About

Hello. My name is Ethan Bale, owner of this website.

I am a Welding Engineer employed in a heavy engineering organization, with an experience of about 10 years in manufacture of pressure retaining equipment. Over these years, I have had extensive exposure to ASME BPVC for my official work. Specifically, I have had exposure to Section IX, Section III, and Section II Part C.

A majority of my experience is related to manufacture of Class 1equipment for a nuclear power plant. The nuclear aspect has meant that compliance to Code and contract requirements is enforced acutely and stringently, with little room for concession.

It also means dealing with Inspectors who are unyielding and unrelenting with respect to requirements, sometimes even paranoid. Sometimes, the Inspector wants to operate by-the-book, and would go to great lengths to arrive at the correct understanding of the Code. Sometimes, Inspectors adopt a practical viewpoint, by combining commonsense and contextual knowledge of the matter. There is something to learn from both kinds of Inspectors.

However, one thing is certain. When one deals with knowledgeable Inspectors, one has to be as good as the Inspector, or better, with respect to the knowledge of the Codes as well as practical aspects of welding. Interacting with tough Inspectors amplifies the fine nuances of the Code to you, and that is when a firm understanding of the matter gets ingrained in your mind with some permanence.

The ASME BPVC is a magisterial treatise. It is a world of systematic rules that have been written by combining wisdom, common sense, and empirically derived outcomes. I feel fortunate that I get to work with a document of such authority and repute.

It is incredible how concisely the Code has been constructed. A couple of sentences convey meaning that can require explanation of several pages. It is also mention-worthy that that the Section IX has kept itself largely consistent over more than five decades. What it said five decades earlier, it says today.

The recent content on this site principally is about Section IX, presently. About 50 articles cover in some detail the topic of performance qualifications and procedure qualifications in accordance with Section IX. The writing work is still under progress, and i hope to finish writing my observations in about another 6 months. Thereafter, there are plans to host a couple of quizzes on Section IX. Beyond that, i don’t have any concrete plans as of now, we will see when we get there.

Gradually, I hope to expand it to include other broader topics about welding. The idea is to share some of what I learn in my official work, and in turn learn something by interacting with the visitors on this site as well. Eventually, I hope that this site becomes an authoritative, consult-worthy, reliable resource for all things related to Section IX.

This website is not an attempt to reproduce or restate what is already stated in Section IX. Also, no attempt has been made to cover the contents of Section IX with any degree of entirety. The content on this website is mainly a collection of insights that i gained while working on official work in my company.

Some of what has been said in the articles on this website here may appear like a reproduction of Section IX, but it is mostly only to provide context to the subsequent discussion.

Abundant reference has been derived from Interpretations issued by ASME every year. ASME has hosted an online database of Interpretations, including historical Interpretations issued 2-3 decades ago, on its website cstools.asme.org. This database form a wonderful repository of information for anyone wanting to understand Section IX with some depth.

In my work place, I come into contact with majorly SMAW, GTAW and SAW processes, so these processes form the basis for a bulk of the discussion in the articles.

I hope that reading through the content on this site adds something to your understanding about Section IX.