Ask your WELDING questions here.

[RonS]

Originally Posted by mark1305

You may already know more than this, but... The only trick I've picked up regarding this problem (and I learned it about MIG, but it may apply to your problem) is to train your eyes to never look at the arc, but only watch the puddle - both the hot side and the side that's solidifying. I found that watching the puddle gave me much better vision to watch the joint I'm following. And watching the "freeze zone" helps regulate your speed to just stay ahead. Watching the puddle also made me see better the amount of penetration without looking at the arc itself which just destroys your vision of the joint. You may already be focusing on the puddle as you dab the filler rod.

Yeah, that makes sense. I'll try that. The other thing I was wondering is that perhaps when welding at this low of amperage I need to drop the darkness of my shade a couple of notches. Don't want to blind myself trying it though. I need to get someone who knows what they are doing to watch and tell me what I'm doing wrong. I think I found someone to do that. The guy teaches welding certification classes at one of the local suppliers and has experience welding aircraft tubing.

[RonS]

Originally Posted by RonS

Yeah, that makes sense. I'll try that. The other thing I was wondering is that perhaps when welding at this low of amperage I need to drop the darkness of my shade a couple of notches. Don't want to blind myself trying it though. I need to get someone who knows what they are doing to watch and tell me what I'm doing wrong. I think I found someone to do that. The guy teaches welding certification classes at one of the local suppliers and has experience welding aircraft tubing.

Looks like this thread isn't being monitored at this point in time so I thought I'd update it with my findings.

I did get the guy to come over and give me some pointers. There were a couple of issues I had. One of them was identified by Mark in the previous post. Keep your eye on the puddle. This is harder to do with TIG than it is with Oxy-Acetylene in that the arc is much brighter and is easy to get distracted and watch the arc instead of the puddle. He also got me to change over from a regular collate to a gas lens. The gas flow is much smoother with the lens and the arc seems to be more stable. Another area is the angle of the grind on the tungsten. He was grinding his tungsten to much more of an angle than I was. Changing to the angle he was using seemed to narrow the arc and permit better control over the puddle. I did also reduce the shade level of my visor to 10 and that does allow me to see what I'm doing better than I was before. Yet another thing he pointed out was that with the thin rod I was using (also .0035) the feed rate of the filler rod needed to be much higher and that required more coordination than I had given my experience level. A little thicker rod (which he brought with him) permitted me to add to the puddle at a much more comfortable rate given the amperage and the material I was welding on (4130 tubing).

The result of these changes is that I can now lay down a reasonable bead in a straight line. Not everyone is perfect but they are beads and the correct amount of penetration is present in the bead. The next task is to learn to weld joints that intersect at different angles. I'm still having problems in that area in that I'll get penetration on one side of the joint but not the other. More later.

[DustMeOff]

one trick i've picked up for grinding tungstens is to taper them so that the taper starts at least 3x the diameter back from the tip. i try to put some curve on it like the nosecone shape below. then i grind a very small 90 degree cone to get rid of the sharp tip, which would erode quickly if i left it there. this shape stays hot so you get a stable arc, but lasts better than straight cones in my experience. you can also fudge using a bigger tungsten on lower current, saving you from switching (or buying) a bunch of different collet assemblies for the torch.



if you use an automatic mask, you may want to give a standard 4x5 lense mask a try. i use a gold colored lense which somehow helps reduce the eyestrain (turns out to also help my eyes focus and adjust to the light), and i think the one i have is a 9. i pretty much only use auto lenses for tacking and out of position stuff.

i'm not sure if it's been mentioned, but it helps to hold the filler metal nearly perpendicular to the tungsten. both the tungsten and the filler then should be in the same plane. i usually tilt the tungsten to push the arc by about 10 or 15 degrees, then the filler is 10-15 degress above the path i'm on.

