Costing of Material and labor for different type of welding (MIG, TIG, FCAW, SMAW)

[Mac111]

Can someone guide me about the base of any empirical formula to calculate the material cost of welding wire (for all types of welding process) based on the geometry (approximate quantity of metal deposition) of the weld joint?

Labor time and energy consumption particular type of weld machines, we can calculate practically and add to the total for material cost of welding to get the total cost of welding.

Thanks.

Mac

 

[Sengland]

If you search for deposition rate a few decent sources come up, the TWI and ESAB ones cover most of what you're looking for. There are also numerous books, I find the AWS - Welding Handbooks pretty good, ASM also has some good material but if you get their stuff be careful as they duplicate a fair bit through their different literature. Suppliers of welding equipment and/or consumables are also a good source for this information.

I've found estimating of welding time and costs to be a painful trial and error exercise as I didn't really have anyone to learn from. I now do it by estimating the number of runs required based on material thickness and welding process (from experience), using an average travel speed based on the position, and multiplying by an efficiency factor for the process (for example GTAW doesn't require the same time spent on interpass cleaning as FCAW, so I use factors of 0.9 and 0.6 respectively, so when using FCAW the welder only spends 60% of the time actually laying a weld). This gives you a welding time, but one thing to watch for is the time spent preparing the material for welding, setting up and purging if required, assembling and fitting the parts together prior to welding, bracing, often these can take longer than actually making the weld.