This was the final one of the five joint configurations I had to do to pass my City & Guilds qualification for the TIG welding of stainless steel.
This is a tube standing vertically on a horizontal base plate. The skill is to perform a fillet weld which joins the tube to the plate.
The tube was longer at around 100mm (4inches) and was cut to this stub when extracting the "break test" sample.
This joint convincing passed and I felt very happy indeed after my long journey.
I did slightly "adapt" the welding procedure, compared to what a welding contractor would do in commercial practice welding say several hundred stanchions for the rails on the viewing terraces of a swimming pool. A commercial welder would sweep around in a continuous motion, and would be experienced enough to control and get a faultless joint. On the other hand, what I did, wanting to pass this test while less practiced, was to work cyclically around the joint, flowing the metal forward with no filler added, so as to get a well wetted weld root, then backing the torch back up the weld pool and filling it to get the fully formed fillet, before again coming down the front face of the weld pool and inducing the weld pool to flow thinly forward again - repeat until having gone around the circumference. The final picture shows that my weld penetration was more than convincing. Who cares. It's work cutting up the sample and testing it, so you might as well tip the odds in favour of only having to do it once.
What I didn't cheat on is that the weld sample stayed in one position as I went around the circumference. You are allowed to rotate the piece so you are always working in the same "easy" quadrant, which I didn't know while practicing on some mild steel. So, much to the surprise of the instructor on showing me how he would do such a weld, I showed a practice weld which he said would have passed and he was surprised when I said I had achieved this while sweeping all the way around the circumference.
Here are pictures of the sample which quietly took me to the end of my months of dedicated study and practice, from the warm end of summer of 2003 through to the cold beginning of spring of 2004.