Longitudinal seam welding is one type welding process used to produce linear welds on a wide variety of parts. This process is used for many industrial applications to form the material into a desired shape (e.g. a cylinder or rectangular tube), by welding the abutting edges to form a rigid structure. The traditional method of doing this is to manually hold the edges in alignment, tack weld them and then complete the linear weld. This is done manually or by use of a simple carriage carrying the welding torch.