bunch of money, so you need to pay me. Same mentality with a CWI. Just because you passed that test, you put a $10,000 investment down, doesn't mean you're going to get that ROI day one and that your inbox is going to be flooded. like understand that knowing, you know, going into taking your CWI and passing that exam, it's not going to be like, you know, there's not going be a hundred employers at your door just

you know, banging your door down to give you a job application, you're going to have to kind of start back at that bottom rung and work your way up. And the best way to do that is to start stacking endorsements and credentials and making yourself more employable and valuable to these companies. And the only way you're going to do that is instead of time under the hood. Now you've either got, you know, time under the paint can or, you know, the spray can or time under the yoke or, you know, time under the codebook with a, with a set of gauges and stuff like that. You're going to have to go out there and put in your time.

Daryl Peterson (01:46:20.526)

You we got, you got the design section in the code. You got, you know, the pre-qualification section. You got the qualification section. You got the fabrication. You got the tubular section. And we're just talking about D11, right? The repair section. So studs, you know, that's what we haven't talked about studs yet tonight. So at the end of the

Jason Becker (01:46:30.546)

Rubular.

Jason Becker (01:46:34.128)

Action.

Jason Becker (01:46:47.25)

second time today, I've had to talk about studs.

Daryl Peterson (01:46:49.614)

So, you know, there's so much of that code and it's, you know, it's an inch and a half thick, you know, and that's just that code. That's not talking about pipes, you know, pipeline is not talking about pressures, pressure vessels, pressure piping. And the commentary is phenomenal. And I would, I would encourage anybody, you know, I know a lot of CWIs that lost their minds when

Jason Becker (01:47:06.258)

Not even the commentary.

Daryl Peterson (01:47:19.278)

In 2015 when they backed off of, it's got to be clean. know, thou shall not weld over grease and this and that and that and that. And, you know, when you go back and you read the commentary on that, on the cleanliness, it's how do you check that it's clean? What is that test? How do know how clean clean is?

What is that test? It doesn't exist. So the standard the code now uses is, hey, there can be a little bit on there, right? You should always strive to be as clean as possible. But the end result is if you can meet the quality requirements, which I think is table A1, right? If you can meet the quality requirements, then it's clean enough.

And like I said, CWI has lost their mind over that. But I was already a coatings level two inspector, right? And like one of the things in coatings, if it can withstand a dull putty knife, then it can stay on there. Well, how dull is dull? You know, there's a lot of things, right? But you have chloride testing. there are tests that you can do for like salts. But

Again, that's a whole nother thing that you can go a lot of different directions. you know, we talk about, some of you showed we talk about endorsements and different certifications, right? And we're all saying the same thing over and over and over again. But if you're a new CWI, understand that, you know, you got a license to learn. That's it. And, you know, it took you, it could have taken you two years of studying to get through that test. Could have taken you two or three or five times.

tries to get through that test. It's not easy to, it's like the bar, it's one of the hardest tests on the planet for sure. And you know, if you were lucky enough to pass it, maybe that you had studied the right things for the test, the version of the test that you took, you might've got lucky and passed it. And God knows a 72.1 is the same as a hundred, right? So you have a license to learn. That's really what you have.

Jason Becker (01:49:11.249)

Yeah.

Daryl Peterson (01:49:35.214)

You know, spend your time being trustworthy, being the dependable person, build your brand, know, become somebody that everybody's like, ask them, they know, but no, right? And that takes, it's taken me 40 years to get here.

Right. I mean, I get that a lot. And you're like, you know, Darrell's an expert and he's an SME in a lot of things. I'm not SME and everything. said, I don't know jack crap about railroad stuff. mean, I don't know jack crap about underwater welding. I know people that were in it said, stay away from it. So, but at the end of the day, there's things I don't know. I quite friggin like, no, that ain't my Bailey wag. Right. But.

Jason Becker (01:50:19.014)

Yeah, same.

