How to weld, know your machine first.

This time we are going to talk about welding. More specific, how to weld and even more specific, know your machine. Do you feel like you and your welder got off on the wrong foot? That it does not agree with what you want to do? I most definitely feel like this with my TIG-welder.

We can say more that I speak one language and it another. This has pissed me off for a long time and I thought I just was not ment for welding. But I liked it, the results could be beautiful if done right and who doesn’t want beautifully made parts? But the thing was that no matter what I did the results did not change. I tried all the tips from the gurus out there, different tungsten angles, gas flow and gas cups. Even tried to replicate their settings, but still the same awful welding result.

Here’s when I went berserk.

Let’s say I got tired of constant bad results. At this point I was so close to throw out this cheap shit and buy a super expensive professional TIG-welder. There was only one thing left to do, try the extreme.

Now I started to turn those knobs to the max. Well not so simple, I put all the knobs to their 50% “mark”. From here I went over them all, trying each of them on its min and max setting to see what they really do. What I can say from this is that it was very good practice. I hope that you can take good use of my problems so you can avoid making them.

How to weld with my TIG-Welder

I learned a lot from twisting and turning on all the knobs. If it’s me who like to use weird settings or if my welder is just bad, I don’t know but it sure works fine now. Here is a list of the things I found out from trial and error.

1. The manual was wrong

Let’s just say that it was written by some imaginary fairy tale writer that have not even used the machine. When you first start out you want to be able to depend on the manual for help, but not this time.

2. Frequency knob is nonlinear

When there is a scale from 5 – 300 Hz one would think that 50% would be 127 Hz but it’s not like that here. 127 Hz is more like 75% on the knob. Annoying…yes, very much.

3. Frequency knob range

My machine works best from 5 – 50 Hz and 200 – 300 Hz. in the area between the current jumps around like a lunatic and is impossible to set up correctly. For example: If I set it to 100 Hz and 90 Amps, then I wait two seconds and then it start to jump up and down from 75 – 100 Amps. This is somewhat annoying but I can work around it by turning up the Hz and use base current and duty cycle to get penetration. 

4. Cleaning area goes backwards

This was surprising. The knob goes from 20 – 80 %, so one would thing that 80 % is 80 % percent cleaning action. God not, that would almost be logical, 80 % is in fact 20 % cleaning action. It means that it calculates backwards from 100. When I found out about this I was like ” What in the living hell were they thinking here”. Just figuring this out made it so much easier to weld.

5. Welding aluminium requires a ball tip

This also came as a surprise. You are supposed to be able to have a pointed tip with a tiny ball on the end when TIG-welding aluminium, but not me. It did not form a nice tiny ball at all. so I chopped it off and made the whole tip to a ball. What a difference It was like night and day.

6. The arc gap was set far to big

Inside the machine are an arc gap, like a spark plug. This is adjustable and it was set to almost 2 mm from the factory. which in term means that you need to touch the material for it to start an arc, this is perfect for aluminium…or not. Dialed it down to 0.4 mm and now it actually arcs above the material.

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Here you can see where I started out ( To the left ). I used to weld a lot with those settings and thought something was wrong with me.

Conclusion

Knowing how to weld can be tricky especially in the beginning. Now before you give up the torch, here are a few things to keep in mind.

• Practice, practice and practice. Don’t start out with titanium just because its cool, start easy and build your skills. That will be more rewarding in the long run.
• Gather information. YouTube is perfect and free and packed with good to know stuff.
• Use the knobs. If you are struggling, make lot’s of practice runs with different settings until you find out what works for you.
• Before you weld up your new expensive intake. cut some strips of the same material and do some practice runs. It will limit the risk of fucking up your new part.
• Have dedicated tools for the job, Especially for aluminium. I only use slow cutting tools and an aluminium only stainless steel brush for aluminium. All this to prevent driving dirt in to the material.
• Buy quality material. It’s worth it and it makes a huge difference.