Mruczek's Welding Engineering currently has two software products for sale.  Both are Excel Spreadsheet files. One will aid you in estimating your welding costs and the other will help you predict the ferrite content of dissimilar welding in stainless steel.

The ferrite prediction spreadsheet will determine the amount of ferrite as a percentage using the Schaeffler diagram or as a ferrite number using the WRC 1992 diagram. The program allows you to enter the composition of the two base metals and the filler metal. Once you have entered the composition of each then you can then enter the dilution rate for each. Then choose the diagram you wish to see and the results will be plotted automatically.

The weld cost spreadsheet has 10 different joint configurations to choose from and there is a sheet to help you calculate wire feed speed and deposition rates based on the length of wire fed for a given period of time. All sheets are capable of converting from English to metric units with the click of a button. 

Each sheet contains two pages. The first page is the input page where you enter all known variables such as, current, volts, cost of electrode per lb, gas cost, labor cost, and so on. The second page is all the outputs for your project.  Shop productivity in lbs of wire per 8 hr shift is shown on the output page along with the amount of weld wire to order, number of gas bottles to order, number of welding hours, total cost, deposition rates, estimated number of passes required. There is also a row that shows the percent savings between the two processes. This is not all the outputs but just a small sample.

With the program you can look at two different weld processes for the same joint configuration to determine which process will save you the most money! You can change the weld joint design while keeping the process the same and see how joint design effects the total weld cost.  There are many possibilities.