Welding Tips and Tricks

Hi I only have my tig welder for about a week now. Ive been practicing on mild steel, while welding a tee joint it was all going okay then it started to go a bit funny and it ended up looking a bit like a mig weld with no gas. The steel is 5mm thick, im using a 2.4mm 2% lanthanated tungsten and a 2.4mm er70s2 filler rod. it only happens some of the time and I have cleaned the metal and rods with acetone, does anyone have any tips?

What do you have your argon flow set at?

Make sure you grind away the mill scale before welding. Remember clean shinny metal.

Breezes from a fan or outdoors can blow your gas away one second and then seam fine the next.

Do you have girl friend/wife/significant other?? Do you know how close you 2 get?? Get CLOSER to the weld ! (Haven't seen my wife in 2 months.) I am new to TIG also and learning that closeness and cleanliness counts --- a lot. The guys in here are a BIG help. Also, get right into the pedal and then back out after the puddle is evident ... kind of like chasing a liquid dot.

BillE.Dee wrote:Do you have girl friend/wife/significant other?? Do you know how close you 2 get?? Get CLOSER to the weld !.

Terrible analogy!!! Everyone knows you should never dip your tungsten....

Ok ok I’m leaving now

argon is about 8 LPM I think I might have figured out what I done wrong, I used the same disc to sharpen my tungsten and clean the metal so maybe that contaminated the metal?

Stephenw35 wrote:argon is about 8 LPM I think I might have figured out what I done wrong, I used the same disc to sharpen my tungsten and clean the metal so maybe that contaminated the metal?

Not likely. How about a few pictures of what you’re encountering?

this is the problem

JayWal wrote:

BillE.Dee wrote:Do you have girl friend/wife/significant other?? Do you know how close you 2 get?? Get CLOSER to the weld !.

Terrible analogy!!! Everyone knows you should never dip your tungsten....

Ok ok I’m leaving now

Stephenw35 wrote:this is the problem

2 likely causes: material is not clean (pulling contaminants from joint/backside) and/or gas coverage is insufficient. You might be moving the torch too far away at certain points, causing the gas flow to suffer it’s shielding.

okay thanks for your help

You need to grind to bare, clean metal the steel you are TIG welding. Your photo doesn’t show that. If you just wiped the material down, that’s not good enough to insure contamination free welds. Heat looks good, but look at the edges of your welds, there’s not a really cleaned area outside of it.

If you’re using a flap wheel to take off mill scale, especially if it’s a finer grit or a really used wheel, sometimes it’ll just shine up the mill scale without actually taking it off. It can take some substantial pressure sometimes to get through the scale, especially on sheet steel ive found. You need bare shiny steel. If looks aren’t important I’ll use a grinding wheel or Zip disk to get into a corner to clean it before welding. They get through scale much easier than flap wheels.

I had where I was welding clean, didn't bother cleaning the whole piece as its only a practice bit, I hit it with a sanding disc first and then a flap wheel

Don’t forget the edges when you’re welding a joint. And the immediate backside.

I never thought about clean the back side, thanks for your help