Welding Thresholds

• by cewitherell
• 2011-11-20 06:11:19
• Interferences
• 2566 views
• 4 comments

Many thanks to Frank and bdon for your very prompt and appropriate comments on my previous message. I may be a newbie to this forum but not to living with a pacemaker (several years with a St. Jude twin lead model). And certainly not a newbie to welding. I am 84 years old and first welded when I was about 10 years old. My father operated a welding fabricator business on our next street in an industrial town near New York City, and I learned both gas and electric welding and machine shop practices at a very early age.

It served me well too as my father died when I was 15 and with WWII on at full blast I was able to get a job when I attained work age at a war plant that made use of my fabricating skills. A few years later, in the US Army, I served as a welder for a tactical bridge company in Korea for two years. Upon discharge I went to engineering school, working part time night shifts as a welder on aluminum heat exchangers for a fabricator in Newark, NJ. Upon graduation I eventually became Director of Welding R&D for an international corporation in NYC. And have worked in the welding field ever since.

Now retired, I am well equipped for welding in my garage shop and want to be able to operate the required power units for arc welding and possibly TIG and MIG, as gas welding has its limitations as we all know.

I have been to St Jude's engineering people and find that practically everybody is reluctant over liability concerns to give us a green light on welding. This is why I have tried to find a definitive measurement or standard for this - a threshold for magnetic field force or whatever energy affects pacemakers adversely. There really is nothing out there, and this is surprising since pacemakers have been around a long time, and so have welders.

My cardiologist and the St. Jude technician say that welding is an absolute no-no; which, to me, is hogwash driven by liability concerns. I am aware of the wrapping together of the power leads to minimize magnetic field influence and the various amp level maximums touted around for welding. I keep coming up with the thought that somewhere someone must have or know of a device that once and for all can measure and establish what is and is not acceptable limits for electric welding.

One method I thought of, but am unable to implement myself, is for the pacemaker technician to bring his computer console to my shop, attach to my pacemaker his doughnut, and measure the effects upon the pacemaker of actual welding operations. So far, I have been unable to muster the willingness of the right people to do these experiments. Perhaps someone on this forum has the right influence with the right people to carry out such tests. We are not talking rocket science here, but straightforward technical trials in the real world.

Anyway, sorry for the long entry, but this is where I am coming from, and I think that there are many other pacemaker users who would benefit from having real numbers to work with. Thanks again for your welcome comments and interest.
Charlie