TIGged off with Tertiary Education

During his Higher School Certificate year, a friend’s son looked several months ahead at his options for 2020. He’s a very bright kid from a family of tertiary graduates, so it was generally assumed that the boy—I’ll call him Jerry—would enrol at university.

But Jerry had other ideas. He’d become intrigued at some point by videos about welding. There are hundreds of them on YouTube: tutorials, restorations, guides, historical features and forums. The more welding videos he watched, the more fascinated Jerry became.

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Impressively, an increased awareness of welding’s complexity only served to increase Jerry’s interest. As engineering-minded readers will be aware, welding is not simply a matter of sticking a couple of bits of metal together and applying heat. Different metals, and different formulations of alloys, require very different treatments.

As well, there is the issue of where and how a weld is applied. This is dependent…