Welding Tips and Tricks

Hello all,
I am a welder at a tool shop. We recently took on a new job that involves welding a stainless steel cap onto a 4"steel pipe. The welder that used to do this job is retiring and attempted to show us at the tool shop. There is an 1/8" gap weld with the 3/32" ENiCrFe-3 rod. He was showing me using an 1/8" rod because that size was all that we had on hand. He had the welder set at 85 amps DCEN. The whole time he was having issues running a bead and having the slag form worm holes. The welds he did ended up having to grinded out and redone many times on the same Pipe. I was thinking that maybe the amperage was to cold for the slag to rise, but I am fairly new to welding and did not want to try and question the old timers methods. We recently received the 3/32" rod and I will have to weld together three of these pipes. Does anyone have any experience with this rod and type of weld? I would really appreciate any advise that will help me get this weld done right.

If I had that metal configuration I would chose 309 rod in 3/32. It's meant for just that kind of weld.

This job is for the power plant in town. They told us what rod to use and all that. I'm not really sure what type of stainless steel this is so my boss wants me to only use the rod they told us to use for liability reasons. Here are some images of the stainless cap and the gap weld.

Definitely use it if that's what the called for. Most SS stick is hard to get a handle on at first. Some versions of the same rod are meant for flat work only. If you try to run down hill it will trap slag like you described.