Welding Tips and Tricks

I'm trying not to get to hung up on appearance right now, I've only been on aluminum for about two months. My question is what makes a lot of the welds I see so flat? Mine seem to be puffy, I've tried Lots of different settings. The pic is 120hz 65% cleaning Dynasty 200.

The bottom picture looks really good in fact. The top, maybe slightly “humped”. You might try to adjust your balance to 72% and run that again. The higher the balance on your Dynasty, the deeper the penetration tends to run (at least on my Dynasty 200).

Another factor is the size of filler, and the amount you are dipping. Especially “flat” welds are much more common on DC TIG than AC. You can dip the same amount, but perhaps increase your travel distance slightly between fills. This will help spread the filler out some (more like your bottom picture). Of course, torch angle, distance, direction all effect appearance.

Bottom picture is not my weld, just an example pic of a flat bead.

ConcealPro wrote:Bottom picture is not my weld, just an example pic of a flat bead.

Well, you should have kept the praise! Whomever welded that, knows their game and it’s a perfect example of experience and proper technique. I assure you, he didn’t get there in 2 months of practice either

ConcealPro wrote:I'm trying not to get to hung up on appearance right now, I've only been on aluminum for about two months. My question is what makes a lot of the welds I see so flat? Mine seem to be puffy, I've tried Lots of different settings. The pic is 120hz 65% cleaning Dynasty 200.

Do you mean 65% cleaning, or 65% penetration?

120hz tends to narrow a bead, lower frequency will widen it.

However, If you list the amperage used and thickness of the material, I think it will end up being too low of amps.

The cleaning band (cathodic etching) is very wide.

This can often be caused by a slow travel speed - which is often caused by low amps.

To me it seems like your bead is a bit on the cold side or to big of filler rod. 65 balance is a good starting place on a dynasty but I usually will run around 70 balance on butts with either a number 5 standard collet body cup for butt welds and about 73 balance for fillets, for thicker than .125 i switch to a number 5 or number 7 gas lense. The bead in your pic looks like a table fillet so comparing a fillet to a butt isn't necessarily a good comparison cause they weld different. But some tips for flattening out aluminum beads on butt welds is go full pen when the application allows or run a backing bar when bleed through is not allowed and push it all the way through the backer, on thicker stuff a bevel will help a lot in flattening your bead. Also running the smallest rod you can helps a lot in my opinion. For .030 to .o50 Al I prefer a 3/64 rod, for .O63 up to about .090 or .125 I prefer a 1/16 rod and like 1/4 or above I'll use 3/32. Sorry didn't have any pics of a butt weld on my phone. Might be doing so today at work. Hopefully those tips help. Also gas flow plays a factor. To much gas can cool a bead down and cause a lot of etching. I usually run about 15cfh on butts, 12 to 15 on fillets and about 18 to 20 on outside corners stuff but this can also vary on cleanliness of material. I work in sheet metal shop so sometimes we can really dirty material or laser cut edges and you got to run your balance down to 50 sometimes to get a clean bead that flows decent

Nice looking beads Aaron