Daryl Peterson (01:50:31.512)

You know, I do enjoy, my wife says I got a big head because a lot of people are like, man, you're like, you're the superhero for, for welding. And I don't see that, you know, and I, I really want everybody else to, to be better every day, learn something new, be better every day. And I think as a profession, CWIs are better when we help each other out. You know, cause again, it drives me crazy when

Well, you can't say certification. Well, you don't know what you're talking about, right? And I would like us all be on the same front and all be somewhat unified and know the right things. You know, one of the worst things that you can do is be very young and try to branch out on your own. And I'm going to tell you that right now.

Jason Becker (01:51:04.167)

Mm.

Daryl Peterson (01:51:26.734)

Because if you try to start your own consulting business or your own CWI business, be very careful because you really don't know what you really don't know. If you're not very sharp at being able to read client specs, you could be a third party CWI, not read the spec and then you're telling your client everything's hunky dory that you'll do.

Jason Becker (01:51:34.704)

Yeah.

Daryl Peterson (01:51:54.094)

inspection is $150 an hour, right? But you missed the whole part in the contract where they got to do $10,000 worth of x-ray. And now, you you didn't advise your client very well. Now they're mad at you because you missed that and they're out of a ton of money. You know, understand the scope of inspection, your limitations. You know, what can you do? What can't you do? What does it require third party? I mean, that could be in the contract.

And liability. So as a independent CWI, you don't have a company that can cover your up-os. You cover those. And you cause a $10,000 mistake, you're on the line for 10 grand, right? If you don't have the right insurance. And for a young person, especially that's never started their own business, never run their own business, you know, having errors and omissions insurance and

Jason Becker (01:52:32.86)

Yep.

Jason Becker (01:52:38.054)

Mm-hmm.

Daryl Peterson (01:52:52.366)

you personal liability and professional liability. 1 million, 2 million. They could be more than that. Um, and then understanding your tax ramifications, right? So, I mean, you, you hear that and a lot of times you'll hear, yeah, I make $150 an hour. That sounds all fine and dandy until you understand that Uncle Sam's taking 50 bucks of that, you know.

And then, oh yeah, I got to cover my own insurance. I got to cover my health insurance and everything else. that, you're buying all that stuff, right? And, you know, well, if you buy an ASME code, that's 20 grand alone, right? So yeah, at the end of the day, you're not making that much, right? And, you know, it sounds cool. Yeah, $150 an hour. That's super cool, right? That's what lawyers charge.

Jason Becker (01:53:21.092)

And updated codes and standards racks up about 10 grand a year. Memberships, renewals.

Daryl Peterson (01:53:46.702)

It's not all that. you know, you happen to be in the same basket that I'm in, right? And we talk about what we charge and stuff like that. And, you know, that's one of those things that, you know, you just got to be careful and you got to know when to say, hey, that's not my bailiwag. I mean, you pass somebody to me today and I pass people on as well. That's not my thing.

Jason Becker (01:54:15.346)

Yeah, that's my... Yeah, that means like I'm, my company makes pretty good money. You want to know what I paid myself an hour for like the first two years I was open? $12.50 an hour. Based off a 40 hour work week and I was probably putting in 60 to 70 hours. But if I, I could work 40 hours that week, I was like, oh sweet, but $12.50 an hour after...

Daryl Peterson (01:54:15.982)

All right, so you gotta be aware of where to say that.

Daryl Peterson (01:54:25.902)

Like 750. That, for sure.

Daryl Peterson (01:54:36.942)

Yeah.

Jason Becker (01:54:43.694)

Insurance comes out overhead, updating code books, know, renewing, you know, endorse or not, you know, as renewing your endorsement, redoing certifications, software programming, insurance, like all that stuff. So you get a lot of students that come out of welding school and they want to open up their own welding mobile and fab business. And it's like, no, go fail on somebody else's dime for five to seven years. I would recommend the same thing with a CWI. Go put in five, seven years with the company. Get, you know, get into that.

