🔥 Top 5 Mistakes in TIG Welding and How to Fix Them: Part 1 | TIG Time

have you ever started your TIG welding machine and found that the tungsten tries to disappear up into the torch well mine just did hey we're going to show you in TIG welding about the top five most made mistakes in getting started even the experts have these same problems in fact I set this machine up and I was welding with a pointed tungsten and I was lighting an arc on stainless steel with a nice fine pointed tungsten when I lit the arc I noticed the tungsten started to disappear it's now balled up on the end so what causes that well typically here's what happens during the setup of a machine all the ports in here look pretty much the same if you take the TIG torch and you put it in reverse polarity and most people don't know what that is but if you actually get it in backwards your ground and your torch or vice versa this will happen so I've got reverse polarity and so in some machines take a look real close when you're setting your machine up or changing torches there's actually a little cartoon there that shows your torch go ahead and plug that in first and then plug your ground in now this particular machine has a plus and a minus on it and I accidentally took the TIG torch and I put it in - okay that's where I need to put the ground always in - first of course the only available port now is the plus so this machine will take care of it in most machines well if you put it in that order so take a look at my tungsten and I'm going to go ahead I'm going to reverse the leads and show you that it does work okay I went ahead and reground my tungsten to a nice fine point I reversed my lead so now I'm in what we consider straight polarity I'm going to go ahead and test it make sure everything is working right okay so okay I can see the puddle nice pointed tungsten so everything is working right now okay so it tests out fine again it maintains the point the arc started properly I hear the gas flow so number one that was that that was a make sure you get your leads correct so you don't have a polarity problem okay number two the most made mistakes in TIG welding is this it has to do with torch angle okay so when we're talking about TIG welding you see it on other videos what is the perfect torch angle well we talked about it as being straight up and down but the reality behind it is you can't see so you're either tweaking your head over here trying to see the puddle where you end up turning the angle on the torch how much is too much well I like to describe it this way this is perfect as your welding along you're going to see the angle change slightly it may be 15 degrees and you get to 30 degrees you get to 45 degrees you know what you're still getting the ask coverage here at 45 but you know one of these days you're going to hit the tipping point and this is just about the tipping point so when you start getting down at 60 degrees the arc isn't as stable you don't have a nice round puddle the the argon is deflecting so just know that if you're it this far down and don't write your cup on your part it's not really how you how to do that go ahead get upright and you know you're going to find out that later in the day you're going to find that angle changing just because you get fatigued you don't realize that it's drooping so let me show you what what I think the perfect angle is and then I'm going to droop it down here and show you what the results would be that way okay I'm going to start off welding somewhat straight up and down not perfectly straight up and down but you know I can see the puddle and I can see that it's pretty clean I'm adding filler material you know what I'm going to do is I'm going to turn the angle of the torch so severe that it's kind of hard to control I can still willed but it just gets out of control so you can see them I'm probably at sixty degrees as soon as I lost control I started stopping so just know you got a nice stable arc nice stable puddle and has a dangle changes it may try to wander on you so you have to determine what works best for you now I still got fairly good coverage even at this angle but there is a point where it just absolutely loses coverage so that's tip number two torch angle okay tip number three is actually the gas itself what do we use most of the time in TIG welding and I can tell you I recommend almost always a hundred percent argon now as you start welding and learning how to weld very very common to start off that other welding process where you pull the trigger and wire comes out and guess what kind of gas you use on that you use argon mixed with co2 so if you accidentally take that MIG set up and you take that bottle because it's got argon in it why wouldn't it work well it won't work because the co2 portion of it that's a volatile gas it's an active gas so when you start TIG welding with it it's going to do all kinds of crazy things so we're going to show you I'm going to go ahead and shift from argon gas to the MIG mix sometimes it's called c25 sometimes it's called 75 25 75 is argon mixed with 25 percent co2 we do not want to use it for TIG welding so let me make the change and show you what happens you can see there's a lot of sparklies in here you know it will cause a try to weld but you can see that it flames up is just dirty look at all the sparks that that's usually your telltale sign so ugly as can be you can see I can make it weld it's got 75% argon so I can make it well but it's that 25% that destabilizes the arc and you can see all these little spark or is going everywhere and the longer