Welding Tips and Tricks

Getting lots of gas metal horizontal and vertical down practice at work this week
Moved over the the caster install for our racks. Let me know what you think.



Hmmmmm wish the pic was clearer....

Mrkil.

Are you learning a lot?
Sometimes money is secondary to a job that is rewarding.

Alexa

I am
Every day it's somethimg new.

I'd rather be getting paid to weld than paying for it.

The horizontals look great, and the verticals look good.

I'd say you have too much gun angle or too much stick-out on the verticals. Note the color difference, there's a li'l bit of air mixing on the verticals. 15* "up" angle is about all you need for vert. down, and watch that stickout... It's easy to draw the gun back to open the view when all that crap is spewing at you while watching from above.

Nothing at all wrong with what I see... Practice will only make it better.

Steve S

Yeah you are probably right

I'm always worried about the puddle getting ahead of me. I'll give your tips a try tomorrow.
Thanks Steve

Hey,

I have found, that straight drag down with not manipulation of the gun is good for vert down. If you can see the arc hitting the base metal, you're golden. If you are too slow, you can see a "boob" of metal flowing down. If you are worried, do a test and travel heaps faster than you think you should, so you can definitely see the arc burning in, and experiment with slowing down.

Mick

Otto Nobedder wrote: Note the color difference, there's a li'l bit of air mixing on the verticals.

So the more noticeable brown staining is from too much air entering the weld zone/ie, too much stick out, is this what you are saying?

Follow da blue light wrote:

Otto Nobedder wrote: Note the color difference, there's a li'l bit of air mixing on the verticals.

So the more noticeable brown staining is from too much air entering the weld zone/ie, too much stick out, is this what you are saying?

Yes. Note the shine on the horizontals, versus the grey color on the verticals. This is pretty common. On a horizontal weld, it's easy to keep the gun in tight and close to square to the work, and still see the puddle clearly. On the vertical, you're usually looking down from the top, and on a vertical "down", the puddle (and smoke) is between your eyes and the arc. This leads people to pull the gun back a bit to see better, on top of the natural tendency to drag the gun more than needed. Vertical down works well with 10-20* of drag angle, but the more angle you use, the less stick-out it will tolerate due to the nature of the gas flow plus the convection (updraft from the heat) to draw air into the cover gas. This mixing also increases the "smoke-stains" around the weld.

I can't support this with any science or research. This is strictly my own conclusions from experience.

Steve S

I think you are correct in your assumption, I have noticed more staining on some welds I do when compared to others.
Thanks for the tip.