respot

A respot is a weld bead applied to an assembly after the initial welding operation has been completed and inspected. It addresses porous welds, incomplete fusion, undercut, or other defects detected during quality control. Unlike a repair weld made on a scrapped part, a respot is performed on production units that would otherwise be discarded, making it a recovery operation rather than a rework of scrap.

In resistance spot welding, the most common context for the term, a respot occurs when electrodes are applied to the same zone again, or very close to it, after cooling and inspection. The part is repositioned under the welding gun, clamped, and the weld parameters may be adjusted based on the nature of the defect. The second weld must be timed correctly to avoid overheating the base material or creating large heat-affected zones that weaken the joint.

Respots are monitored and tracked in production because their frequency signals process drift or machine deterioration. A high respot rate indicates electrode wear, hydraulic pressure loss, transformer imbalance, or inconsistent part geometry clamping. Quality systems typically set limits on how many respots a single part can receive before it must be scrapped; two respots per joint is common, but limits vary by specification and structural criticality.

The term appears most often in automotive sheet metal assembly and appliance manufacturing, where resistance spot welding joins thin gauge steel. It is less common in MIG or stick welding contexts, where defects are more often removed by grinding and re-welded as a formal repair rather than a respot. In some industries, the term reweld is used interchangeably, though respot more precisely means a localized second application at the original or adjacent spot location.