that's pretty great you know someone who's so qualified to help you. luckily for my learning curve, i had an angry (but fun) machinist watching over my shoulder and threatening to use the .45 he just made from scratch.

good luck

Mike

Originally Posted by RonS

I did get the guy to come over and give me some pointers. There were a couple of issues I had. One of them was identified by Mark in the previous post. Keep your eye on the puddle. This is harder to do with TIG than it is with Oxy-Acetylene in that the arc is much brighter and is easy to get distracted and watch the arc instead of the puddle. He also got me to change over from a regular collate to a gas lens. The gas flow is much smoother with the lens and the arc seems to be more stable. Another area is the angle of the grind on the tungsten. He was grinding his tungsten to much more of an angle than I was. Changing to the angle he was using seemed to narrow the arc and permit better control over the puddle. I did also reduce the shade level of my visor to 10 and that does allow me to see what I'm doing better than I was before. Yet another thing he pointed out was that with the thin rod I was using (also .0035) the feed rate of the filler rod needed to be much higher and that required more coordination than I had given my experience level. A little thicker rod (which he brought with him) permitted me to add to the puddle at a much more comfortable rate given the amperage and the material I was welding on (4130 tubing).

The result of these changes is that I can now lay down a reasonable bead in a straight line. Not everyone is perfect but they are beads and the correct amount of penetration is present in the bead. The next task is to learn to weld joints that intersect at different angles. I'm still having problems in that area in that I'll get penetration on one side of the joint but not the other. More later.

[RonS]

Originally Posted by DustMeOff

one trick i've picked up for grinding tungstens is to taper them so that the taper starts at least 3x the diameter back from the tip. i try to put some curve on it like the nosecone shape below. then i grind a very small 90 degree cone to get rid of the sharp tip, which would erode quickly if i left it there. this shape stays hot so you get a stable arc, but lasts better than straight cones in my experience. you can also fudge using a bigger tungsten on lower current, saving you from switching (or buying) a bunch of different collet assemblies for the torch.



if you use an automatic mask, you may want to give a standard 4x5 lense mask a try. i use a gold colored lense which somehow helps reduce the eyestrain (turns out to also help my eyes focus and adjust to the light), and i think the one i have is a 9. i pretty much only use auto lenses for tacking and out of position stuff.

i'm not sure if it's been mentioned, but it helps to hold the filler metal nearly perpendicular to the tungsten. both the tungsten and the filler then should be in the same plane. i usually tilt the tungsten to push the arc by about 10 or 15 degrees, then the filler is 10-15 degress above the path i'm on.

that's pretty great you know someone who's so qualified to help you. luckily for my learning curve, i had an angry (but fun) machinist watching over my shoulder and threatening to use the .45 he just made from scratch.

good luck

Mike

Thanks I will try grinding my tungsten in the manor you descibe. I didn't actually know this guy. I tracked him down through a local supplier. He teaches TIG welding and has expirience with welding aircraft tubing. The guy knew what he was doing. He can lay down a beautiful weld on this thin wall tubing (using my equipment) along a section that is notched to mate into another piece of tubing. It's difficult for me because of the constantly changing angles in addition to the problem I'm having with getting a pool formed on both of the adjacent parts. The guy turned out to be a nice guy as well and offered to help as much as I needed. I paid in cash of course for his time and everybody loves cash:)

[DustMeOff]

you really should isolate the things you're trying to learn. depending on where you are skill wise, here's a list of steps i've used to learn and to show other people to weld. hop in on the list where ever your skills currently are

run a bead with no filler along some .080" or so thick sheet steel. get the width down, puddle control, welding speed. you can look at the heat affected zone to see how consistant you are. it's a good tell tale since it shows heat input, which can be all over the place even if your weld looks right. strive for a very even band, and do welds at least 6 inches long so you learn to move the torch with your hand and not just your fingertips. the medium thickness plate will be forgiving, but still show a good heat affected zone. practice starts and stops.

