Just a quick question..

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So I've been MIG welding without gas for a few years now, and I'm presently taking a course to become a certified welder.   I've also been welding for myself and a few friends, and have never considered charging them for my labor or materials, as they are buddies of mine and I just think that would be wrong.   I do however, have a new side job that will require me welding for someone I met on another forum and I need to calculate how much I should charge him only for the materials.   I calculated that I weld about 12-14 Inches per Minute to make sure that the welds are plenty strong, and use up 156" per minute of .035" inner-shield wire.  Each spool I buy is a 2lb spool.   My question was, do any of you know the approximate length of wire in a 2lb spool?   And if not,  can you guys give me an idea of how much I should be charging him for the materials?   Thanks,
Reply:Keep one thing in mind. As soon as you charge someone to do work you become liable. Your statement I calculated that I weld about 12-14 Inches per Minute to make sure that the welds are plenty strong, and use up 156" per minute of .035" inner-shield wire.
Reply:There should be approximately 8000 inches of 0.035" dia. flux core wire on a 2 lb. spool.
Reply:Originally Posted by DSWDoesn't give me a warm fuzzy feeling about your skills or the project. It sounds like this may be something that you might have a concern over strength of the weld. Should there ever be a problem, your @ss is hanging in the breeze. Don't think you can just hide behind cash and think that theres no way to find you. The lawyers will tear every thing apart looking for someone to blame and get money from nowdays. Your partner will dime you out in  a heartbeat to cut his losses.
Reply:Wellll, let's see now ...There is no such thing as "MIG welding without gas".  MIG, by definition and by what's in the acronym itself Metal Inert Gas aka MIG, uses a shielding gas as part of the welding process.  The more correct terminology though is GMAW for Gas Metal Arc Welding.  There -is- a wire-feed welding technology that doesn't use shielding gas though.  But that is called FCAW-S or just flux-core.Both GMAW and FCAW are wire-feed welding processses, and they can often use the same machines (if the machine can be adjusted appropriately for the desired process).  But they are not exactly the same thing and may not produce -exactly- the same end result.  Because the filler wire electrode and the process influence the resultant weld.With proper procedures and proper electrode selection, both GMAW and FCAW -can- produce good quality welds.  But they are not necessarily always directly interchangable.Next, as DSW pointed out, as soon as you get paid for the task, you are IT liability-wise.And as pointed out, the little 4 inch spools of welding wire electrode are typically the most expensive on a per pound basis.  Even moving to the 10-12 pound 8 inch diameter spools lowers the per pound price drastically.And the little 4 inch spools of wire are typically 2 pounds for SOLID GMAW wire and 1 pound for FCAW wire.As to how many inches of wire are on a spool, for FCAW wires that will vary a bit compared to a solid wire because of the different flux powders used by the different makers and for the different products.  But as mentioned, for an 0.035 diameter FCAW wire, there are about 4000 inches of wire per pound.As to how much wire will be used for a task, you can also just figure out how much resultant weld you will apply and then multiply by the process efficiency to figure out how much wire would be needed to apply that much weld.  For a 'typical' small diameter FCAW wire, the process efficiency is about 85%.  That means that for each pound of wire you use, you got a resultant of 0.85 pounds of actual weld.  The other 15% of what you started with ended up as slag or spatter.  The best laid schemes ... Gang oft agley ...
Reply:Moonrise gave some useful information.  I developed a spread sheet about two years ago to help me calculate welding costshttp://www.aws.org/cgi-bin/mwf/topic_show.pl?pid=105308usually the formula for figuring out consumables use is: calculating your deposition rate, then multiplying it by the amount of arc-on time needed to fill the joints.  For flux core the deposition efficiency is about 86% off the top of my head.For solid wire it's easy to multiply the cross sectional area (area of wire) by the density of steel to get a good approximation of  inches of wire per pound and so forth.  A little harder with flux core as it's tubular.you can also just cut a few bits and put them on an accurate gram scale, or call the manufacturer they would be able to tell you that.I also add in a bit of cost for where items like nozzles and contact tips. usually replace them every so many arc-hours.that same spread sheet can also help calculate welding time. 12-14 minutes is on the high side of manual welding FYI, not saying you're not hitting that but on weave beads that's getting unrealistic.
Reply:Info taken from McKay Full Line Catalog.Inches per lb. of wire..024" = 7,788.030" = 4,960.035" = 3,650.045" = 2,210"Where's Stick man????????" - 7A749"SHHHHHH!! I sent him over to snag that MIC-4 while tbone wasn't looking!" - duaneb55"I have bought a few of Tbone's things unlike Stick-Man who helps himself" - TozziWelding"Stick-man"