Welding Tips and Tricks

Sorry if this has been asked, searching for "Steel-it" is nearly impossible on this site due to the hyphen.

Does anybody have any experience with the weldability of the Steel-it paints? Since it's beat in our heads to clean clean clean, seems like this may contaminate the weld. Perhaps the better way to think about this "weldable paint" is that it should only be welded in a pinch. Just looking for real-world experience with the product.

Thanks

I have none but have heard about it. Anxious to hear your results though

i had a bit of welding the other weak and it was painted with "weld through" galv paint.
it doesn't live up to its name. very hard to get an arc started, you would think galv would conduct better than normal paint.
it looked like it burnt off ok. i ended up just running the grinder over it first which made it a lot easier.
no idea of contamination of the weld as i didn't cut it apart to check (not a critical weld).

Yeah Gal is a pain to weld. I used flux core MIG with splatter spray and found it helped a little. Best to use a grind or wire wheel to just take off the gal coating.

Sent from my SM-G965F using Tapatalk

tweake wrote:i had a bit of welding the other weak and it was painted with "weld through" galv paint.
it doesn't live up to its name. very hard to get an arc started, you would think galv would conduct better than normal paint.
it looked like it burnt off ok. i ended up just running the grinder over it first which made it a lot easier.
no idea of contamination of the weld as i didn't cut it apart to check (not a critical weld).

The "Steel-It" product though is actually comprised of 316L stainless material in the final cover. So, by all claims, you can actually TIG directly through it. A far cry from GALV coating.

Show me a WPS that allows welding through any coating!

You don't really want to be breathing zinc fumes either, in fact you'd typically go out of your way to avoid it as much as possible. In all honesty you can stick weld through just about anything you can get an arc struck on, paint, heavy rust, heavy painted rust, it'll all weld through with a 6011 cranked up 5-10 amps hotter than you'd normally set it at. But I wouldn't TIGweld through anything at all, if it's not bright shiny metal you'll have problems, I also wouldn't try to MIG through paint either, and flux core is forgiving up until you're suddenly riddled with porosity.

cj737 wrote:

tweake wrote:i had a bit of welding the other weak and it was painted with "weld through" galv paint.
it doesn't live up to its name. very hard to get an arc started, you would think galv would conduct better than normal paint.
it looked like it burnt off ok. i ended up just running the grinder over it first which made it a lot easier.
no idea of contamination of the weld as i didn't cut it apart to check (not a critical weld).

The "Steel-It" product though is actually comprised of 316L stainless material in the final cover. So, by all claims, you can actually TIG directly through it. A far cry from GALV coating.

this stuff is not normal galv paint, its designed for welding through it.
no idea what its got in it.

Poland308 wrote:Show me a WPS that allows welding through any coating!

I don’t think this product is designed for code level work, Poland. So no worries on that.