do the above adding filler metal. again, look at the heat affected zone. practice starts and stops. stops will be more critical now, you need to add an extra dab of filler and slowly ramp down the current to prevent craters.

practice some butt joints to get control of your puddle, and fusing it across the joint without filler at first, then work with filler. you should break the joints and look for full penetration. you want to be right on the edge of burning though in order to get full penentration. again, look at heat affected zone and do at least 6" sections.

next move on to straight T joints on the same ~.080". break them and make sure you burned into the corner of the joint.

you can work your way to thinner material on each of these as you progress. make sure to move the torch through the path you want to weld each time, so make sure you have clearance and are able to maniulate it to the correct orientation. i prop my hand off of my pinky or some other finger to stabilize it. i'm not one of those gifted people who can tig or stick weld with their arms fully extended, and not shake at all. most people aren't, but you can still learn to make nice welds.

once you get this down, tube joints will be a more reasonable challenge. i usually do a tube joint by tacking symmetrically, then welding in 4 sections. it makes your starts and stops more critical, but 1/4 of the perimeter is much easier to manipulate the torch around. starts and stops are a tedious task, not a highly skilled task. you trade tedious for skill based on your own level of skill. also, get a stainless toothbrush and clean the area you will weld right before you weld it. and get in the habit of sanding off the black scale/oxide on the tube ends. you want raw clean steel. tig filler has some de-oxidizers, but nothing like stick flux.

good luck,
Mike

Originally Posted by RonS

Thanks I will try grinding my tungsten in the manor you descibe. I didn't actually know this guy. I tracked him down through a local supplier. He teaches TIG welding and has expirience with welding aircraft tubing. The guy knew what he was doing. He can lay down a beautiful weld on this thin wall tubing (using my equipment) along a section that is notched to mate into another piece of tubing. It's difficult for me because of the constantly changing angles in addition to the problem I'm having with getting a pool formed on both of the adjacent parts. The guy turned out to be a nice guy as well and offered to help as much as I needed. I paid in cash of course for his time and everybody loves cash:)

[Big Single]

1 1/4" aluminum tube that was cut too short. Problem is, it was attached to a very expensive piece. How difficult would it be to weld the piece back onto the end of the aluminum tube? Wall thickness???? 1/8" or so. Oh, and the bead can't protrude out the outside of the tube.

[DustMeOff]

it's not that hard. just have someone bevel and weld around. they'll need to grind or file the weld off afterwards. is a hand ground/filed surface acceptable or does it need to have an accurate od? also, the aluminum where is was originally welded and around the new spot will likely be as strong as butter (~15 ksi yield) without heat treatment. that depends on the alloy.

if it needs a clean OD, i would just cut the weld off of the expensive piece, and weld the correct tube onto it. its about the same amount of work either way. what is the expensive piece? casting, machined part?

Originally Posted by klr65o

1 1/4" aluminum tube that was cut too short. Problem is, it was attached to a very expensive piece. How difficult would it be to weld the piece back onto the end of the aluminum tube? Wall thickness???? 1/8" or so. Oh, and the bead can't protrude out the outside of the tube.

[TreeFarmer]

ok, so this is not one of those ground breaking questions, but still I would like to know the best paint match for the Lincoln Red. I picked up a Ranger 8 recently. Unit runs great and only has moderate hours on it. So since I plan on owning this thing for the 10-15 years, just thought I would clean it up a bit with a new coat of paint.

Thanks for the help

[YamaGeek]

I've got some old school questions concerning a TIG torch use on a really old welder.

I inherited from my Pop an old Wilson 220 volt ingle phase, 200 amp BumbleBee welder from the mid 1950's The welder is AC, but is outputted through an even older AO Smith AC to DC selenium plate converter, that can handle 250 amps. This converter has the ability to switch between AC and DC+ and DC- with a big lever.

