Welding Tips and Tricks

I’m currently a junior in high school and I have been taking welding as my elective since I was a freshman.
I instantly loved welding and started to become prettt good at stick and mig. I just started tig welding
Seriously about 3 months ago give or take a few months. I started using a scratch start until the foot pedal was fixed for the machine I’m currently using which is a Millermatic but I do not know the model of the machine, and I got decent
with the Miller so my teacher wants to take me to competition as his tig welder. But anyways the reason i am her
is because one day I went from laying some decent welds to complete garbage. I started welding one day with
the tig and I noticed it was shooting small but noticeable sparks almost like I was mig welding but not as
much. And the welds were extremely dirty looking and had splatter like a mig welder and was messing up my
tungsten further lowering the quality of my welds. So I figured it was because I didn’t prep my metal but I took a grinder to my plates until there was no mill scale left on them but still terrible welds and little sparks. So I asked my teacher and he said it was possibly because I wasn’t getting good ground because the table was painted. So I spent 10 minutes grinding off all the paint off the table in my boxed in booth with an extremely loud grinder. Still bad weld quality. So I bent a piece of steel and grinded the mill scale off both ends then welded it to the table and still dirty welds. I even cleaned off my tungsten and filler rod off and my metal and I was still getting bad welds and I’ve had this problem for several weeks and it has discouraged me from trying to get better. I’ve turned up the gas and turned it down, cleaned the cup, and checked the hose for leaks and didn’t find any. So if anyone else has had this problem or might have a reason to why this is happening please let me know. The last visible weld is kind of what they all look like now but worse, I’ll take another picture so you can see what they look like later. Thanks. Sorry for the long post

Is it possible you’re using the wrong gas cylinder? Or the tank is empty? Your weld looks like a major gas problem to me. You cleaned the cup, but if your using a gas lens, is the screen damaged and obstructed? You can turn up the gas, but if the diffuser screen is obstructed, you won’t get gas through it.

Lick your finger and eat your cheek. Initiate the gas flow and hold the cup to your cheek. You should instantly feel cold air. If not, gas flow is not coming. MIG gas will feel cool, Argon feels cold as ice.

I don’t have a gas lense because if we did some idiot would probably destroy it within a few days. But I didn’t even think to check the cylinder pressure because from my knowledge it’s only been used for tig and hasn’t been used that much. When I press the pedal to adjust my gas flow rate I can hear it come from the nosle. But I will test and see if it’s a mixture for MIG tomorrow. Thank you for helping me!

Well, Young Wyatt, when you weld, swap a gas lens into the torch. Then when class is over, replace the standard collet body and out your gas lens in your pocket. You will see an enormous difference in your welds. And it’s not cheating either, it’s called using the best equipment to do your best work.

Many people who earn a check welding use their own torches at their employer so they can control that aspect of their output. It’s a bit of a hassle, but if your equipment is beat up, you make your task even harder.

Good luck in the competition.

Something similar happened to me with aluminium tig.

Some days I could lay a great bead. Some days it would just turn south real quick.

My old PT185 I was running had a done block connecter. I chased and chased this problem crossing all sorts of things off the list like a breeze blowing my gas away a bad lense etc etc.

Anyways turned out to be the gas line fitting for the dinse block connect was loose under the plastic and would sometimes seal and sometimes not depending on how the hose got rotated.

Not sure if your machine has a dinse block like that one but definitely something to check if it does.

Hope that might help and best of luck.

Sent from my S60 using Tapatalk

I had an issue similar a while back. Had a nice flex torch & it must have been flexed too many time & the gas wasn't going where it was supposed to. Changed to an old beater I had & it was fine.

The beads on the edge of the weld indicates you didn’t fully grind off the mill flake.

Thank you to everyone helping me try to find a solution to this provlem and thanks Cj for the good luck.

I have had a similar issue whilst learning, I bought a fairly cheap gas lens kit and for some reason the flow is very poor. I switched to a more expensive gas lens and immediately the results are 10x better. As perviously said it does look like a gas flow issue, so check the bottle. Not sure about supply in the US but here in the UK you can sometimes get a bottle with bad gas - but thats unlikely if you've been using the same bottle.

It turns out that I was using the wrong gas cylinder. I confronted my teacher about it and this whole time he’s been saying that it’s opr (operator error) but when I told him that the 100% argon cylinder was right next to the 90/10 I’m using it’s like it finally clicked in his head and admitted that he was wrong and I was right. He’s gonna order another 100% argon soon so I can get back on my TIG game and go to competition. Thanks so much to everyone who helped me figure this out, I probably wouldn’t have figured this out and stopped TIG welding, thanks again!