Daryl Peterson (01:55:03.278)

Yeah. No, no, no.

Jason Becker (01:55:14.0)

The only reason I started doing consulting work as a younger CWI is because I had a pretty good background because of what I was teaching at the school. And so those, I was comfortable with those services, you know, and then I had like the CWI and the CWE to kind of back it up and give me some, some credibility and I wasn't doing high-end stuff. And again, I knew when to say, no, sir, like I would love to help you out on that, but I am not your guy. Call this person. So you, and don't be too proud to do that. Don't be too proud to pass off work or know your limitations.

Daryl Peterson (01:55:22.412)

Right.

Daryl Peterson (01:55:41.546)

Amen. Amen.

Jason Becker (01:55:43.516)

But also, we mentioned staying in your lane earlier. Don't stay so far into your lane that you never branch out. Just don't go jumping into a different lane head on. know, like work with somebody, get the knowledge, you know, like I'm not big into the piping world. ASME, API, like I don't do any of that stuff. I've branched out into ASME a little bit, but that was after consulting some of my mentors, going out to the QWIT facility out there in Houston and taking Walt Spurkow's class.

cause I was, yeah, he's like the godfather of, of as me section nine or all things as me. But, I, I turned down a lot of as me work before that. And like even the as me work that I do now, it's, it's very, very miniscule. I'm still not in that lane yet.

Daryl Peterson (01:56:13.932)

What's phenomenal. Hello.

ASMR, yeah.

Daryl Peterson (01:56:32.814)

Yeah, and you know, it's good to go from if you live in a pond to jump into a lake, but don't go straight to the ocean. Yeah, it's just one of those things that it's unfortunate, it's time. you know, a famous philosopher once said, the only thing that I know for sure is that I don't know anything.

Jason Becker (01:56:33.392)

But I know the call.

Jason Becker (01:56:43.9)

Right.

Jason Becker (01:57:00.614)

I it.

Daryl Peterson (01:57:03.15)

And you know, kind of got to be that way, right? And I mean, obviously you're in it for a long time. You know, you can do a lot of things and, I, I know personally,

I mentor a bunch of people and I want to use my knowledge to, especially like with these ethics panels, to make sure that people get a fair trial and if they're not in the wrong, but you'd be amazed at how much, you know, Tim Kinnaman is phenomenal. I loved him a lot. You know, he's done, he's big into history, right? It was funny because we were on this last panel he's like, yeah, they cited a code from 1982. And I'm like, how did?

How you know that is, I mean, when I got to say that, it's like, man, but he is just, that's what he did. He's the welding historian, right? And he is sharp as a

Jason Becker (01:57:56.274)

Yeah. And he's got all the codes. He knows where to find it. he's a great guy. He's got every welding journal dating back to 1919, either physical or digital copy. So from the first issue of the welding journal up till March, you know, this month's issue, he's got them all.

Daryl Peterson (01:58:00.136)

And you know, I am honored to call him a friend.

Daryl Peterson (01:58:08.034)

Yeah.

Daryl Peterson (01:58:16.354)

So true story, we were down in Miami probably last spring, when I say spring, our spring board, and he got Darrell Gashler to let him into the library up there, and he found some books that were like ancient, like ancient, and he was able to find some stuff in there. That's his passion, right? And super sharp guy. I love him to death. I'm very honored to call him a contemporary and a friend.

you know, and, and again, he's another, he's been in it, you know, longer than I have. and we talk and he's, he's easy to talk to. so I guess, you know, I know we've been on this for, for a little while, but at the end of the day, get training, you know, start to learn what you, what you need to know, right. And, and learn, like you said, at, at three years, you're

It's kind of like a kid, right? And when you're a kid, you're like, oh, dad knows everything, right? And then you become a teenager, you get your CWI, right? You get your driver's license, you get your CWI, and well, dad doesn't know anything, right? And I'm the smartest person on the planet, you And then you turn 20 and dad still doesn't know anything. And 25, well, maybe dad knows a little bit. By the time you give him 30, dad's pretty smart, right? Because I didn't realize how much I didn't know.

