TIG Welding 4130 Chromoly Tubing

i'm going to use er 70 for the first pass and then a different rod for the second pass this is 4130 tubing 0.12 wall thickness 2 inch diameter i'll be doing kind of a burn down root pass with a small diameter rod and then coming back over with a second pass now this is just a practice cluster joint 4130 kit but it's very representative of a lot of stuff that i've done in a side hustle job and a fixture plate like this something to get things at a square 90 easily and to hold things and then you can spin it around on your main work surface is is one of the handiest things i've ever used it'll let you clamp something at a true 90 degrees in just a few seconds i'm going ahead and sharpen it up a couple of two percent lanthanated 332 diameter electrodes and then i'm only using a number six cup to tack weld with just to save a little gas because i'm getting low and it's the weekend 12 cfh will do just a fine job with that number six cup especially since i'm going to prop the cup and just hit a really small tack really quick i'm trying out a new auto darkening welding helmet if you see it on my store soon that means it passed the test so far so good i really like it i use a 2.5 cheater lens this this helmet lets me just slip one right in there i'm trying to make my tacks pretty small so that they're not obvious when i go back over them but since i'll be doing two passes that shouldn't be a big deal and i'm getting quite a few tacks attack every inch and a half or so probably i'm not really measuring it i'm just i just don't want it to walk around on me while i weld these first two out or otherwise the rest of them won't fit properly nice small tacks should be pretty easy to burn right through those melt them in now i'm going to switch to this jazzy 10 ceramic cup one of my very favorite cups when you add this double diffuser here in addition to the diffuser that's in the gas lens itself you really got something there you can go with a really long stick out it only requires about 20 cfh which is really what i use on a number eight cup typically so it's one of my favorites perfect cup for a job like this i'm using o45 diameter er 70s 2 for the first pass here occasionally i jumped up to 1 16 for joints that had a small gap in them this is kind of like a lap joint and the most important thing one of the most important things on a lap joint is arc length this is a this is way too long of an arc length too much torch angle and i'm coming in and out of the argon with that feather rod i tighten it up a little bit here but this is more like what you would see with gas welding with an oxy acetylene torch you're not getting the benefit of tig welding when you hold a long arc it even look kind of like a gas weld all dull and gray and lumpy so it's all everything you've seen so far here is 100 amps on this lap joint and all i do is just tighten that arc length up still at 100 amps and everything gets way better okay let's get back to the 4130 chromoly tubes now okay i'm just going to get a single pass on this first joint here because this is just practice i know if this was an actual chassis i was welding it might be a requirement to get a full two passes on this before i put the other rest of the cluster pieces on there that are coped i can tell my argon tank is getting a little low i have owner's bottles typically the 125 cubic feet and i'm not really sure they vacuum them out or they just top them off or whatever but i've noticed when they get down pretty low you can notice a difference in the argon coverage this is a stainless joint i did a while back and it's very much just like what i'm doing here on the chromoly except that i try to get going a little quicker on stainless and move out but i'm not really doing anything much different requires a little bit lower amperage on stainless than for carbon steel and chromoly but same technique where you try to twist your wrist and reposition and maintain some kind of decent torch angle still using the jazzy tin cup on here though so you can see how well it's working now if you wanted to get practice out of position you can certainly position it up over your head or some kind of hard position just like i did this joint here this is actually pretty easy nothing's in my way or anything and when you're welding a chassis everything's in your way at least on certain joints but you got to start somewhere so i'm going to weld this just thing out flat on the fixture plate mad respect to all those guys that contort their bodies and get inside and weld and still make the wells look awesome so i'm tacking it all out went back to the number six cup to save a little argon keeping it clamped down good and flat i've been trying out this little tig torch holder here recently kind of a handy place to hang your torch and the cool thing about it gives you a little place to sort of give yourself a little slack without it hanging on your table legs and stuff so i found it pretty handy also this little tig part organizer it's got some magnetic bases on it keep a little good assortments of cups and collet bodies and things like that i'm going