For the last week and a half I have been struggling with getting my horizontal welding down first with the root pass on two plates with a 3/32 gap to make sure I had complete penetration which I finally got it after two days and then with the cover pass using two 7018 3/16 rods. With the cover rods I first fought with temp then it was with gravity then it was with travel speed which is all screwed up now but thats another story. Tuesday at the end of class I made it clear that if I didn't get it by the end of the mod on Oct 29 that I would be dropping the program because it would be foolish of me to continue with a program that I would have to pay for and not pass. Yesterday I tried it again and ended up with a crappy looking plate for the 5th time so the instructor follows me into my booth and I go about doing what I had normally been doing, he stops me after about 10 seconds and points out two mistakes I have been making, the first was starting location for the cover and the second was whipping a drag only rod. I had no idea that 7018 is a drag only rod or I may have forgotten either way I corrected the mistakes and went from something that looked like the rocky mountains ( no offense to our staff member ) to a B quality bead run that overlaps its lower bead properly each time.
Now I have to go back and work on my travel speed and re-cement my root pass because they both took a beating with my getting stressed out about the cover pass's turning out the way they did. I feel so much better about what I'm doing now and plan to complete the horizontal portion tomorrow and the vertical and be on overhead by Friday at the earliest.
The instructor talked with me yesterday and stated that since he is also the administrator for the program he feels that he is not able to provide enough time to the students since he is having to do two jobs so he went to the head of the school to put it to them that they need to change this right away. I'm going to talk with him about this some more to see if I can pitch to him and the head of the school my becoming an administrative assistant to the program since I have some office background thanks to working as a shipping clerk with walmart and handling assets considerably larger than what the school does, at least it would get me out of walmart and it would cut down on my travel time from school to work.