Can we talk about how I ran my root pass too hot for two years without knowing?
I was working a water wall tube job over in Gary last spring and a guy named Manny watched me for about ten minutes before he asked why I was running my root at 95 amps on 2 inch schedule 80. Turns out that heat was pulling the puddle and I was just filling the gap with wire instead of fusing the bevel, and the X-ray on my third section showed it. So here is the argument I keep having in my head: is a hot fast root ever the right call for a guy who has steady hands, or should everybody step down and crawl it in? Curious what amperage you all run on that size pipe and whether you'd trust a hot root on a test.
The "is a hot fast root ever the right call" question is where I'd push back a little. On 2 inch sch 80 in a shop where you can roll the pipe, sure, a hotter root can work if the guy truly has the hands for it. But on a water wall in the field, fixed position, you don't get the same view of the bevel and a fast puddle hides lack of fusion until the film shows it. Manny wasn't wrong to stop you, and the X-ray backed him up. Steady hands don't fix a puddle running ahead of the arc, that's a heat input problem, not a skill problem.