back to the jazzy 10 ceramic cup now i'm going to bump my argon up to about 20 cfh and i'll keep on going again with the o45 actually it looks like i may have a 1 16 in my hand here but yeah like i said wherever there's a slight gap but i didn't get my fit up just right i'll just use a 1 16 rod and i use 045 for where it's appropriate i'm really just trying to get really good penetration right down into the root of the joint here i'll get some reinforcement filler metal in there with a second pass so on these first passes i'm not doing anything crazy with the foot pedal i'm not pumping the foot pedal or anything it's just a straight current and i'm about 120 amps right here when i come up on the tack i probably skip a dip just to uh compensate it might make a ripple look funny or something but this is the first pass and i'm more concerned with having you know not having a bump there on a cluster joint like i'm welding today sometimes you have to use a really long stick out you get you get these really tight angles and you need a long stick out and i'll bump my argon up a little bit up an extra five or so and i can extend the electrode at easily three quarters of an inch with this one i have done it more than an inch even and still get good gas coverage on a joint like that there is a lot of welding on this practice kit a lot of inches of weld and so i'm showing lots of angles lots of different joints but i won't show every single one of them they're just kind of too much and they all start to look the same after a while but the way cope tube joints work is you know there's there's there's parts of it that kind of you're welding down in a v parts of it are kind of like a lap joint and you're constantly having to reposition your wrists in order to maintain a favorable torch angle we'll show one or two more here and then we'll go on to the second pass you see my torch angle here is just almost straight in there are times when it's leaned back quite a bit it's very forgiving as long as you hold the tight arc and a tight arc to me is roughly the diameter of the electrode or a little bit less depending on your skill level depending if you shake a lot and things like that if you hold too tight of an arc you'll be cleaning electrodes all the time if you hold too long an arc you'll get that scenario that i showed earlier with the rod blobbing up and blobbing into the puddle i'm going to wire brush those now and then let it cool for a good little while before i come across with the second pass i set the machine now an additional 20 amps up to 140 amps max and i'm just kind of stomping the pedal full pedal and then backing off to probably maybe 110 amps or something like that i wasn't watching the machine so i'm not really sure backing off just to give myself a little time to turn my wrist if i need to and to feed rod i really admire the work that joel does that frank flerquin does eli latin and they all seem to pump the pedal like this they make it look way better than this but uh you know there's a lot of benefit to it and i can see why it's done for chromoly cluster joints like this because when you manually pump the pedal you can adjust on the fly that pulse doesn't come when you're not ready for it if you get hung up for a second and have to feed rod or turn your wrist a little bit you can you can adjust now this is a special rod here notice it's got a little bit different look than the er 70. some trophy truck builders you know for for cosmetic purposes mainly for show cars and whatnot we'll use a super missile weld or er 312 stainless for the second pass i'm not using either one of those this is something i happen to have a lot of and i'll tell you what it is at the very end see if you can guess we're nearing the end here okay only a minute or so left so there's so many welds on here to show and i got some pretty good arc shots i thought well i might as well show what i got instead of just trying to make it as short as possible so it's around this video is around the 11 minute mark and i'm speeding up portions of it and leaving portions of it out because it kind of like i said it all looks the same after a while i need to do one last nice long run i'm going to try to make it kind of without stopping and of course my tig finger there is kind of a heat pad is going to let me do that without my hand just smoking before i get finished i'm trying to make this look good and make it look somewhere close to the sample that joel gave me i got really lucky almost 30 years ago and was able to buy a whole bunch of hastelloy w 1 16 filler for basically scrap price so i bought as much of it as i could and that's why i'm using it here it's really expensive it's probably not the appropriate rod here but i just got curious is how it would look on 4130 chromoly you

Channel: weldingtipsandtricks

Views: 60,765

Rating: 4.9551339 out of 5

Keywords: 4130 cluster, tig welding 4130, tig welding chromoly, tig welding chromoly tubing, welding 4130, tig welding tips, welding tips and tricks, tig welding

Id: WoIgZxm9k8U

Length: 10min 30sec (630 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 04 2021