Welding Tips and Tricks

Job I'm working on at the moment is 2" sched 40 pipe from China. The heat of welding (tig) is melting the surface varnish nearly a foot back from the butt. My gloves and tigfinger sticks to it (can't slide around pipe) and leaves a black sticky residue on them and it stinks like poop and smoke everywhere.
It sucks.
Anyone else found this?

I was saving this one for you bro.

Haha that's a good one.
The pipe actually welds ok.
Maybe I'll be accused of smoking a pipe[SMILING FACE WITH OPEN MOUTH AND COLD SWEAT]

That's funny...

That's a weird one for sure, especially since it welds good. Makes you wonder what's in that coating. I'd be more mad it put crap on my TIG finger..lol

I dealt with that a lot back when I did a bunch of hand rails a couple years back. The 90 degree elbow fittings I used looked just like the one in your pic and they seemed to be some kind of high grade cast steel. I would clean the surface to bright metal but it would still give me problems when I mig welded it. The residue must seep into the metal and then get pulled out as you weld. The pipe itself welded good after cleaning though. I kept getting porosity from it so I switched to stick welding and got better results. Still got that crap on my gloves though.

I am mad that the crap is on my tigfinger. I'm really pissed off. Its not slick anymore. it sticks to the melted crap and when I lift off I get strings of crap stretching off the pipe attached to the tigfinger. No problem with the elbows.

Cut a strip of fire blanket and wrap around the pipe where you need to support or slide.

AndersK wrote:Cut a strip of fire blanket and wrap around the pipe where you need to support or slide.

+1.
Good thinking. Doesn't salvage the current TIGfinger (though a solvent wash might) and I'd be real curious what I'm breathing, in that circumstance.

Steve S

Pine tar, Coal tar, or Creosote, maybe?

I'd lean toward an organic-vapor respirator...

Steve S