🔥 2 HUGE TIPS for tig welding mild steel 🔥

all right today let's do something we do not do very often on my channel we're gonna go over some fundamentals of TIG welding mild steel I'm excited for this one now one of the students in my online TIG welding program his name is Luther this dude is awesome now Luther and I went over a bunch of aluminum stuff early in the program but he actually approached me that he had more of an application for learning mild steel because a lot of the projects He was hoping to get to would involve that more so than aluminum so he asked if we could tweak the experience of the program start working on some mild steel and of course I said yes so we used the curriculum for my aluminum program as a bit of a basis that we were going to follow we got to work learning all the fundamentals and Basics that we should start with now in my experience I've done a fair amount of chromoly TIG welding I've done a fair bit of mild steel TIG welding as well mild steel honestly is something that's a little bit more finicky I find a little bit more tricky to work on so it's really great to go through some of these exercises with Luther and get him a really good and thorough understanding of what's going on what we're going to do is we're going to go over two very important variables here the first thing that we're going to work on is the overall profile of the weld this kind of refers to the shape of the weld all the way from the start to the finish and how the filler material Blends into the base material the second variable that we looked at is one of the most important ones for sure and this is going to be the heat affected zone now when breaking down the heat affected Zone I personally find it a little easier to break down when working with stainless steel even if your torch is set up the best parts that provide the best gas treatment welding mild steel is always going to kind of look a little bit oxidized it's never really going to have quite the same finish that you're going to see as easily with stainless steel when you get really comfortable with what you're doing you can definitely get some results that look and run a little bit cleaner but what I'm going to show you here today is definitely going to help you out a lot with getting a chance on how to break these details down for yourself alright so let's go over the first thing of breaking down the profile of your weld so you can see here that Luther started out working on exercises on flat plate this very important step that we started with here we did not jump into more difficult joints we first learned what we were looking for in a controlled environment of working on flat plate before moving on looking at the welding profile of these passes here one thing that I recommended working on first is getting a good consistency from start to finish we want a controlled start right at the beginning and we want the filler material to blend in perfectly before moving very important now once we have flashed up and we have established a good and controlled profile right at the start remember that as we start moving with filler material we want to see adequate reinforcement this means that as you are adding filler material we are not seeing the surface of the weld falling concave or flat we want to see a little bit of reinforcement above the Plate's surface and again when establishing this profile it is all about the start anytime something is cold or has not been established properly at the beginning it is going to be struggle City once you start moving now once you start moving you should be able to maintain your width pretty easily and maintain a consistent amount of reinforcement from start to finish we really want to take a look at this area here where the filler material is blending into the base material this is very important right here and looking at this spot there should be a smooth transition between the two materials we see a hard Edge or a hard transition like what you're looking at here this means that the filler material is having trouble blending into the base material so either less filler material is required here or more heat input is required to blend this filler material into the base plate now what we're working with here is a bead width of approximately three millimeters or just shy of 1 8 of an inch and we're going to look for these details to be really consistent from the start of the weld all the way to the Finish okay the second thing that we're going to talk about focusing on was the heat affected zone now as things start to get hot on the material you can see how the heat affected Zone starts to wash out towards the end see how it's a little more narrow and refined at the start and by the end it has spread out quite far now again in my opinion I definitely find this a little bit easier to control and understand working with stainless steel but the same goes for welding with mild steel we want to control the heat affected Zone basically what you're looking for is to tighten up and start to bring the heat affected Zone in a little bit tighter this is going to mean that your heat input has been controlled much better by the amount of filler material you are using as well as the gas coverage when the heat input becomes excessive the heat affected Zone obviously will become excessive as well and anytime you're not really keeping things covered well with the gas you're going to see this area become excessive as well once we worked on the first thing of having our profile of our weld completely dialed in combination with the heat affected Zone being nice and controlled and trying to get the best consistency with it from start to finish this is the time when it is now appropriate to move on now when anybody jumps into learning more advanced joints they are now going to have a way better understanding of the context of all the things that they are doing at this point jumping into welding on a fillet joint or something like that if somebody does not understand the fundamentals of establishing a good profile or how to effectively control and maintain a consistent heat affected Zone this is going to be a freaking huge learning curve start simple and learn how to break these variables down for yourself before moving on now you can see that when Luther jumped into the exercises a little later in the program while it may have taken us a little longer to get to that point he actually had a much better understanding of control overall by this point take a look at something like the lap joint here you can see that when he got working on this one the reinforcement of this area became a little bit Hollow we can see the top Edge has a bit of a Sharp Ridge as things have fallen a little bit flat or concave so let me ask you here Pop Quiz of the variables that we talked about which one of them needs work pause the video and put the answer in the comments below I'll wait so which of the two variables was it you would be correct if you guessed the variable of that's right the profile of the weld we can see here that the top Edge has fallen Hollow the profile is now lopsided with the filler material because we have a high side and a low side so this is what we went to work on I always recommend on getting the profile dialed down and perfect first and then after this is done consistently we start to work on the heat affected Zone Luther started to incorporate and use a little bit more filler material and when he really started to find the perfect amount look at the difference in results we see here right on dude we can now see that he has adequate filler material reaching all the way to the top Edge we can see that the bottom Edge is still blending in nice and smooth to the base material this is exactly the transition between the two materials that we are looking for here we can see that the heat affected zone is relatively consistent as well and again this is going to improve even more and he'll start to get better and better finish as he starts to get more familiar and comfortable with this joint now we can break down another aspect of our profile here take a look at the stepping distance in this example here if you do not know what the term stepping distance means it basically refers to the amount of distance in between each step where the filler material is added to a weld now taking a look at this example here see how the step steps are a little bit further apart anytime we have excessive stepping distance with a pass our filler material is going to start to fall flat even if somebody is using the perfect amount of filler material for each dab let's think about it like peanut butter on toast this amount here over a shorter distance on this piece of toast now compared to the same amount being spread over a further distance on this piece of toast peanut butter is going to go a lot further on one piece of toast than the other didn't learn that at weld school so essentially this is the exact same thing as what's happening with Luther's filler material here now when you started working with a little bit of a tighter stepping distance each time he does a dab as he moves along the length of a pass the filler material is going to go much further you're going to have a much easier time keeping the profile of the weld from falling flat or concave and you can see from this example here the profile looks so much better awesome work dude so tightening up the stepping distance is going to allow the filler material to stack up a little bit more in the joint and this is actually going to help to absorb some of the heat a little bit better so which variable is this going to help it's going to help us to control the heat affected zone now many students who have worked with me through the aluminum program online have gone on to start working with stuff with mild steel as well as stainless steel you can see that using the fundamentals that we learn in the original program this applies directly to any type of metal it's just a matter of figuring out the small things about the variables that we mentioned earlier how they apply to each metal specifically and how we can break down the work that we have done and especially with mild steel once somebody becomes really comfortable with controlling their heat and they get a little bit more experience they're going to start to see the finish of their welding come out better and better mild steel is a little bit of a fussy type of TIG welding but I've seen a ton of amazing stuff done by some really talented people who work with this metal all the time I really enjoyed this area of TIG welding when I went through it all for certification let me know in the comments below if you enjoyed this exercise on mild steel go ahead and watch this episode next if you like the episode that you watched here today you're going to enjoy this one as well go today do a random act of kindness for a stranger my name is Dusty Phil and chill we'll talk soon peace [Music]

Channel: Pacific Arc Tig Welding

Views: 95,856

Keywords: tig welding mild steel, tig welding, tig, welding, tigwelding, welding mild steel

Id: K-HLRLlqHO0

Length: 9min 6sec (546 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 31 2023