you go you're going to hit a pocket or something where there's a lot of sulfur in your metal and it's just going to explode on you so I'm going to go ahead and change it back to straight argon just to show you exactly what happens as soon as you go back to the right gas okay all I did is I changed gasps I went back from the sea 25 or that argon co2 mix that we just did a little weld on now I'm back to a hundred percent are gone and I'm just going to do a side by side well so you can see the difference okay so you can do a close up here you know what I first let the arc I saw a little sparklies and that was just the gas that remained in the lines from the last weld so it took about three or four seconds it all cleaned out and you can see the weld changes immediately you okay the number four most made mistake has to do with the argon gas itself the CF H cubic feet per hour now we obviously like a lot of argon this particular cup has a fairly small opening and my stick out is about a quarter of an inch so it's going to have an ideal cfh setting of somewhere around fifteen to twenty cfh now here's a logic that happens an awful lot if 15 or 20 is good 40 is better or is 60 better the more argon the better the gas coverage well the reality behind it is you got to be careful it creates turbulence so it starts sucking in oxygen and your weld suffers so let's see what it's like to accidentally turn your gas up or maybe try it on purpose so I've got this thing set at I don't know 50 to 60 CFH you know I actually I don't have real good stability of the funnel you can see it fluttering man you can really hear it too it's pretty amazing just changing the gas settings on here how much difference you get I don't have control of the puddle but it's running at 60 cfh you can hear it in hisses it also throws so much gas on the puddle that it's bouncing around and I could see porosity developing within it so even when I got to the end of the weld here I could see this this porosity forming just not a good deal so you know set it back to 15 to 20 CFH and this is the results that you'll get out of it you okay now the fifth and final item that we're going to talk about the most made mistakes in TIG welding has to do with voltage now there are sub machines that will actually show you your voltage but the reality behind it is you are the welding operator you control the voltage by the distance of your tungsten to the part you're about to weld so here's what I'm recommending just as a guideline as you get your skills better and better and better the distance needs to be about the distance the offset of the thickness of a dime okay now if you can do that you're going to be probably in the 9 to 12 volt range now the reason you want to get that close to your weld is because you get a little conical arc and what takes me maybe 50 amps to make a weld if I raise the torch too high then it requires more amperage and then the arc gets wider you lose control of the puddle so that's why you'll find some people can weld very very good with low distortion and other people well but they have higher distortion so I'm going to demonstrate that I'm going to do that 9 to 12 volts and then once we raise the arc in order to keep the puddle I've got an increase amperage so here goes okay start the arc all I want to do is just get a nice little puddle that I can see if you notice my tungsten is really close to the puddle and I just dwell there a little bit you know so all up I'll watch it and I'm not adding filler so you'll see all kinds of rust and stuff come out but just a good steady travel speed now here's what's going to happen I'm going to lift the torch up much higher and I could see better but I've got to increase my amperage just so I can make that puddle halfway stable so you can see I could put twice three times the amount of heat in as I need to by being this far away so not a good thing but you know in the beginning it's okay as you get better and better go ahead and drop it down get down closer closer closer closer closer and when you can do that you'll have a very stable puddle okay so what you could see here was a very stable puddle at about nine to twelve volts very well controlled now I'm welding on steel so it's not the cleanest thing but I welded about an inch at nine to twelve volts and then I raised my torch not only did I lose stability I started getting porosity in my well so just know that the further away you get the more concern about porosity and your weld so then what I did was I went ahead and dropped my torch back down to nine to twelve volts and you can see that it cleaned up very nicely so anyway those are the the top five things that I run into a lot in it it mostly comes from you in the forums and in just general phone calls so we'll keep we'll keep doing top five we're going to get into some other metals and talk about the most main mistakes as well so thank you for watching take time I'm mr. TIG to stay up with the latest TIG welding technology and education subscribe by clicking the button below

Channel: Weld.com

Views: 771,063

Rating: 4.8599496 out of 5

Keywords: TIG Welding, Welding, GTAW, Mr TIG, TIG Time, Weld.com, Welding Videos, How to Weld, Welding Tips and Tricks, TIG Welding Videos, Everlast Welders, Miller Diversion 180, Miller Welds, Longevity Welders, AHP Weld, 200X, 200DV, Weld Troubleshooting, How to Troubleshoot your weld, Welding Problems, Make better welds, how to make better tig welds, how to set up your tig welder

Id: LBXSVCmuBeY

Length: 14min 19sec (859 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 25 2015