Welding Tips and Tricks

I have been padding beads on a flat plate, for practice on an up coming welding project. I purchased a pack of 7018 H8 AC Lincoln rods from Lowe's. I have been getting bad! porosity at the start and restarts. I had some Lincoln 7018 H4R in a screw cap plastic container, prob. 15 yrs old. They ran perfect no porosity whatsoever. Has anyone had problems with rods purchased from Lowe's? Buddy

see if this helps. Long story short, after striking your arc, hold a slightly longer arc for a second, and pause. You have to let the weld heat up and get the flux burning.

http://www.lincolnelectric.com/en-us/su ... etail.aspx

See if this helps, run them on AC, that's what they're made for.

Len


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Welcome to the forum Buddy.

We had some nice weather here today and I could get out and burn some rod finally. I ran the lincoln 7018AC from home depot (same as the Lowes I think), some hobart 7018AC from tractor supply, and some lincoln excalibur 7018s. The lincoln 7018 had the worst flux...thick and gooey, couldn't make out the puddle. Hobart was not as bad, and IMO nothing is as nice as the excalibur stuff (in my limited experience). Maybe its just the rods.

Louie1961 wrote:see if this helps. Long story short, after striking your arc, hold a slightly longer arc for a second, and pause. You have to let the weld heat up and get the flux burning.

http://www.lincolnelectric.com/en-us/su ... etail.aspx

You may be on to something about holding the long arc to get things hotter....however too long of an arc at stops and starts can cause the porosity too, also be careful of the rod angle...too much angle and one side of the puddle doesn't get the coverage it needs to prevent the porosity.

buddyh wrote:I have been padding beads on a flat plate, for practice on an up coming welding project. I purchased a pack of 7018 H8 AC Lincoln rods from Lowe's. I have been getting bad! porosity at the start and restarts. I had some Lincoln 7018 H4R in a screw cap plastic container, prob. 15 yrs old. They ran perfect no porosity whatsoever. Has anyone had problems with rods purchased from Lowe's? Buddy

I have run a test, after heating the Lincoln 7018 H8 AC rods for prescribed time and temp. The results are very favorable. Very little if any surface holes or porosity, however the excalibur 7018 MR is by far the best.