It was just a 20-minute welding job in a basement boiler-room, but it left the plumber feeling lightheaded and nauseated and gave him a headache that lasted until the next morning.

Although robotic laser cutting systems have advanced over the years, you should know exactly what one can do before you decide if it's right for you. To find out whether you should choose robotics to laser-cut your parts, you first must consider several factors, starting with what is in a system.

Let's start with the obvious: Molten metals have no particular structure. The atoms that make up that metal are just whipping around helter-skelter—at a high rate of speed—with no real orderly, defined pattern.

Kevin Robb's sculptures seem to defy gravity, arrest time, encroach space. Each sculpture is a moment freeze-framed; each element seems to be impossibly suspended.

Metal-cored wire is a tubular electrode that consists of a metal sheath and a core of various powdered materials, primarily iron. The core of metal-cored wire contributes almost entirely to the deposited weld metal.

Narrow-gap gas tungsten arc welding (GTAW) frequently is used to weld regular and multilayer high-chromium steel for power generation boilers, stainless steel for nuclear power generation equipment, INCONEL® alloy and other high-alloy steels, and thick-wall stationary pipes.