Welding Tips and Tricks

Hi, I am a total beginner at welding and want to be as best prepared as possible before my class starts. Any advice? Tips? Form? Btw I am taking a stick welding class. Any and all advice will help and would be greatly appreciated.

Hi there. Welcome. Best of luck with your class. My tips are to wear clear safety glasses under your hood and keep your mouth shut while chipping slag. The glasses will provide an extra layer of UV ray protection, help stop wayward sparks. As for the mouth shut, well, a hot slag burn to the tongue isn't pleasant....

Good helmet, good gloves, and a really healthy dose of patience. You’re starting off with the best process to learn by. Stick will teach you to manipulate the rod and watch the puddle, both critical skills as you go forward with other processes.

Once you’ve burned hundreds of stick rods, you’ll overcome your fear of the rod strike/sparks and things will get much easier

I’d recommend a good auto dark with at least 4 sensors. Get lots of extra cover lenses. They get sorted up easy when your first learning to stick weld. Get a pair of boots that don’t have laces.

Your outer lens will get smoke-covered real fast doing stick welding. I highly recommend a small box of tissues and eyeglass/TV monitor/screen cleaner(couple dollars at walmart) to gently clean the outer lens of smoke residue. No heavy wiping though, just spray the lens and gently drag the damp tissue all over. You don't want to scratch the lens. It will pick up a lot of crud and will help make the outer lens last longer before it truly has to be trashed.

Before you spend a lot of $ on an autodark shield, I'd suggest you try both autodark and fixed-shade shields.

I started with autodark, and it wasn't until the headgear for that shield broke that I tried one of the fixed-shade shields at the school where I was taking a welding course. What a difference, even from my fairly expensive Miller Digital Elite autodark!

Now I only use autodark shield when in awkward positions or for tacking. It's like night and day how much better I can see the puddle with the fixed-shade.

Welcome to the forum and best of luck in your welding course.