Supervisor's 2-word tip fixed my whole weld prep routine

Old foreman in Baton Rouge told me to 'watch the puddle' and I ignored it for 8 months until a cracking failure on a tank shell, now I slow down and actually read the heat, anyone else get a stupid-simple piece of advice that turned out to be the real deal?

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jordancoleman17d ago

That "watch the puddle" bit sounds simple but it's everything... once you actually stop fighting the machine and start reading what the heat is doing, everything else falls into place. I had a similar thing with "slow down" and it took a cracked header on a job to make it click. Now I tell guys all the time, if you're not seeing the puddle move the way you expect, you're not ready to move the torch. You can't fix what you can't see, no matter how good your settings look on paper.