The Expired Qualification and the Tuesday Inspector
You have just taken over a 22-welder shop. A pre-shipment audit turns up three things at once. Welder #14 has been welding column splices for six months, but his D1.1 performance qualification expired three months ago and there is no continuity log. Three welders hold 3G qualification but have been running 4G. Most seriously, the floor is working to WPS Rev C, which raises preheat from 100 °F to 250 °F for 1-in. plate, while the CWI's file holds Rev B. Fourteen 1-in. splices were welded last week with no preheat recorded or measured. A $180,000 shipment is scheduled, and the customer's inspector arrives Tuesday.
1. What do you do in the next 24 hours?
Read the worked answer
Containment, ordered by irreversibility.
- Quarantine the 14 splices physically - tag and segregate, not just note it in a file.
- Stop #14 from production welding.
- Suspend the affected work under Rev C until a controlled copy is at every station and each welder has signed a revision briefing.
- Cross-check the qualification register against work assigned. The 3G/4G mismatch is the same class of problem: position is an essential variable, so those qualifications do not cover what has been run.
- Call the customer's inspector yourself, before Tuesday, and disclose.
Do not let the inspector find it. A self-disclosed nonconformity with a plan is a management problem; a discovered one is a credibility problem you cannot buy back.
2. Are the 14 splices necessarily rejectable, and who decides?
Read the worked answer
Not automatically. Missing preheat is a process nonconformity, not proof of a defect - but on 1-in. plate the risk is hydrogen-assisted cracking that may not surface for 24-48 hours, so a visual pass today proves nothing.
Actions:
- Surface NDT (MT or PT) after a 48-hour wait.
- Hardness survey or UT as the engineer directs.
- Do not judge by eye, and do not weld over it.
The disposition - accept by evaluation, repair, or replace - belongs to the engineer of record or the customer's authorized inspector under the applicable code. Not to you. Your deliverable is the test data plus a recommendation, with the cost of postponement stated side by side with the cost of a field failure. That framing is what gets a decision instead of an argument.
3. How much of this belongs to the welders, and what do you fix systemically?
Read the worked answer
Very little belongs to them. #14 kept working because nobody tracked expiry. The crew welded to the revision that was on the floor - that is the revision they were given. Both failures are supervisory.
Systemic fixes:
- One controlled copy per station, with a revision block signed at shift start.
- A posted qualification matrix with expiry dates and a 60-day advance alert.
- Preheat recorded on the traveler with a contact thermometer reading and the welder's initials.
- A monthly CWI audit that covers documents, not just beads.
Tell the crew plainly that the audit found the supervisor's failure, not theirs. Welders who expect punishment for reporting lapsed paperwork will stop reporting it, and the next expired qualification will be found by the customer instead of by you.