Jason Becker (01:59:28.583)

Nothing.

Daryl Peterson (01:59:43.91)

And that's, it's the same thing in this profession. You know, when you get your thing, I mean, you'll start getting libraries like this and, you know, you wish you knew everything in there, but you don't. you know, just learning and just hopefully pray to God that the mistakes you make are not that big and that you learn from them. You know, that it really don't cost anybody anything. Right?

But patience and understand you're just starting your journey. You are just starting your journey. And I know that sucks to hear because you spent 10 grand. You know, this profession sold as, you're going to be the hot stuff. And 40 years later, you're going to be like, you know, I'm just starting to get close to that, right? But, you know.

network, get to know all the people. Like you got a guy for something, right? If you need to make those connections, you absolutely have to. Hey, I don't know, but I got a guy I could call. Right. You go talk to this guy because he knows it right. And and and I'll say that I think I say this every time. Get involved with your local section. Get on the executive board. Right.

Go to your district conferences. it's kind of hard to do that if you're not on board unless it's right in your section. But you can learn a lot at the district conferences. Go to the trade shows. Go to Fabtech, right? Meet a bunch of people. Make all those connections. Go see what's out there because you go to Fabtech with a million square feet of showroom floor space.

you will see things that you had no idea were a thing. I mean, it's unreal. And when you realize it, when you go, well, I know that piece of equipment, that piece of equipment, and that piece of equipment, but everything else in here is foreign to me, you'll realize real quick how much you don't know. You know, so go to these FAPTAS, and I'm not saying that, you know, to make money for AWS or anybody else. I'm telling you, get

Jason Becker (02:01:58.418)

Mm-hmm.

Daryl Peterson (02:02:10.392)

get the real world experience, get exposure to these things. Get on your exec board, do run for district director. mean, that is the one thing that has made me, I can say in my career has exposed me to more people than anyone. mean, you know, and you know, we've, talk about this every time we're together, you know, I saw you, I knew you from well.com and

I trained a bunch of welding instructors to go take the test. We dutifully went up to Orlando and poked my head in. You're like, what are you doing in here? we didn't even know each other back then. I'm like, holy shit, it's Jason Becker. I was like, man, you kicked me out. And then a year or two later, I see you at our district conference and there you are smoking a whiskey. And I'm like, okay. And then we became great friends.

Jason Becker (02:02:53.298)

You

Daryl Peterson (02:03:08.492)

I cherish our friendship, you know? And you have a lot to contribute to our profession. And the fact that you get to talk to everybody, I don't think there's anybody in welding that you don't know. So it's pretty rare. And vicariously I live through you, because I go to a lot of the things that you go to and I get to meet people. So that's super cool.

Jason Becker (02:03:23.73)

pretty hefty one.

Daryl Peterson (02:03:37.762)

When we were in Chicago, I met the folks from Chess on Smoke, right? Those guys, they're phenomenal. They're super down to, they're awesome. And I was like, my gosh, and Sarah Stork, anybody that's anybody on social media pretty much shows up to that. And Ray Ripple, everybody. And she always is, I know she doesn't really know who I am. She knows my face, but.

Jason Becker (02:03:43.5)

Yeah, Jason and Amanda are awesome people.

Daryl Peterson (02:04:06.552)

You know, we're not friends or anything, but she's always super great to me whenever I see her up there. You know, she's doing her plasma cutting things. She always comes over and gives me a great big hug. And, you know, but at the end of the day, it's, you know, it's just a, it's a community and you need to get out and network. You need to get to know people. you need to, you need to really learn and it's a lifetime of learning, right? Don't be afraid to, don't, don't be afraid to make mistakes. Don't make big mistakes.

