Welding Tips and Tricks

taz wrote: This reminds of something that happened 10 years ago.
I get..............................................
Then I go " THEN HOW THE F*CK DO YOU WANT ME TO GET UP THERE? "
Needless to say they called a crane with a lifting basket for me to do the inspection.

Many times I wish we had a " Like " button !!

like

I don't know how to do it, but I'll tell you how to. Funny how these guys turn up everywhere.

One time our Nomex cleaner got drunk and didnt show with our coveralls so they made us put on PAPER DUST SUITS and go out in the unit. I asked the safety guy who had his own nomex why he wasn't wearing a freakin paper suit...."this unit isn't running right now", So I asked him why are we wearing Nomex then? He didn't say a word and skulked off...I yelled at him, "you ought to be ashamed of yourself"...never saw him again.

Ok, I had some more time tonight. I sanded the plate down w/2" sandpaper disc, then used acetone. 1st pic just shows plate after that cleaning. Then I started w/185A. 2nd pass down to 175A, then I dropped down to .7 pps, and 65% balance for more cleaning. Results are all better but I still seem to have more contamination. I will go down and get some new plate soon, but I don't have any nice metal shops real close to me; hence my desire to work on a scrap piece.

Goldhawg. It looks like you have the ability to lay down a good bead but I can almost assure you that your base metal is the root of your problem. The one bead has a huge crack almost the whole length of it. I only have about an hour on my 210 but as soon as I lit up on aluminum I could feel the difference from my transformer, it is almost as stable an arc as welding steel, just a whole lot noisier. Get some good clean metal and try again. Im bettin you will notice a big difference. You cannot have it too clean with TIG plus your etching zone is too small. Set it at 75%(proset) and give it a try. Let us know what happens...Don't brush your welds, thats cheating

Been watching this thread for awile and the one thing I have not seen done and it has to be done. There is no ifs or butts about it is. . . . . .

SHINY BRIGHT CLEAN METAL

The sheets you are welding on are oxidized and pitted real bad. A light sanding or brushing is not gonna clean that like you need it. Get a 4 1/2 inch grinder with 80 or 120 grit flap disk and get that oxidation and pitting off there. TIG doesn't like dirty material. Clean the whole plate then do the aluminum drill like in Jody's video and pad beads on that whole plate. Make use of that scrap cover it with beads. But Clean Clean Clean that crude off there, basically grind down to good metal. The cleaning action of AC is for removing light oxides not corroded metal.

here is link to aluminum drill if you have not seen or heard of it yet. If you practice this like Jody tells you to it well make you good at aluminum beads. Notice how shiny his plate is yours needs to look like that. http://www.weldingtipsandtricks.com/alu ... ining.html

Well, you gurus are right. I took the plate over to my belt sander and ground pretty smooth, and it did a lot better. I'm pretty happy with how the one bead looks on the bottom. However I was also having a problem with the welding rod melting before I could get it into the puddle, and once this process started it is almost impossible to get it off while welding. I'm trying to keep the tip of the rod down near the argon, but it got a bit hot. What is the likely cause in my technique? When this happens, is it best to just stop and restart after cutting the end of the rod or is there a way to melt this off and keep going?

Most common problems

1.Arc Length
2. Torch Angel

Arc length should be 1 to 1.5 times of your diameter of tungsten. Large arc length puts excessive heat in work making uncontrollable puddle. Torch angle wrong blowing arc and heat at you filler. Also filler angle might be coming in to high. Come in at low angle.

Basically same answer I gave in this post "black steel welds"

http://forum.weldingtipsandtricks.com/v ... f=5&t=7035

OK, got down to the metal store to buy some new plate out of the scrap pile. Got lots of misc pieces @ $2/lb, including the recommended 1/8" plate. Everything seems to be working great. I'm using 125A, 75% balance and 1 PPS. I really like the pulse feature to give me time to work the rod; I don't feel too rushed and am able to get into a bit of cadence.

That's a GREAT improvement. That clean piece should take a lot of your headaches away when learning. Make sure to pad some beads without pulse too. After you pad a mess of beads, you will find just the foot pedal is all the control you need for heat input

I am a rookie myself and the first thing I kept seeing was you are picking the shittiest crappy junk to practise on. They are throwing that shit away for a reason so stop trying to use it. It was mentioned a few times on here "nice shiny new metal" not found at the bottom of the ocean after 100 years metal. A couple of auestions I have are:

1. did you clean the aluminium with a stainless brush that has NEVER been used on any other metal?
2. did you sharpen your tungsten on a grinding stone that has never been used for anything else?
3. did the tungsten touch the base metal at any time and if it did, did you resharpen the tip on that clean bench grinder stone?

All of these are extremely important and cannot be over looked or side stepped when tig welding aluminium (or anything else)

Did you read his above post and/or look at the pictures vs what he posted a few weeks ago?

I didn't see the last posted pics before I replied. While things do look lots better some of the things I asked he never did mention in his posts.

Wow! Nice! There is no such things as too clean in TIG. I mostly MIG everything steel but every now and then I TIG it just to stay in practice and I admittedly get lazy about cleaning my steel and you can get away with it in steel but it gets hard to watch the puddle because of all the millscale flaking off and hiding it. As far as aluminum goes, it has to be spotless. You can't TIG weld dirty aluminum.

dcuplover wrote: A couple of auestions I have are:

1. did you clean the aluminium with a stainless brush that has NEVER been used on any other metal?
2. did you sharpen your tungsten on a grinding stone that has never been used for anything else?
3. did the tungsten touch the base metal at any time and if it did, did you resharpen the tip on that clean bench grinder stone?

All of these are extremely important and cannot be over looked or side stepped when tig welding aluminium (or anything else)

@dcuplover I wouldn't get to hung up on dedicated bench grinders for the tungsten or cutting the contaminated tip off before grinding. Yes these might be the best practices for perfect conditions, but for hobbyists and industrial welding it is simply not needed. Everyday in the world xray test are done on welds that where performed with a tungsten sharpened on a bench grinder that gets used on everything the shop sees. As for cutting off contaminated tips it's a waste for most welding. Grind off the garbage and resharpen it. some times good enough is good enough.

I am a very picky person on things but sometimes this tungsten thing is taken to the extreme that is not necessary. I sometimes think tungsten grinder companies put stuff out there to try and sell there products. Create a problem that doesn't exist. After all do you use more than one type of tungsten? If you do, do you have a different stone or grinder for each one.
Just my thoughts on the whole dedicated grinder thing.

Hey dirtmidget...your absolutly right...I use one side of a grinding wheel for talking off the crap I get on my tungsten and the other side I use to sharpen and blunt it. The day my neighbor wants the welds on his rusted out, dog crap covered lawn mower deck, xrayed...I will dedicate a wheel to tungsten only.

exnailpounder wrote: The day my neighbor wants the welds on his rusted out, dog crap covered lawn mower deck, xrayed...I will dedicate a wheel to tungsten only.

ROFLMAO