Bethlehem Steel welding procedure notebook

Tom's first-hand experience receiving the proprietary Bethlehem Steel WPS notebook as a welding engineer — used to illustrate what a WPS looks like in industrial practice.

When I worked for Bethlehem Steel, they gave me as a welding engineer a notebook of all the Bethlehem Steel welding procedures for the structural welding division, and it had things like this page after page. It was exciting reading. But if I had a particular type of steel, I could look up the type of steel, I could look up the process, I could go down and it would tell me the same type of thing. If I'm a welding engineer, I ought to be able to write one of these. You're not welding engineers, so don't expect to write one. Go hire some welding engineer to do it for you, someone graduated from Ohio State or something like that. This tells you how many inches per minute and amps and everything. Almost everything's filled in, very few blanks. It's not a tungsten process here, so they didn't fill in that. You have to interpass cleaning — you've got to remove the slag. There's no post-weld heat treatment on this one.