Blueprint Reading for Welders: Creating a Bill of Materials

Lesson Description:

In this lesson, provided by the Contextualize to Learn project at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, students learn about and create a Bill of Materials (BOM). Students should understand the following five objectives after completing the lesson:

1. That all Bills of Material must contain a number or letter to represent each item, a quantity, a size, a description of the material and the length.
2. That structural metal goes by thickness or metal gage, and then length and width,
3. That pipe is listed as a nominal size and that the actual OD, ID and wall thickness needs to be looked up in a pipe chart.
4. Kerf is the amount of metal lost when cutting each piece.
5. Most structural metal comes in 20 foot lengths and metal sheets in 48” x 96” or 60”x 120”.

Further, by the end of the lesson, students should be able to utilize the knowledge gained to create an effective Bill of Materials (BOM), utilize a pipe chart, calculate the amount of kerf per structural length or material or sheet, and figure out how many lengths of structural metal and sheets of metal are needed for a welding project. The math in this lesson includes adding, subtracting and dividing whole numbers and decimals, and converting between feet and inches. 

The expected total time for the lesson is seven hours.

Lesson Contents: 

Lesson materials include instructor notes, a collection of handouts with answers, a practice materials list, a test, and a layout exam.

The 5-page instructor notes includes prerequisite assumptions, notes, a suggested timeline, objectives, and two problem situations. Problem Situation I is to create a material list to fabricate and an order list for a vendor. Problem Situation II involves a BOM pretest and post test. 

For orientation purposes the Creating-Bill-of-Materials_Instructor-Notes PDF is included as a separate attachment and offers a sample of the type of material included in this collection. 

Below is a list of the files contained within the .zip attachment. The size of each file is included in parenthesis. 

Creating a Bill of Materials (6 files, 3.2 MB)

• Lesson Instructor Notes (Creating-Bill-of-Materials_Instructor-Notes 436 KB)
• Practice Handouts with Answers (Handouts-for-Practice-and-Test-Items-with-Answers 1.3 MB)
• Practice Material Lists (Practice-Material-Lists-for-BPR 719 KB)
• Test (Silverstein_BPR-Test-2 97 KB)
• Layout Exam (Silverstein_Layout-Exam-for-354 628 KB)