About the project
An independent welding handbook. No shop, no affiliate links, no paid recommendations: nobody pays me to praise them. The ads on the pages are Google’s — I do not choose them and they are not my endorsement; they pay for the hosting and the domain.
Who writes this
Dmitry Frolov — welder and metal fabricator, over ten years at the torch. He started in Kyiv, then ran a shop in Warsaw, and has been working in Cyprus since 2023.
These days it is mostly on-site work: gates, carports, railings, stairs and repairs at the customer's place — with his own generator, because there is usually no power on site. MMA, MIG/MAG, TIG; steel, stainless, aluminium.
Where what you read here comes from. The numbers in this handbook come from standards, not from memory: the section tables, quality levels, current ranges and hardness conversions each name their source, and the calculator and the table on the same page work from one set of data. Practice is needed for something else — to explain what those numbers mean at the weld pool, and where in the shop they most often get broken.
What you will find here
The handbook is organised the way a question actually arrives. You are setting up a machine and need a current: the parameters section and the calculators answer that. The weld came out porous: the defects section explains why, and what changes it. The inspector asks for a certificate: the standards section explains what EN ISO 9606-1 covers and what it does not.
The English version exists because the standards do. EN ISO 9606-1, EN 1011-2, ISO 5817 and ISO 2553 are published in English, and on international sites the procedure specifications are written in English too. Where the American system differs — AWS A2.4 symbols, AWS D1.1 acceptance criteria — the difference is spelled out rather than glossed over.
Where the numbers come from
Coefficients and limits in the calculators are taken from standards and from consumable data sheets: EN 1011-2 for preheat, ISO/TR 18491 for thermal efficiency, ISO 5817 for quality levels, EN ISO 9606-1 for the qualification range, EN ISO 6848 for tungsten electrodes. The source is named on each page so that the result can be checked by hand.
Where a figure is empirical rather than normative — loss factors, arc-on time shares, typical settings — it is labelled as such. A number that cannot be traced to something is worth less than no number at all.
Everything published here is for reference. Final welding parameters are set by the welding procedure specification and the material certificate, and the right to make a weld comes from a qualification, not from a website.
Nine languages, not nine translations
The site is written in Polish, Russian, Ukrainian, Romanian, English, Spanish, German, Portuguese and Arabic. These are parallel versions rather than translations of one another: the standards are the same European ones, but the terminology, the customary designations and the practical questions differ from language to language. A page that has no version in your language simply does not appear in that language's menu — the language switcher in the header shows where a version exists.
Found a mistake?
Write through the contact form. Corrections to figures and tables are especially welcome: a technical handbook stays alive because somebody checks it.
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