My welding background includes 2 years as a bicycle frame manufacturer employee. I was mostly doing tubing prep and mitering, but we were encouraged to learn other workstation skills and that included some MIG, TIG welding and brazing. I got fair marks for my TIG abilities, I didn't do production work, but got good at in-house repairs and Jig fabricating. So I probably know enough skills to get myself in trouble.

Can I get by with this old welder, which BTW doesn't have the high frequencey start so I'll have to "scratch" to get the arc started. My father a few years back bought a regulator and torch W/ leads and piping for the inert gas for this very welder but never really used it much. The torch itself has a manual off valve.

I realize this is really old tech but I'm intereted in doing some TIG work with this machine if it's possible?

[Bronco638]

Question from a welding Noob:

I have one of those 120V "buzz boxes" (Firepower FP130) and am teaching myself to weld by experimenting on scrap pieces. I have the welder set-up to weld without gas (.030 flux core wire).

I know that if you use too much electricity (voltage), you can burn thru the material. But, how do you set up the welder to weld two pieces of dissimilar thickness? For instance, I have a rear fender support that's made of .062 (1/16") tubing. I want to weld a pre-fabricated rack to the support. The rack has .1875 (3/16") plates that will be welded to the tubing. So, do I set up the welder as if I were welding .062 tubing? If so, is that hot enough to get good penetration on the thicker material?

I hope that makes sense.

TIA, Dave.

[mark1305]

Originally Posted by Bronco638

Question from a welding Noob:

I have one of those 120V "buzz boxes" (Firepower FP130) and am teaching myself to weld by experimenting on scrap pieces. I have the welder set-up to weld without gas (.030 flux core wire).

I know that if you use too much electricity (voltage), you can burn thru the material. But, how do you set up the welder to weld two pieces of dissimilar thickness? For instance, I have a rear fender support that's made of .062 (1/16") tubing. I want to weld a pre-fabricated rack to the support. The rack has .1875 (3/16") plates that will be welded to the tubing. So, do I set up the welder as if I were welding .062 tubing? If so, is that hot enough to get good penetration on the thicker material?

I hope that makes sense.

TIA, Dave.

For the different thickness pieces, you can often go with the voltage set for the thicker material and adjust the wire speed/current on some pracitce pieces. The trick is to aim the wire and the arc to penetrate more into the thick piece and not burn thru the thin piece. That's the art of the process, and takes practice to place the heat more into one side yet still fill the joint with penetration of both parts. Learning to lay an uneven weave heavier to one side is one way to manage it. Keeping travel speed up will help avoid burnthroughs as well.

Depending on the range of wire speed/current settings of your machine, you'll want to dial it in to where as you maintain about 1/2" stickout of wire, the arc sounds like bacon sizzling smoothly and evenly. If the wire tries to burn back into the tip or ends very time with a big ball on the end of the wire, add more wire speed/current.

As I was teaching myself a few years ago on my trusty Handler 120, I found that once I picked a decent voltage setting, I could weld better by ear than by watching - doing little beads with a gloved hand over it and listeing to what the arc was doing. I still tack like that, doing it by sound.

[DustMeOff]

scratch starting is a pretty frustrating ordeal, especially if you are relatively new to welding. does it have any type of remote control like a foot pedal or a hand control? you can find old high frequency starter boxes on ebay, or craigslist sometimes. i have one, and will probably be selling it once i get a chance to round up all the cables for it.

as for steel, it may do well on DC. if it as no external control it can be frustrating to start and stop welds. thin stuff requires more skill on your part since you can't back off the heat if you start burning through.

on ac without high frequency, you can't do aluminum. the arc will die each time the voltage crosses zero.

since you just need a bottle, tungstens and some filler and if it all works, it can be a great learning tool for teaching youself tig. start with 1/8" and up steel to get used to it. things mch thinner may be too frustrating.
if you really like the machine, you can grab a HF starter and use it. if not, you can someday lavish yourself with a modern machine. all of the things this machine is missing will be icing on the cake. make sure you clamp your work down, scratch starting can easily turn into spot welding.

