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Expert's welding career began in a family-owned welding and radiator repair shop. He progressed to welding on offshore oil and gas platform structures, processing facilities, and pipelines in the Gulf of Mexico while an undergraduate engineering student. As a graduate engineer, he prepared welding procedures, qualified welding procedures, and certified welders. Expert became an American Welding Society Certified Welding Inspector (AWS CWI) in 1978. He has the experience and practical education about base metal welding and applications for structural welding. As an engineer, he has approved welding and testing procedures and inspected offshore structures, high-rise buildings, pressure vessels, nuclear power plant components, and most reactive and refractory materials used by industry.

Expert has written procedures and welded with manual, semi-automatic, and robotic welding processes. He enjoys the challenges presented by all types of welding opportunities, especially automated and robotic welding.

Expert practices a service-oriented approach to managing the business of fabrication and manufacturing. He is an advocate for the value of time at work, increasing return on investment, and helping companies provide long-term employment.

He has welded titanium, zircaloy, reactive metals, inconel, stainless, aluminum, HSLA, and plain carbon steel. Expert has used most cutting processes, including oxyacetylene, plasma, mechanical, laser, and electric discharge machining. He is familiar with most welding and joining processes (e.g., arc welding, resistance, electron beam, lasers, soldering, brazing, ultrasonic bonding, and adhesives). He has developed and tested processes, procedures, and standards for real-time radiographic and ultrasonic examination.

Early in Expert's career, he started learning welding metallurgy and inspection as an Industrial Engineer. As he experienced more challenging welding procedures and nondestructive evaluation requirements, he chose to further his formal education at The Ohio State University. While there, he learned structured problem-solving methodologies for various additional types of welding (electron beam, lasers, robotic applications, etc.).

While a Graduate Research Associate at the OSU Welding Engineering Department, he helped design and patent wet welding (underwater welding) electrodes, wrote proposals for government grants, developed and tested flux mixtures, reviewed finite element analysis for weld bead profiles, used computer-aided welding design techniques for ship-building and aerospace applications and taught underwater welding and NDT classes.

While working as a welding applications engineer with a national shielding gas supplier, Expert dealt with hundreds of industrial users of argon and helium welding gas mixtures. He conducted management seminars and extended courses on health-safety-environmental issues, including benchmarking and financial analysis for many types of manufacturing and fabrication.

Expert provides troubleshooting expertise for numerous manufacturing and fabrication processes. He systematically works with sales, cost accounting, design engineers, materials (purchasing, receiving, and storage), welding processes, quality assurance, and warranty claims to solve welding problems.

For three decades Expert has dealt with the challenges of being a professional welding engineer and a non-destructive testing engineer. For example, he has interacted with presidents, vice-presidents, department managers, academic researchers, design engineers, manufacturing engineers supervisors, repair personnel, welders, robots, quality engineers, and NDT technicians. He has interpreted and certified code compliance and piece-rate labor incentive programs throughout the USA and in court cases.

Expert developed the QC programs and documented welding procedure specifications for dozens of pressure vessel fabricators. The vessels and tanks were used for oil and gas processing, refineries, chemical plants, and pharmaceutical and food processors. As an advocate of "Zero Accidents," Expert is consistently involved in safety seminars, training, and thorough accident investigation. He believes that accidents do not just happen, they are planned.

Expert has designed, witnessed fabrication, and inspected pressure vessels manufactured with carbon steel, stainless steel, and vessels clad with titanium and zirconium. Wall thickness ranges have been from .035" zirconium through 8" steel. Pressures ranged from vacuums to 5000 psi.

While working as a Senior Welding Engineer with Siemens Power Corporation-Nuclear Division, Expert as part of a team that manufactured zircaloy nuclear fuel rods for commercial reactors. He contributed to globalized welding operations in the US and Germany for "world-class quality" standards. He received official Siemens corporate recognition for the MECAZIR research & development contract for a French reactor research program.