Don't be afraid to learn from them. And I can't tell you how many times I've made bad mistakes. And don't make stupid mistakes more than once. Don't be looking at x-ray film and say, that's slag. Well, it's a TIG process. There's no slag. Come on, Or that's a tungsten inclusion. Well, that was big. There's no tungsten.

Jason Becker (02:04:59.29)

Yeah, know in your processes.

Daryl Peterson (02:05:01.774)

knowing your processes, right? And that's so critical. It's so critical.

Jason Becker (02:05:05.232)

and the limitations of processes.

Daryl Peterson (02:05:08.13)

Exactly, exactly. So, know, it's just one of those things that, you know, hey, what are a couple of the worst things you can do with MIG, right? Go downhill and go short arc. Go short arc downhill. I mean, that's two super bad things, right? Unless you're using an RMD or STT process and that kind of...

Jason Becker (02:05:21.415)

Mm-hmm.

Jason Becker (02:05:28.703)

If you're in D1.3, you can get away with some stuff or you can do some stuff.

Daryl Peterson (02:05:32.172)

Well, yeah, so I do want three is like the redhead stepchild, right? You know, we always think structural D1 one is like by far the most known code out there, right? And I make that I make that so you make generalizations, right? So but but yeah, if you're well in structural steel, you know, downhill and short arc and some companies make a living at you got to be really, really good, especially open. But right. And then

Jason Becker (02:05:43.631)

yeah.

Jason Becker (02:05:59.975)

Mm-hmm.

Daryl Peterson (02:06:02.062)

You you're doing that when you're putting a temporary route anyways, because you got to gouge it out and then they're not paying you. The bull late ain't on when you're gouging. So they're not paying, you know, your customer's not paying you for that. So, so go to RMD process, get it qualified or STT if you're a Lincoln guy. You know, I know Fronius has their version and everybody else does, but modified short circuit, right? Where you don't have to remove the route. mean, work smarter, not harder. Right. So.

Jason Becker (02:06:09.105)

Right?

Jason Becker (02:06:32.754)

study, study, study. Keep learning.

Daryl Peterson (02:06:34.158)

Study, study, study, learn. You didn't get into welding because you wanted to go to college, right? And you wanted to get out of school. But if you choose this profession, you need to learn every day. You need to study every day. You need to learn something new all the time. You need to go take classes, get your educational hours. Hopefully, the content is...

geared so that it's enjoyable for you, right? Because if you don't like it, you're not gonna learn. And that's why most people got into welding to begin with, right? Because they didn't like math, didn't, know, geometry didn't make sense back then. Of course, you didn't know that you'd be using it every day when you were a welder, right? So, know, Pythagorean theorem, yeah. So,

Jason Becker (02:07:20.978)

Yep. And surprise, it's cool eating it in hand.

Daryl Peterson (02:07:28.556)

You know, all that stuff that you never thought you would use, you're using, right? Fractions. How many, my gosh, how many students come out now can't read a tape measure? It's ridiculous. You fractions are terrible. We're having to, as instructors, we're having to teach them all over again. So.

Jason Becker (02:07:37.82)

Yes.

Jason Becker (02:07:46.93)

Yeah.

Daryl Peterson (02:07:47.458)

Commit to learning. It's a lifelong thing about learning. Pray that you don't make the mistakes big enough that they can't be recovered from and understand that you really don't know. You don't even have a clue what you don't know. You really don't. And understand that, you you learn it when you're going to take your CWI that there's always the exception, right? There's always that extra go re-pass where you find the answer because it's there. I mean, there's there's a ton of things that's

this way, accept, right? And you'll find yourself in that exception more times than not. It's crazy. There's a reason that exception's there, because people have run into it. So.

Jason Becker (02:08:29.552)

It happens on a daily basis.

Daryl Peterson (02:08:31.214)

On a daily basis, my friend. Anything else you wanted to cover? I know we're getting late. I don't know. I hate to.

Jason Becker (02:08:34.012)

Derrick, before we get out of here, if people want to contact you, what's the best way to go about it?

