AWS Issues

Although we barely work with American standards and documents but at many occasions they are the only available and reliable standards. I personally had to refer to different American documents including AWS and ASTM several times and I have found two issues with one specific standard that I would like to complain about:

1-      American standards, in my experience, ASME and AWS which I had referred to few times are written or would be better to say printed in column format! I have no idea why they do that and what benefit it might have. There are two columns in a page and instead of starting from the left side of the line, finishing on right and continuing on the next line they write to the middle of the page and they go to the next line, in this way making a column and then when they hit the bottom to go back up to the first line, leave a little gap and continue what had been left from the bottom of the page and make the second column similar to the first one.

2-      This issue is in regards to AWS A3.0 and it should probably not be even mention here but I am adding this because I want a longer post. There is a glossary provided at the beginning of this document. Different welding terms are presented and defined which is actually very helpful as I never saw such a complete list in CWB documents. There are two issues with this document apart from what was explained above which is applicable to the majority if not all of American technical documents:

a.       Obsolete terms are provided. It is not entirely a bad idea but for someone such as me who intends to limit his readings to only useful material it becomes very difficult to separate those from today’s terminology.

b.      Most of the terms are followed by a figure number which the reader can refer to and see a diagram, a chart or a schema. This also is a fantastic idea as a picture speaks more than thousands of words but the page number(s) is(are) not provided. An example is:

Flash Time: Period of flash welding cycle during which flashing action accrues. See Figure B.51. And no page number is provided. If this definition had been followed by Page 128, it would have been much easier for the reader to manage his or her time. 

Generally I found AWS documents more complete and better explained but comparing to CWB, both institutes suffer serious customer services problems.