When a weld goes wrong — the signature of a reject
An unstable arc and an erratic pool — the weave never settles into a clean bead. The signature of a weld heading for rejection, visible frame by frame.
What you see
- An unstable arc that never settles into a steady length.
- A pool that surges and starves instead of tracking evenly.
- A weave that fails to build a consistent, rippled bead.
- The early visual signature of undercut, lack of fusion, and porosity risk.
How Therness catches it
- HeatCore AI scores arc, pool, and bead stability in real time.
- Anomalies are flagged during the weld — not after it cools.
- Each event is logged as pass/fail evidence for the weld record.
- Operators can stop, adjust, or rework before scrap accumulates.
The signature, decoded
A sound weld has a rhythm: a fixed arc length, a pool that trails the electrode at a steady width, a weave that lands each toe on the same line. The reject in this clip has none of it. The arc hunts for length, so heat input spikes and drops from moment to moment; the pool answers by surging wide then starving thin, and the toes wander instead of tying in. Each of those departures maps to a defect an inspector would later find — a starved edge becomes undercut or lack of sidewall fusion, a turbulent pool drags in gas that freezes as porosity. The useful part is timing: these instabilities are present in the live image seconds before any of them is locked into solid metal, which is exactly the window real-time scoring is built to act inside.