Daryl Peterson (02:08:42.069)

Um, darrell, D A R Y L dot Peterson, P E T E R S O N at outlook.com. Um, I'm also, if you go on the AWS, uh, AWS website, go under leadership and go under deputy district directors. Uh, my email and my phone number is in there. Um, and I answered a phone. I put it on here. No problem. 8135, two, three, five, four, three, Feel free to call me. Um, my current.

role is consulting. so if you get welding questions, I'm also at ASNT level three. If you need a contract level three, somebody set up your written practice, your written procedures, do your training, do your certifying. I'm focusing on small businesses, places that can't really afford a full-time level three.

And it's not really necessary in most cases. Plus, subject matter, I also certify welders. I write procedures. I'm a WPQ1, WPQ2, NDEC. I'm going for my QA, so I'll have an honest senior CWI, both by testing and by endorsements. So on the standard stuff, Scott Prince called me via the just

Jason Becker (02:09:58.652)

You too, guys.

Daryl Peterson (02:10:10.734)

kind of out of the blue. He called me and said, hey, I'm having a problem. We're not getting good penetration with this TIG process. so they're doing, I want to say he was using ER-ADS D2, doing some TIG on some 1050 steel, I think it was. But anyways, they're having a problem getting penetration. He's preheating and doing everything else. said, have you tried changing your gas?

Right? You know, we put a gas lens on, we've been doing this. I said, well, what about, you know, using a helium mix? And because it changes your arc characteristics, right? You get a deeper penetration. So I haven't followed up with him, but you know, Scott's another one that calls me a lot. And I do, I feel a lot of calls. I have several CWIs that call me up and I do it for free. And, you know, I help guide them. And to watch those folks.

You know, initially I get a lot of questions that are pretty run in the mill, right? And then it starts being, well, it's very, it's, it's, know, once sometimes it's, you know, two, three times a week. Then it gets down to once a week, then it gets down to once a month. Then it gets down to, they call me when the, when I got to put my thinking cap on, you know, and it's, it is phenomenal to watch that growth, right? And there's just, I wish there were as

hundreds of me out there that were willing to do that because it just does our profession so much to do that.

Jason Becker (02:11:44.484)

It does. I appreciate every time I call you pick up and have a conversation about, know, whatever's, whatever I'm running into.

Daryl Peterson (02:11:53.238)

Yeah. And like I said, and if I don't know, tell you, but you know, I'll look it up and I'll see what I can do to help you out. And, and like I said, my goal is to have the most professional CWIs on the planet, right? To, to elevate our profession, especially in America, you know, to, be the best inspectors that are possible to, you know, to serve our, our, all of the owners.

to serve all of the contractors and just to be professional inspectors, period. know, elevate everybody up. You know, we don't do any good if we keep some down. It's, it's, got to bring them all up. So, so, if you're a CWI, you know, I challenge you to, help out your fellow CWIs. And if you don't know, you don't know, you know, but you might know somebody who, who you can turn them on to. So.

Jason Becker (02:12:28.21)

Mm.

Jason Becker (02:12:36.436)

for sure.

Jason Becker (02:12:49.83)

Yeah. For sure. Again, Darrell, man, I really appreciate it. I hope to see you soon. I think I'll probably I might see you at one of the advisory board meetings coming up. If not, probably Weld Summit or no, the district conference once we get that all sorted out.

Daryl Peterson (02:12:54.188)

Man, it's always a pleasure. We always talk a lot, but.

Daryl Peterson (02:13:00.45)

Yeah.

So yeah, so Puerto Rico, I got to get my Miami guys back up. But that's what it sounded like. I need to get back and get them to make that happen. This is my last year as a district director. So six years. We got a great guy coming in, Griffin Sturkey. I've been working with him, trying to get him up to speed. And you know, I.

Jason Becker (02:13:07.898)

It's a possibility. It's on the table.

