Welding Tips and Tricks

Does anyone know if Jody's CD'S are closed caption and/or know of any type of CDs/books/etc to explain the various tools (plasma torches, rosebuds, shears, bandsaw, etc) used in metal fabrication & pipe welding? I'm currently in a welding technology degree program in order to study for the CWI certification exam (yes, I'm crossing over to the dark side). There's a guy in my class who is deaf and is doing well burning rod but asked me if I would teach him the "tools of the trade". Our instructor is good but has 20 other students to worry about. I was a welder and pipefitter for 20 plus years in the navy so I've got a little bit of experience and knowledge to share but I do not know sign language. Having to write a note every time he has a question would be ridiculously time consuming. He does not have reliable Internet access. The school has a deaf interpreter there during classes but for after school learning, he's on his own. I want to help the kid and he's a quick and eager learner but there are some obvious obstacles I'm not sure how to overcome. Any and all suggestions are appreciated. Thx

One of life's worthy challenges for certain...

Only thing that comes to mind is Jody's website does inventory many of the videos with a summary text description. So too on the some of the YT videos. At least it might help him to correlate what he's seeing with what he reads (maybe pre-read, watch, re-read for enhanced understanding).

You could also develop your own "hand signals" with pre-written notes. Too hot - 2 fingers to your heart. Too cold - 2 fingers to arm. Arc too long - spread fingers. And so on... I've done something similar with non-English speaking kids coaching soccer. Write it down, agree on hand signals, then gesticulate. Can help, but I surely wish you all the success in helping him-

Great question!

I'll pose it to Jody and his team myself.

Steve S

One thing to try for more background info is to enable hearing impaired subtitling for Jody's youtube videos. Not sure if he already did/tried that?

It's an auto-generate function of youtube if there's no closed-caption available for the video and unfortunately it often sucks very, very badly, but Jody's voice is clear and well-articulated so the system may have chance of getting it at least somewhat right.

Might be an idea of Jody to put up a video at some time to see if any of his subscribers are willing to create subtitles for his videos. Not just for the hearing impaired but perhaps also in other languages so people who are not fluent in english can also get the information.

Several channels use such a 'community translation' for video's and there's often quite a few people in the audience who are willing to chip in just for the heck of it.

Bye, Arno.

My gratitude for all replies. Great combination of ideas/experience and they gave me a good starting point. I found a couple of iPhone apps for ASL (American Sign Language) and am working on learning & putting together words and phrases that are most associated with all of the basic (non-machine or automated) welding processes. I've been wearing out soapstone sticks on the welding booth walls answering his questions. I like the idea of creating a set of hand signals unique to welding. By the way, nice chopper weld monger. Thanks again to all of you. I'll post updates and to Steve, I would genuinely appreciate Jody's input.

Michael, I've texted Jody, and emailed him and Joey on the subject. It sometimes takes a minute, since he's got so many irons in the fire.

That chopper was an OCC build (that didn't make the TV show) for AirGas. I was on a build of a cold box for them in Pennsylvania. The picture of me on the bike was taken by an executive VP for AirGas in Radnor, PA.

Steve S

Rather than trying to reinvent the wheel since this is an education situation you might be well served contacting NTID at RIT or even Galludet.

NTID seems to be at the forefront of closed captioning, having it near real time translation now.
They may have students who can and are willing to CC all the videos.

We're currently looking into several services for accurate captioning and transcription, but in the meantime like Arno said, the YouTube auto-generated closed captioning has come a long way. Running a quick test on Dad's (Jody's) last video, it seems like it's pretty precise. Works on mobile too. I wish I could give a time frame about when we'll have a more comprehensive option, but Like steve said, we're pretty busy around here. Thanks

-Joey