Expert designed, tested, verified, and published a technical review on an alternative manufacturing process for second pass acceptance of fuel rod end closure welds. Customer recognition and intangible benefits were enormous, with annual savings to a single customer exceeding $450,000 USD.

He was a vested team contributor for process controls with a 23 person manufacturing quality team for consistent daily production of 3100 GTAW fuel rod welds (.375" diameter and approximately 300 psi internal pressure). His team set world records for first-pass acceptance of welds.

Expert was a co-inventor and tested a revolutionary underwater "wet welding" electrode. He developed and published the marketing plan for a $2.0 MM annual revenue and 45% profit, 200% ROI. He is a founding member of an underwater cutting committee and co-author of an underwater welding specification. He is the lead author for writing the testing scheme for underwater welds as inspected by Certified Marine Welding Inspectors. He is also a Certified PADI Open Water Diver and has welded underwater.

Expert teaches and applies the AWS, ASME, API, ANSI, and Military specifications, standards, and codes. As an AWS Certified Welding Educator and Certified Welding Inspector, he teaches short courses for examination reviews and to improve the overall quality of weld inspection services. He has interpreted codes and standards as a first-line supervisor and fabrication manager and industrial engineer. He formed his consulting firm to specialize in the application of technology, training, and testing of welds per codes and standards and forensic engineering.

As a director of engineering, metallurgist, and supervisor of NDT technicians, Expert wrote inspection plans and procedures and inspected steel buildings, steel mills, ladle and furnace fabricators, bridges, and food processing equipment plants. He developed sales forecasts, project cost estimates, and American Council of Independent Laboratory (ACIL) Certification documents. He is knowledgeable of the application and proficient in teaching radiography (RT-Gamma and X-ray), ultrasonic (UT-contact and immersion), eddy current (ET), liquid penetrant (PT), magnetic particle (PT), visual (VT), leak testing (LT), and visual (VT) techniques.

As a welding specialist, Expert often serves as a third-party inspector for major welding projects. He has been engaged in welding, metallurgical evaluations, destructive and non-destructive testing for most of his professional career. He remains active worldwide, expanding corporate capabilities and certifying laboratories to provide structural and construction material evaluations, welding inspection, shop inspection, and field erection of structural steel, real-time inspection of welding processes, strain gauge measurements, residual stress, and distortion analysis, and welding process improvements.

As an industrial engineer, Expert has written brazing and soldering procedures for electronic assemblies, circuit boards, power supplies, waveguide components, and wiring harnesses for telephone microwave systems. At a manufacturer of heat pump switching valves, Expert performed troubleshooting and improved process reliability for production brazing and in-process testing of 1100 units per shift.

Expert has experience with the installation of cladding materials on the interior of pressure vessels. This is accomplished with zirconium or titanium while the structural components of the pressure vessel remain carbon steel. Dissimilar metal welding is necessary at the transition between these components while welding attachments such as nozzles and couplings. Similarly, he is experienced with dissimilar metal welding applications while gas tungsten arc welding titanium tubes to zircaloy tubes with an argon shielding gas in the nuclear fuel rod fabrication industry. It was a successful project and required weld metallurgy considerations during the design stages.

Expert develops welding procedures and provides training courses about titanium welding on a regular basis. He knows the details of cleanliness, purging tubes, providing adequate shielding gas, and above all else cleanliness. Base materials and filler metals must be cleaned with acetone, along with adequate shielding gas before initiating the arc, during welding, and a few seconds after the arc is extinguished.

Compliance: Expert worked on-site to solve welding problems in manual and automated robotic GMAW processes for numerous materials and products, solved weld-cracking problems, and tested and implemented appropriate welding procedures.

Technology: He developed welding procedures and solved welding problems.

Training: Expert has trained managers, engineers, technicians, and personnel in sales and design on topics covering materials, processes, quality, and warranty issues.

Testing: He runs an independent testing agency and certifies processes and personnel.

Failure Analysis: Expert has been an expert witness in numerous litigation issues concerning misinterpretation and misapplication of welding codes.