Jason Becker (02:13:17.286)

Okay.

Daryl Peterson (02:13:33.932)

I wish I'd only done three years and able to let somebody else do it, but three years ago there wasn't anybody that was really willing to step up. then I got Andrew Dock is in the wings too. So I'm kind of working with him as an assistant. And he's going for the future leaders trying to get in there and this will be his second round. that's tough.

Jason Becker (02:13:42.492)

Mm-hmm.

Daryl Peterson (02:14:02.594)

really tough to get into. So don't give up. Andrew does a phenomenal job. He's funny because he calls me up and he goes, what do think about this? And I'm like, when I tell him and it's like opposite of what he thought, he goes, that's why I call you. He goes, because I thought for sure it was something else. I'm like, yeah, you know. So, you know, again, know who to call. Right. And I explained to him why and how and the reason behind it. And I think that's one of the things that

Makes you a good mentor is to be able to explain the why not just the what? right the the why behind it and Being able to demonstrate Find the things that Like I said dumb it down to the wilder level make it so it's really easily explainable, you know, whenever you're watching Subject matter on YouTube or wherever wherever you get your content. You know, hey, that would be great way to explain it, right?

And then you get a bunch of those in your repertoire. You can teach anything and you want to learn something, teach it. Absolutely. You want to learn something, you teach it. You you become a mentor to your younger CWIs, then you start having to look stuff up, right? You have to make sure what you're telling them is correct. You want to be a good CWI, start teaching it. You know, become a mentor and start teaching it, you know. And, you know, maybe you say, hey,

Jason Becker (02:15:07.757)

yeah, yeah.

Daryl Peterson (02:15:27.192)

for the next couple of weeks, we're going to focus on fabrication, clause seven, right? We're going to focus on that. And then you go, my God, know, hey, atmospheric exposure limits, how long can you leave a 70-18 rod out? You you come across little gems like that, right? So teach it, right? And become a mentor and a true mentor to the younger guys, right? So, you know, that was one of the...

When I worked at Central Maintenance and Welding, one of the highlights of my career was to work with, you know, the guys that worked for me. I've had several CWIs work for me over the years. And I'll put those guys up against anybody all day long. And I think you know a couple of them, right? So, and you know, one of them stepped right into my job and I'm all about teaching them, right? He still calls me and I help him out.

You know, every one of them, Sean, Sean Hurley, he came to me. He was a Boilermaker. He came to us. He got the cert as a Boilermaker. Really didn't know what he was doing. Got him onto some coach stuff right off the bat. Kind of threw him into the fire, but gave him, you know, little, helped him out. But he learned, you know, D-16 stuff right off the bat. You know, I got, you know, just all of them. Kelly, Denmark.

PipeFeder, he does all our PQR stuff on stuff that is out there. We've got all our common vanilla flavor stuff. He does all our other stuff and he is phenomenal at it, Exotics and new technologies. Like, hey, this is out there. Can we use it? Can we use it? Right? I got a new guy out of the shop that we're training him up and he's doing a phenomenal job.

Jason Becker (02:17:09.124)

exotics or not.

Daryl Peterson (02:17:25.902)

And then Tyler Ward, Tyler's a savant. That guy, I love him to death. He's a pain in my ass. You think he was an iron worker with the FAFO attitude that he has, but he's a boilermaker through and through. The guy knows his stuff. I think he reads the code on the toilet. He could cite anything for you. And he is just jam up. He is absolutely phenomenal.

You know, and I like to think I had a little part in helping, you know, mold those guys to be the outstanding CWIs that they are, as well as several others that I've interacted with, you included, you know. And, you know, that's, that's my legacy, I think, is to help raise everybody up just a little bit, make them a little better in our profession. So, well, thank you. Thank you. All right. If we don't quit this off, we're going to, we're going to run into tomorrow.

Jason Becker (02:18:15.494)

Yeah, you're doing a hell of a job. Keep it up. Yes, sir.