Welding, welding, and more welding. Four students from Arcata High’s FFA Welding team, along with many different schools across California, loaded up the trucks and headed over to Butte College’s 23 million dollar welding facility for Arc Exposure in Oroville, just a little under 20 minutes away from Chico.
At Arc Exposure, a welding event, students learn how to weld 4 different processes consisting of OAC, GTAW, GMAW, FCAW. Students spend hours practicing their welding skills and learning to better themselves in safety. Students Braylan Downing, Brendon Mosier, Colton Adams, and I attended this year’s event. Junior Braylan Downing attended for his first time and had a blast in and outside of welding, while also learning a lot about the skill.
My personal favorite process was FCAW (Fluxed-Cored Arc Welding). Fluxed-Cored is a process in which your electrode, or welding filler, contains self-shielding material that eliminates adding gas. In the real world, this process would be used for outside welding where weather conditions are applied. For GMAW and FCAW, students were instructed to fill up a “X” shaped piece of metal with each different process within GMAW and FCAW. Those processes were GMAW pulse and spray along with FCAW self-shielding.
“It’s a great learning experience. The instructors were super helpful with everything. And it’s just a fun opportunity to get a hangout with the welding team and get to know everyone better,” Downing said. Downing has been welding with the team since his freshman year and attended local competitions such as CR field day.
While the students were there, they also got to go on an industry tour of the fabrication business TINC, which specializes in building heavy machinery equipment. The tour was a walk through tour in which students got to learn about their business and what they do. But what caught sophomore Colton Adams’ eye was a robotic welder from a stainless steel pipe welder.
“It was pretty cool to watch. I’ve never seen a robotic welder like that and it costs like $70,000,” Adams said.
Outside of welding, students had some downtime to hangout and get to know each other better. They went out for dinner, went to the mall and hung out in the pool where they made many new friends.
Adams highlights of the trip was getting to weld and hangout with his peers.
“It was a really good experience,” Adams said. “I really liked going. I want to go again.”
