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Engineer caused data loss by cleaning PCs with welding tools (www.theregister.com)

submitted 5 days ago by Powderhorn@beehaw.org to c/technology@beehaw.org

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This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Wilson" who once worked as the boss of a welding shop attached to an engineering consultancy.

Wilson set the scene by telling us this story came from the early 1980s, when AutoCAD was replacing drawing boards.

"We had a new structural engineer who those of us in the shop quickly identified as an idiot with a degree," Wilson wrote.

One day, said idiot decided that the computers used to run AutoCAD needed to be cleaned and that the welding shop was the place to do the job.

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[–] anachronist@midwest.social 3 points 4 days ago

"It's at 90 PSI and is 80 percent air, 15 percent water, and 5 percent oil,"

Something's seriously wrong with the air system then, and it will contaminate all their work and compromise the welds. Water is a particularly pernicious contaminant in welding because it causes hydrogen in the weld that will make it brittle and crack.

Welding shops have to be CLEAN. There are some welding processes that can work ok with dirty metal (SMAW with some electrode types) but these only work on mild steel, and these processes really aren't used in a shop or production setup, more for field work.