Author: Andy G.

It’s been a busy semester. I taught three classes this fall. Until now, I’ve only taught one class each semester during my one year of teaching. In the past year, I’ve been teaching introductory welding classes in all the main processes, and introductory blueprint reading classes.

Several of my inspection certifications were up for renewal this year, so I’ve been chipping away at some online courses for educational hours so I can maintain them. My certifications have brought me a lot of income and opportunities, so it’s one of my priorities to maintain them.

Fishing is my outdoor hobby of choice. Recently, I’ve began targeting catfish. The style of fishing for cats is slower paced and more relaxing in my opinion. There’s something about just casting once, sitting, and waiting for that rod tip to bend.

Happy Holidays!

I frequently jump from project to project, idea to idea, and task to task. It’s probably a symptom of some undiagnosed ADHD I have, but who has time to get in the car, go see a doctor, fill out a bunch of forms, then wait weeks or months just to be told what you probably already know and possibly get pills I have a phobia of swallowing? Not this guy! So instead, I stumble through partially edited media, incomplete lesson outlines, disorganized files, and cluttered workspaces, but still somehow manage to produce content, teachings, and work that give me a reasonable paycheck and a satisfactory feeling of accomplishment. To be fair, though, my ambitions fluctuate on a daily basis from changing the world with a revolutionary new idea that would make me a billionaire, to just finishing a book, politely completing a conversation, oiling up the treadmill, or getting to bed before 10 pm.

What’s the point of this rant? That some days it’s ok to want to do everything, but end up doing nothing.

I’ve heard some people say they just want to make the world a little better than when they found it. Is it wrong to just want to not make it any worse?

I had been curious about the cost breakdown of an individual 1/8″ E7018 SMAW electrode, so I tried doing the quick and dirty math down to the inch. When doing the math, I generally rounded to the nearest cent.

I took the price of a 50 lb. can of 1/8″ Lincoln Excalibur 7018 MR from grainger.com, which is about $223 without shipping, and divided it to find the price per pound. This brought me to $4.46 per pound of 7018 electrodes, further broken down to $0.28 per oz. Using a scale in the kitchen typically used for measuring cooking ingredients, I found that a single electrode weighed in at 1.3 oz. making the cost of a single electrode roughly $0.36. The full length of one of the electrodes is 14″, but the portion of electrode typically consumed without burning the identification numbers is about 12″ which works nicely for this particular equation. This would indicate the cost of one inch of 1/8″ Lincoln Excalibur 7018 MR to be somewhere around $0.03 if buying a 50 lb. can. The cost increases one to five cents per inch if purchasing the electrodes at a lesser quantity. The cost of a single electrode is nearly $1 in the 1 lb. pack.

This information is interesting to me because I’ve seen a lot of wasted portions of electrodes on the floors of various shops and jobsites, and I wondered what the actual cost of that waste was. Now I have a rough idea and so do you. Let me know your thoughts or if you think my math ain’t mathin’.

That is the current quote on the whiteboard in my office. It reminds me to recognize my futile attempts at perfect, and to be satisfied with good results. It helps me to pull the trigger on my GMAW gun when I may otherwise continue to line up the perfect bead, or to push the GTAW foot pedal when I’m confident my amperage and gas flow rate are set adequately, not perfectly.

I haven’t written creatively in quite a while, and I’m quickly realizing I’m constantly second guessing my grammar, and likely for good reason. Luckily, I’ve saved my copy of The Elements of Style. This would be a good time to crack that open, again. I fear I’ve broken many a rule.

What about frequency of posts? Maybe not daily, but definitely more often than never. I’ll be intentional about it. Too often and it could lack quality and depth. Too seldom and it may not be as real.

More stuff for me to overthink about, I suppose. I googled “overthinking” and I’m not sure if I should have. Anyways, here’s a photo.

Imagine that. Someone who self-admittedly thinks too much took too long to create a blog and type something on it. This first post will be short as an act of combating the urge to overthink it and never publish it. Mission accomplished, I think. See you soon.