Welding Safety

The welding process can and, will injure you, unless you take welding safety seriously.

Welding clothing

The first thing that you want to do to protect yourself when welding is to wear some thick clothing. You will need to be covered from head to toe, as UV light is given off from the welding arc and you will get sun burnt.

I use a set of overalls as they are nice and thick and do a good job of keeping the sparks and UV light off of my skin.

You can use a thick leather welding apron or welding jacket also. Here is a picture of what I wear when I weld.

It is important to keep your whole body covered. If you don't have a set of overalls or a welding jacket or apron, wear a long sleved shirt.

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Welding gloves

Next up is to protect you hands when welding. For this you need to use welding gloves.

Welding gloves will protect you from scratches from the sharp edges of the metal, they will protect you from the UV light and they will protect your hands from being burnt when you touch hot welded components.

A good set of welding gloves will be nice and thick, with the inside cotton lined. A lot of cheaper gloves are not lined on the inside and not very thick.

"The thicker the glove the better"

The thicker gloves will give your hands more insulation from the red hot welded parts. The welding gloves shown here are the ones I use.

You can see on this inside how they are nice and soft and cotton lined.

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Welding helmets

This is the most important welding safety item that you need to have.

You don't wear a welding helmet for fashion, or to look good. Although you can get some pretty sweet looking helmets these days! That bright blue welding arc will cook your eyeballs if you do not protect them.p>

Just try looking up at the sun for a few minutes and see how they feel. Then imagine that ten times over.

If you look at the welding arc with the naked eye too many times, or catch too many flashes. Your eyes will get really really sore. It will feel like they are sandy and very itchy.

This is called "welders flash".

Hey, anyone who has done a bit of welding in the past knows about it, and have probably had it themselves. Eye safety is very, very important.

Make sure you always use a welding helmet. I use what is called an auto darkening welding helmet . This type of helmet will "automatically" dull and filter the welding arc.

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Welding boots

Welding footwear is also a very important area not to overlook. I use a good strong pair of boots. These welding boots that I use are made from leather.

There is no point welding and wearing thongs or sneakers. Trust me on this one! All the hot sparks will burn the top of your feet if you use thongs.

And sneakers or normal shoes are not much better. What happens is the hot blobs of spatter will burn through your socks and burn through the tops of your shoes. Sneakers are all synthetic, and that melts really easily. You will be jumping up and down all the time trying to get hot blobs of spatter and sparks out of you shoes.

If you are going to use shoes, get leather ones. As the leather will not burn through as easily. The sparks and hot welds will roll off you leather shoes.


Here are the welding boots that I use below

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