Welding Tips and Tricks

Hi all....I'm from all the way back in Johannesburg, South Africa. Yep, for the uninitiated, that's the country at the bottom tip of Africa (yes, we do weld over here as well )
I'm 54 yrs old and have been stick welding for about 10 yrs. with a basic oil cooled tranformer welder. None of this newfangled DC inverter stuff for me. Never even dreamed of aluminium welding. (note the spelling of ALUMINIUM ) Didn't know what the big gas bottle was for either
Anyway, so last week I got a bee in my bonnet and decided that I'd like to learn TIG and in particular Alu. So I enrolled at a Training College to see how difficult it would be. I liked it so much that I went and got my own AC/DC welder and took it to college so that I wouldn't have to re-learn a new machine all over again after I finish the course. It's a 10 day course and I've now completed 4 days. I have done butt - joints, T- joints, pipes, vertical ups and inside corners so far.
I'm still trying to figure out the different knobs and settings on the machine and make huge screw-ups most the time.
I'm attaching some pics of my "better" pieces here for criticism but be gentle please, I'm still a virgin
All the pieces are done with 1/16 material. My Instructor reckons it's better to start with the thin stuff so I won't know later on that it's supposed to be difficult.

Note to Jody: Thanks for this great site. You have taught me more than my Instructor.

Nice for your first few tries. Keep on practicing, and soon you'll be perfect, or at least as perfect as any person can be.

I never even heard of welding aluminium until I got a job doing it. cool aint it?

-Rick

rickbreezy wrote:I never even heard of welding aluminium until I got a job doing it. cool aint it?

Rick, wow! I'm impressed. You got it right
Just kidding! Thanks for the compliment. I'm practicing my butt off (literally). Spent 6 hours in the chair today.

Tomorrow I'm starting TIG stainless. Looking forward to it except I've seen the material I'm supposed to be using. Looks like .020 thick . I think I'm gonna blow holes in it. I'll post some pics afterwards.

Now that was fun! The stainless steel excercise, I mean. Like I said, my Instructor came with .020 sheet and said "weld!" Well, those pieces of steel didn't last long and soon they were reduced to scrap metal. So much so that I'm even too embarrassed to post pics
Instructor just laughed at the results and then gave me 1/32" sheet which I had to cut up into strips and do inside corner welds.
Now remember, like I said, I've NEVER done TIG before so it was a steep learning curve. At least the 1/32" looked more manageable.
The results are posted below, numbered from 1 through 5, starting at the first attempt and ending at the 5th. (Pics 4 and 5 are in the next post as only 3 attachments allowed per post) At least the last one sort of resembles a weld bead. I started in the middle with that one and worked it out to opposite ends and then tried to fix the joint where I started. Maybe I should have just left it Also struggling with overheating, welding too slow and maybe need to reduce the arc length

I guess I'll just keep practicing............

Stailess Steel TIG attempts no's 4 and 5