i bought a broken linde C300 ac/dc tig (from 1960) on ebay for cheap and fixed it about 6 years ago. it welded steel as well as anything modern. aluminum took more skill to get clean welds, but were very possible. enough of it finally died that i gave up keeping it going, but it was a great machine until then. it did have a foot pedal and hf. and i did learn on a more modern machine. old stuff isn't bad. either way, you have what sounds like a nice stick welder.

keep in mind transformer machines draw way more power than the new inverters for the same output. my linde made the electric meter audibly spool up when i did aluminum. if you're just doing steel under 3/16" you can get something like a maxstar 150.

good luck
Mike

Originally Posted by YamaGeek

I've got some old school questions concerning a TIG torch use on a really old welder.

I inherited from my Pop an old Wilson 220 volt ingle phase, 200 amp BumbleBee welder from the mid 1950's The welder is AC, but is outputted through an even older AO Smith AC to DC selenium plate converter, that can handle 250 amps. This converter has the ability to switch between AC and DC+ and DC- with a big lever.

My welding background includes 2 years as a bicycle frame manufacturer employee. I was mostly doing tubing prep and mitering, but we were encouraged to learn other workstation skills and that included some MIG, TIG welding and brazing. I got fair marks for my TIG abilities, I didn't do production work, but got good at in-house repairs and Jig fabricating. So I probably know enough skills to get myself in trouble.

Can I get by with this old welder, which BTW doesn't have the high frequencey start so I'll have to "scratch" to get the arc started. My father a few years back bought a regulator and torch W/ leads and piping for the inert gas for this very welder but never really used it much. The torch itself has a manual off valve.

I realize this is really old tech but I'm intereted in doing some TIG work with this machine if it's possible?

[KTM640Dakar]

Originally Posted by NX650Rider

ok, so this is not one of those ground breaking questions, but still I would like to know the best paint match for the Lincoln Red. I picked up a Ranger 8 recently. Unit runs great and only has moderate hours on it. So since I plan on owning this thing for the 10-15 years, just thought I would clean it up a bit with a new coat of paint.

Thanks for the help

I will find out what the paint code is. It was powder coated red at the factory.

[YamaGeek]

Thanks Mike for the response,

I'm already using the machine for small weld jobs around our place, I'm fairly good at stick welding, and yes it's a good welder for vanilla purpose, 6011 "1/8th and "3/16th welding. I've already fabricated a removable wood splitter for my old I-H crawler, that runs off an additional hydraulic control.

My main concern was if the "scratch" striking method was too damaging for the tungsten tip. I've already learned about regrinding and shaping these at my previous job. The torch has a primitive plexi gauge with a small ball bearing for flow metering. FWIW...

[Bronco638]

Originally Posted by mark1305

For the different thickness pieces, you can often go with the voltage set for the thicker material and adjust the wire speed/current on some pracitce pieces. The trick is to aim the wire and the arc to penetrate more into the thick piece and not burn thru the thin piece. That's the art of the process, and takes practice to place the heat more into one side yet still fill the joint with penetration of both parts. Learning to lay an uneven weave heavier to one side is one way to manage it. Keeping travel speed up will help avoid burnthroughs as well.

Depending on the range of wire speed/current settings of your machine, you'll want to dial it in to where as you maintain about 1/2" stickout of wire, the arc sounds like bacon sizzling smoothly and evenly. If the wire tries to burn back into the tip or ends very time with a big ball on the end of the wire, add more wire speed/current.

As I was teaching myself a few years ago on my trusty Handler 120, I found that once I picked a decent voltage setting, I could weld better by ear than by watching - doing little beads with a gloved hand over it and listeing to what the arc was doing. I still tack like that, doing it by sound.

Thanks Mark. Obviously, I have some practicing to do.