[jakeru]

I wanted to get some practice on a not too serious project involving welding outside corners in 16 gauge aluminum, so I ended up welding a cube. Then I put dots on the faces to turn it into a die. It made a kind of fun thing that my kid can play with. The alloy of this particular material is unknown (it is home depot 1.5" wide 16 gauge bar stock).

It gave me some practice at precision fitting of small pieces, while experimenting with tack welding techniques (with and without filler rod, sometimes blasted some holes and got practice filling those too, but it was easy ), as well as the open corner welds, corner build-up, etc. I have a pretty serious 16 gauge aluminum project coming up, fabricating an intercooler end tank, so this is practice for that.

I also practiced on some sheet metal scraps I had laying around (which were mostly 6061, and a bit of 5052). It seems with the open edge welding technique that I was getting good penetration.

For all the 16 gauge aluminum, I really liked a thin (3/64 = .047") 5356 MIG wire I had. I liked it better than 1/16" 4043 TIG filler rod, which just seemd a bit too large (and also dirtier, but I didn't clean either so maybe it was.)

I think I was using a lot more heat than I needed. (Part of that reason because I was experimenting with tacking with no filler, which needs more heat to work properly.) But I found I had to taper off the current sometimes all the way off the bottom of the pedal range to keep things from melting excessively, especially near an edge and after the work heated up.

I used 3/32" tungsten, but probably could have used 1/16". I just wanted to try some tungstens I had ground nice sharpened tips (with a flat on the tip) on my new diamond wheel. I liked them and actually the 3/32" tungsten with nice sharp point worked OK on 16 gauge aluminum. Only thing is it didn't start well at the bottom of my foot pedal range. I set my foot pedal so it was about 75 amps at full down. I started with about 30-35%%DCEP but dropped that down to about 20% DCEP, worked about the same both ways. I did try some high frequency pulsing but not sure if it was necessary. I used a #6 gas lens cup at 12 cfh and didn't vary that, it seemed to work very well.

Coming off of a project welding old cast aluminum, this welding on virgin sheet stuff is easy. No inclusions in the metal to deal with, don't need tons of heat to melt a puddle, etc.

[gurew]

good practice use less heat!!