Mig welding hints and tips

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metiz
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Re: Mig welding hints and tips

Post by metiz » Sun Jan 17, 2010 1:25 am

Viv wrote:
Ah Ha! Ok do me a favor mate and throw the wire brush in the garbage bin ;-) your welding stainless steel now not ordinary steels, if you use a wire brush to try and clean up stainless steel ready for welding all you are in fact doing is contaminating the surface with plain steel from the wires used to make the brush.
Viv
you misunderstand. I don't use a wire brush to prep the steel for welding. I use it to clean the weld up afterwards. even if I manage to weld perfectly, there will still be flux (from the wire) and a very small amount of surface oxidation. This I can clean up with the brush.
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Re: Mig welding hints and tips

Post by Viv » Sun Jan 17, 2010 2:01 am

metiz wrote:
Viv wrote:
Ah Ha! Ok do me a favor mate and throw the wire brush in the garbage bin ;-) your welding stainless steel now not ordinary steels, if you use a wire brush to try and clean up stainless steel ready for welding all you are in fact doing is contaminating the surface with plain steel from the wires used to make the brush.
Viv
you misunderstand. I don't use a wire brush to prep the steel for welding. I use it to clean the weld up afterwards. even if I manage to weld perfectly, there will still be flux (from the wire) and a very small amount of surface oxidation. This I can clean up with the brush.
Hi Metiz

Ok for the wire brush but flux from the wire? was that weld you showed me using flux cored wire then and not gas as we have been talking about?

Viv
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Re: Mig welding hints and tips

Post by metiz » Sun Jan 17, 2010 11:06 am

Viv wrote: Ok for the wire brush but flux from the wire? was that weld you showed me using flux cored wire then and not gas as we have been talking about?

Viv
No it was a gas weld. The wire I use it not flux cored. It does, however, has some adjatives
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Re: Mig welding hints and tips

Post by metiz » Sun Jan 17, 2010 2:12 pm

Ok thoroughly cleaned weld tip and gs shield. sprayed some anti beading agent inside. gas flow decreased and wire speed increased (see pic) the beading problem is gone and the weld looks great! and I forgot to clean the surface so better welds to come :P
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100_1360.jpg
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Re: Mig welding hints and tips

Post by Viv » Sun Jan 17, 2010 5:15 pm

Hi Metiz

Looks like a good result for all our hard work yesterday ;-) looking at your beads I think you can still do better after playing with the settings and the speed you are moving the torch along.

The gap between the wire tip and the weld pool is your arc gap, the length of the arc gap decides how much heat you are putting in to the weld pool, short gap gives high current and lots of heat, longer arc gaps give lower current hence lower heat.

The arc gap is made up from the wire speed setting on your welder as one part and the other part is you moving the torch along the work peace, it does not matter what wire speed setting you have set the welder too if you are moving the torch along at the wrong speed! this is an important point so practice your torch movement to get better welds! if you find one day the welding is good and one day its bad then lay off the coffee! the welder stayed the same it was you that changed ;-)

Look at your trial welds again in the picture and think about what would happen if you left the wire speed at the same setting but changed how fast you moved the torch? try that and see what happens, you can start a bead slow and then speed up and look at the results, you will be surprised to see that you can pick a region of good bead from the line to indicate the correct torch speed.

In MIG welding the settings are current, wire speed, torch travel speed and they are all interrelated to give you fusion penetration and total bead size.

Try wire speed 5 that gives good to too much penetration and just move a little quicker, you will then find your self doing the same bead as wire speed 4 but with good fusion and low distortion in the heat affected zone.

Viv
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Re: Mig welding hints and tips

Post by PyroJoe » Mon Jan 18, 2010 3:46 pm

As a side note:
I have seen those conditions when the grounding clamp becomes dirty or has a bad connection. I'm sure this is probably not the case here.
Joe

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Re: Mig welding hints and tips

Post by Viv » Mon Jan 18, 2010 4:04 pm

Hi Joe

Yes you are perfectly correct a bad ground or bad connection/ broken ground wire will cause similar problems apart from the gas issues

Viv
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Re: Mig welding hints and tips

Post by Fricke » Mon Jan 18, 2010 4:32 pm

What gas are you using?
I think it's 90% c02 and 10% argon or something like that.
When welding stainless you should only use pure Argon gas, if you are welding duplex or other "special" stainless steel alloys then there are som mixes for that...

Ditch the MIG welder and buy a cheep Chinese TIG/MMA welder... It should atleast have controls for slope and post gas... And prefferably have puls control so you can weld really thin SS...

Just my € 0.02 worth.. =)
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Re: Mig welding hints and tips

Post by metiz » Mon Jan 18, 2010 5:11 pm

Hey Fricke

I'm aware that SS needs pure Argon to be perfect but the mixture at hand seems to do nicely. Absolute minimum oxidation and good beeds. I think I'll go ahead and not throw away my mig. The cheepest Tig I've seen was 999 euro's and I'm guessing that's a shitty one
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Re: Mig welding hints and tips

Post by PyroJoe » Mon Jan 18, 2010 6:15 pm

MIGs become important if your a "one man production facility", as they can run bead about 6 times as fast as TIG.

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Re: Mig welding hints and tips

Post by Fricke » Mon Jan 18, 2010 7:24 pm

PyroJoe wrote:as they can run bead about 6 times as fast as TIG.


And spend that same amount of time grinding welds...
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Re: Mig welding hints and tips

Post by PyroJoe » Mon Jan 18, 2010 7:40 pm

"And spend that same amount of time grinding welds..."

Nope, just as clean as TIG, it does require the correct setup.

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Re: Mig welding hints and tips

Post by ZanderJay » Mon Oct 11, 2010 3:39 am

PyroJoe wrote:MIGs become important if your a "one man production facility", as they can run bead about 6 times as fast as TIG.
It can be taught for production welder in a short time. It was the best solution in the problems encountered for welding. This can be performed a huge development in the aspect of welding.
My seo

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