Thanks everyone for all the responses. I mentioned it in the last post I did but just this year we got a new shop teacher at our high school because our previous one quit, and so the shop teacher we acquired now is an engineer. Not a welder or machinist or anything like that and is pretty much just ...

Yeah I realized that yesterday the water line is also the power cable. I was hoping to weld some stainless with it but I did end up firing up the oxy-acetylene and played around for a while. Since the power cable runs through the water line does that mean it has to be only distilled water in the wat...

The water cooler lines on our WP20 at school went out and while we are waiting for new lines to come in I was wondering if it would damage the torch to run it air cooled.

Thanks, Joel.

At home I've got my own media blaster but unfortunately not at school. We are on quite a low budget with lots of shotty equipment and our teacher is also (not to offend anyone) an engineer/architect and honestly does not know how to weld, light a torch, or run a lathe or mill. So pretty much in my 3...

When I've been prepping I've been either taking a wire brush and cleaning it down to shiny raw aluminum or cleaning it off with a wire wheel down to shiny aluminum. I have no issue with doing as much prep as I can because I want to learn it all right the first time so that I know I'm making good wel...

Thanks for the input guys. I'll try and post pictures as soon as possible but I was also wondering why some of my welds with aluminum are pretty shiny and some are gray and dull am I not running enough gas pressure or is my metal just not clean enough or what? I'm using 3/32nd tungsten and a pretty ...

Hi all, I am a senior in high school and I convinced my teacher to let me get our Lincoln Idealarc 250 ARC/TIG out and get it up running as it hasn't been used in years. I've TIG welded once before but I don't even think you could qualify it because it was only for about half an hour and that was be...