Welding Tips and Tricks

I am in the process of welding up a weathervane with 16oz copper sheet with de-oxidized copper rod with my syncrowave 250 and wondered if anyone has any experience in doing this...settings,electrode etc?
Thanks

Welcome to the form
That's pretty thin sheet, I haven't welded (TIG) this gauge but have done copper, perhaps a silicon bronze filler would be best as you don't need a lot of structural strength

Do you have a pic of what you're doing?

Richard,
Thanks for the reply! I have welded with deoxidized copper before with good results but it's been a long time ago.
This is one I did a few years ago.

Start out around 30 amps. Use a foot control or thumb wheel. You might need to bump the max up 5 amps at a time or so to find a good puddle point. Depending on overall mass copper can pull heat away pretty fast , so it may take more than you think. But after it gets hot it may take much less. That’s where the rheostat comes in.

From Harris
https://www.harrisproductsgroup.com/~/m ... meters.pdf

Poland308 wrote:From Harris
https://www.harrisproductsgroup.com/~/m ... meters.pdf

The numbers on that chart look a little more like what I was doing. My amps were pretty high because I couldn't even get a puddle started at low current.

I have 20 oz copper because I used it for flashing on my chimneys. I just played around with some of the pieces and had fairly decent luck with welding it but I did put a lot of heat in the part which anneals the material something terrible. If I had more time to play with it I would probably get some of that water putty stuff that you used to sink heat out of your part. There's got to be a better way than what I was doing. I used clean Romex as my filler rod. 14 gauge. Straight argon and DC at I want to say 100 to 150 amps but it's been a while so I don't remember.

If I were to do it again I would do very short areas and allow a lot of cooling between. Copper heats up something terrible when you weld it.