4 Easy Ways to Grind Tungsten for TIG Welding | TIG Time

welcome back to TIG time I'm mr. t and today we're gonna talk about grinding your tungsten now I have a 1/16 tungsten here and it's ground to a point and there is a right way in a wrong way to grind your tungsten and that's what we're going to show you today but also I want to show you I've got four methods of getting a sharp point on this tungsten and there are several other ways but I want to show you everything from very economical to a light industrial grinder to a heavy industrial grinder to actually field grinding well I say grinding this is a chemical it doesn't actually grind but it'll have a chemical reaction and it'll actually create a point on any of your tungsten and I'm going to show you my favorites [Music] [Music] first let's get started with this one right here this is a pesto grinder just about everybody has in their garage you know this this can be purchased at any of the economy stores for you know about fifty dollars or less and should you use a grinding wheel well actually yes it's it's used frequently now if you'll notice the wheel on this you know it's got probably a sixty grit wheel can we grind with it the answer is yes I prefer to put a 120 grit wheel on there but we're going to show you you can get good results even with this it's a really good idea to make sure that that wheel is used for tungsten grinding only you don't want to have other metals soft metals in there or you may get some contamination on the end of your tungsten so we're looking at a $50 investment and it'll do a good job for you this little device right here it's portable and it's about three hundred dollars and it has a little wheel inside that will probably give you up to I don't know maybe 500 grinds on one side and what wears out you can turn it over and use the other side of the wheel so you get a maybe a thousand grinds out of it and it all depends on what diameter tungsten you're grinding now I'm gonna move over here this is my heavy duty version this one is much more power and I use it for more industrial use and I can get probably 3,000 grinds out of this before I have to change the wheel and the wheels are arguably fifty dollars or so so it's not a huge investment now this little bottle right here is under ten dollars and I have a love-hate relationship with it the love-hate relationship is that when you don't have grinders with you in the field and you need to put a point on into your tungsten this becomes your best friend it creates a chemical reaction and we're going to show that to you in just a few minutes but you've got a you've got a tungsten that you actually heat up and you dip it in here in the chemicals will start popping and sputtering but it also gets up onto your torch and gets in your torch components so that's the hate relationship got to clean your components when you're finished so let's get started and we'll start grinding on this unit right here okay I've got a 1/16 tungsten and how many of you grind your tungsten this way using the wheel visually being able to see this very very well and then putting it nice point on here but the problem is I've got the grind marks going the wrong direction this this is the wrong way [Music] okay never grind on the side of the wheel but the best way to get the angle and you get the grind marks going the right direction for you just like this and you can see I'm putting a little groove in the wheel that's going to happen but I'm twisting this as I'm grinding it visually I can see it very well so I thought the grind marks going in the right direction and arc initiation will be at its peak because of that you can see I've been I've got a pretty good angle on there and I'm pretty much finished with my grind that's a decent grind now I'm wearing safety glasses I'm not terribly worried about the tungsten dust because tungsten is a heavy metal and the wheel is running downwards make sure you have good ventilation in your shop okay I've got my little PowerPoint grinder got my safety glasses on and this little PowerPoint grinder operates off a hundred and fifteen volts so I'm gonna go ahead and do my grind get the point on and at the very end of this tool I'm gonna kiss off the end of the tungsten because this this will put a very very fine point on and I want to put just a slight flat when I finish so here goes [Music] okay I just kissed that often okay I've got my industrial tungsten grinder and it's got a few more features to it so I'm going to show those to you now before I turn it on it makes a little bit of noise it is definitely heavier duty but it's actually got like a protractor built-in so I don't have to guess what the angle is going to be it's going to tell me what it is so I have preset the angle and it also has there's a little handy tool so I can actually chuck up my tungsten and use this as a turning device and I'm going to do it both ways I'm going to do it without the tool and by hand and see what the outcome is okay I did finish two of them absolutely identical using the tungsten itself without the holder he had a little better feel for getting a tungsten started but using this tool and the weight of the tool allowed me only to have to spin it so worked out very well okay now we're going to use this chemical sharpener and like I told you it it'll activate but it'll only activate if I can make this tungsten get a little bit red then I quickly dip it in here and it activates I'll swirl it and it'll put a point on the end of the tungsten so this is how it works okay well you can see that the chemical reaction does put a very nice point on the end of your tungsten but there's awful lot of residual on the end of the cup and still on the tungsten that residual can be wiped off cleaned off but you have to take the tungsten out and now you have to take your torch apart just so you can clean out the cup and screens on the inside so it works but it's pretty messy it's good for field applications okay now that you've seen four different ways to grind your tungsten you can you can create all kinds of ways of grinding but just make sure that you get your grinding marks in line thanks for watching take time I'm mr. Teague [Music] you

Channel: Weld.com

Views: 173,819

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Keywords: grind tungsten, How to Grind Tungsten, Grinding Tungsten, Tungsten, Welding, TIG Welding, Grind Wheel, Bench Grinder, Chem Sharp, Chemical Sharpener, Industrial Grinder, Turbo grinder, Weld.com, TIG Time, MR. TIG, Mister TIG, Weld, grinding tungsten for tig welding, Grinding tungsten for aluminum

Id: 48I3Su5iQFw

Length: 10min 16sec (616 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 31 2012