Every welded part gets looked at before it gets measured. The bead profile is checked for evenness along its length, for a consistent width and for toes that blend into the parent metal rather than sitting up on it. Undercut, overlap, missed edges and unfinished craters are all caught at this stage.
Colour is part of the same check. On titanium and stainless a root or heat band that has gone past straw into blue or grey indicates either too much heat or too little shielding, and both are reasons to look closer rather than to carry on. Spatter, arc strikes and handling marks are noted before finishing, while they can still be addressed.
A part that fits is the specification, so a finished weld is measured against the drawing and against the vehicle it is intended for. Flange flatness, bolt hole spacing, tube length, angle at bends and the position of mounting points are all checked, because a welding error and a fitting error look identical to a customer.
On sample work an engineer measures the finished sizes and tests hardness to confirm the part matches what was intended, which is the same logic applied to a single part. Where a dimension cannot be measured directly once the part is assembled, it is checked in the fixture before the part leaves it.
The interior gets its own inspection wherever it can be reached, using a light, a mirror or a borescope. A silver or light straw root means the shielding and purge did their job. A grey, black or crystalline deposit means they did not, and on a part that has to carry gas it is not something to be polished away and forgotten.
Where a joint is structural and the interior cannot be seen, the process has to be trusted instead of the inspection: proven purge setup, proven sequence and a welder who makes the same joint the same way every time. That is why the TIG titanium welding parts we build are designed so that the root can be checked, wherever the application allows it.
Anything that carries gas or fluid is tested as a complete assembly, not as individual joints. Air or fluid is applied and the part is watched for weeping, with particular attention to the ends of runs, around flange welds and at any joint that ties into a casting or a machined face.
A part that passes when cold is not automatically proven, because thermal expansion is what opens marginal fusion defects. Whenever a design allows it, the joint that carries the load is welded for full penetration rather than relying on a test to catch a shortfall later.
Inspection is best done by someone who did not weld it. The same workshop does the work, but the check belongs to a separate function with its own standard, which is why our own team includes a dedicated quality-check group working alongside the production welders rather than reporting to them.
That separation also carries the TIG stainless steel welding side of the shop, where the inspector is judging against the drawing and the standard rather than against what the welder thought looked good on the day. Independence is what makes a check worth having.
Rejection is routine, not exceptional. An incomplete fusion at a root, a crack, porosity that breaks the surface, a flange out of tolerance or a tip that will not sit square are all grounds for the part to stop where it is. It is cheaper to remake a part at this stage than to explain it after it has been fitted.
Where a fault is surface-level and the part is not structural, a decision is made on whether to repair or to remake, based on what the repair would do to the metal. Some faults are genuinely fixable and others simply move the weakness somewhere else, and that judgement is part of the job.
