It took me some time to write this as you may have already added stuff or there could be stuff already there I missed in the first place  May I  Nathaniel I think you have pointed out one of the most fascinating double edges of the internet and certainly this frustrating Wikipedia please forgive me taking this time here but for the sake of your welding article case might I be so bold to attempt advancing a much much larger cause as well   You have said yourself that you are not a highly experienced welder save for Im sure at least some time spent laying down a few good beads yet you havent been known to build large constructions where lives might have depended  I have that right about you yes    HOWEVER what you have done through this string of welding articles I find simply fantastic  It is concise and worded at a level properly aimed at most anyone already competent enough to begin welding yet simply needs to get the overview  It is as authoritative as any single or group of books and articles Ive read on welding as a hole That should encourage and scare you at the same time Now we just need to add a bit more about the Art  Yes that ethereal bane stalking wikipedia bureaucrats who cant stand things which dont come up in google counts  The list of unsourced statements you have offered may exist in no small part to the very lack of authoritative sources available for such things  I have never NEVER come across two welding books which are consistent through a school of thought on such a list of interdependent items  It is precisely the effect of deep interrelation that no two instructors will ever approach welding exactly the same yet miraculously so many welds hold together and perform their needed functions in our lives  After the instructor has pointed out the canvas paints and brushes than he must leave the student to his own devices  To hone a skill set to practice an art  Practice  For ultimately the welders experience becomes the most reliable gauge to deciding the finished quality of a weld  So practice and time under the hood is everything so they say    XRay is really quite impractical for all but the most overfunded projects  Destruction by crosscutting open the weld or simply trying to break it is what the most honest instructor will tell a student he must do if he wants to know learn what it takes to make a good weld  Breaking things is the engineeres absolute best instruction manual and heshe must hold in great regard and memory those times where they witnessed failure so better to prevent it  That is what truly builds experience and it is only the experienced person who has any hope of mastering any art  A highly technical well sourced and cited article such as this MUST in some way acknowledge that the details will only go so far before it must address that which I have seen turn the stomach of so many a geekzoid wikipedian   those chanting the endless mantra of NPOV and that shitsource of false surety google counts That there are people out there who know more than google  And there always will be  That these articles if wikipedia wishes to survive if wikipedia ever wishes to be more than an ARTIFICIAL intelligence it must learn to allow by tolerance alone of need be or better yet to encourage those who have deep knowledge into feeling more comfortable here  To collaborate to offer their thoughts and experience here to celebrate the diversity of opinion and even the howtos and whatfors wherein work can be done with great satisfaction and supreme result for all  This largely tedious wasteful foolhardy and pointless absolute fixation around which too many wikipedians have styled themselves as NPOV warriors by demanding citation on every minute single detail will be this wikis undoing     From my experience the arc is held simply as short as possible so as to concentrate heat in the shortest possible time yet long enough to avoid dipping the tip while the hand naturally shakes minutely  The amount of heat the amount of heat the powersupply can deliver over time and becomes and very important factor in calculating dutycycle to the weld pool and thus how convex or concave the pool is laid with filler defines for me how close I can get to the work  Duty Cycle is a calculation of the machines ability to deliver a given heat for a given time vs the time it must literally rest idle before it has radiated or cooled the internal workings of the machine completely irrespective of the work piece Yet this largely defines the maximum amount of heat to a given thickness in a shortness of time that a welder can put into the work piece  Aluminum for example is notorious for its ability to wick conduct heat away from the p