Aluminum Tig Welding Settings - How To Make The Perfect Weld!

[Music] hey everyone what's up welcome to another episode from Pacific Arctic welding my name is dusty thanks a lot for joining me for today's episode we're gonna go over some aluminum tape welding settings I'm gonna show you how I set up all my gear both my machine and my torch and all that stuff let me show you how I get a perfect aluminum tape weld with the settings on the machine that I'm using so in this episode we're gonna go over a torch setup which is very important for sure we're gonna go over a machine set up a basic gas setup as well as our arc balance something I haven't really talked about a lot on the show before but we're gonna go over how to balance our AC wave we're go over some general rules as far as your filler material it relates to your heat as well as a couple things we'll check after we finish the weld as far as how to see how it went and I'll show you a couple other secret little things as far as how to make your weld of real shiny so if you're new to the channel please subscribe like share do all that stuff I always feel bad asking but it's gonna help the channel grow the more people watch these videos the more videos on TIG welding I will make all right so you ready to go we're go over a few things to start off as far as setting up our torch and making sure our torch is good to go so the torch I'm using is TK 26 style torch or a WP 26 style torch I usually go by the CK worldwide standards as far as CK a worldwide goes as a 26 style torch so base is a pretty basic setup here I've got a number 8 cup with a 3/32 gas lens setup so I prefer using the gas lens setup for a lot of the projects I do if you watch a lot of their videos on my channels I usually have a gas lens setup I don't actually come to think of it I don't think I've ever done an episode with the normal setup as far as call it body goes everything I've used is for gas lens basic rule of thumb as far as the gas lens goes you just keep it clean if you a lot of the time what happens with AC welding is when people dip and contaminate their tungsten a lot of the splatter and stuff will kind of stick to the little gas screen in here so what you want to do is you just want to make sure your gas screen and all this stuff is nice and clean in here just give it a quick once-over if you see anything on there as far as like splatter or anything gross need to get rid of you just use the butt end of your tungsten and just kind of gently clean it out like that you want to be very careful that you don't puncture the gas screens or anything like that so you just give it a light scrape and use a wire brush as well just get rid of this little scrub scrub as far as this guy goes looks pretty clean and good to go so another thing you want to check before we get going here it's how clean is your cup take a look on the inside and hold it up to a light like this you'll be able to see inside there's any splatter or anything and stuff stuck on the inside of your cup you want to make sure that you clean all that out if you have debris and stuff stuck in here it's going to create gas deflection what I mean by that is when you get your weld going your gas won't come out as a perfect kind of swirl like it does or whatever shape it comes tote is it's gonna come out more lopsided you're going to get deflection on one side of the cup if you want to make sure that all the splatter and stuff from the inside your cup is gone you want to make sure it's nice and clean a couple ways you can clean it you can just use a little piece of tungsten or a tick rod like so just scrape it out on the inside have a little look-see in there make sure it's nice and clean this guy's pretty much brand new so it's pretty good you can also take a wire brush can't get in there just get a little swirl like so make sure there's nothing in there at all this guy looks pretty clean aside from that most importantly how clean is your tungsten this is like my first rule of thumb when I'm teaching people and they call me over because they're having problems with their arc and I go over and I look and they're Tungsten's destroyed I don't even know what to say you have to change out your tungsten hit you've dipped it a lot of the times even sometimes what will happen is that if you get a tungsten that's just been used for a little while you don't have your AC balance totally balanced though even though you haven't dipped it it will just kind of collect a little bit of contaminant and stuff that will end up sticking to it so even after a while if you've used it for a little bit even if you haven't dipped just switch out for a fresh one trust me you'll get a much smoother arc when your startup's and stuff like that so just do yourself a favor keep your constantly alright so if your torch is good to go what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna fire up my machine I'll show you a little bit about my setup as far as what I do for general settings and stuff like that so let's take a look okay so I got my can of weld 201 pulse d this machine is a little beast when I fire it up here just give it a sec the fan will turn off in a second here there we go little quieter this machine's a little beast I love this machine I'm actually gonna do a little review coming up on coming up soon on this guy so keep your eyes peeled for that in the next two to three weeks on my channel so as far as settings go obviously I'm gonna be on AC so AC current alternating current for anybody that doesn't know alternating current balances between DC negative and DC positive creates what's called a sine wave so the sine wave goes on both the positive and the negative side of the AC sine wave what we're gonna do here is I'll show you my basic set up first one here is our pre flow so as you can see I'm not running my pre flow at all just about 0.2 seconds so not much time at all so that's good zero upslope keep it at about 180 amps here that's good zero downslope in about four seconds of post flow time and after post flow we have our AC balance so I'll go over this when we set it up but what I'm actually gonna do is I'll probably just ballpark it to be alone 30% so what this means is that it's on 30% of the positive side of the AC wave so it's 30 70 so 70 percent negative 30% positive keep it there for now my frequency that's pretty good we're running at about a hundred Hertz so that's good to go so pretty basic setup here I'm happy with that let's go with it all right so one thing I wanted to explain before we get welding here I want to explain how the AC balance works so like I was saying the AC balance is the balance between the positive and the negative side of the AC cycle so this always seems to be a bit of a tricky thing to setup for most machines reason being is a lot of machines act very differently from one it also really depends on what you're welding as well thickness of material plays a factor in this the amperage that you're welding plays a factor in this I was gonna need to kind of custom tune in their own settings on the machine as far as what they're setting up to do but a general rule of thumb is this so if you have too much DC negative on your AC balance what's gonna tend to happen is you're gonna get a dirty well you're not gonna be able to figure out what's going on every time you do a well it's gonna be really dirty kind of crusty it's gonna look really strange kind of frosty it's not gonna look shiny at all you can check all your other settings you can check the gas flow you can check your torch setup and all that stuff everything's gonna seem really really fine but for some reason you're still getting a weld that's kind of dirty it's not actually a gas problem what's happening is you're not running enough positive side on the AC balance anywhere between twenty to thirty percent on the positive side is definitely gonna kind of get you near the sweet spot there so that's a good place to start but if you're starting a weld you're starting to set up a machine you've never used before and your welds are kind of turning out really frosty looking and really cloudy and stuff like that that would be a good place to start is check where your AC balance is that on the positive side of the scale so the other flip side of that equation is if you're running too much of the positive side so we just talked about running too much negative so what I mean by that you're running too much of the positive side of the AC wave on the balance so dead giveaway of this is if you park up and I'll put a clip up right now this is a slow motion clip of a little little test run I did where I intentionally had too much positive side of the AC balance on the sine wave so as you can see look at the tip of the tungsten is fluttering it's balling up way too much and the ball is almost it's like wobbling if you actually have too much from the positive side of AC balance the ball will flick off it'll be like a splat or like molten tungsten that will just blow into your weld so you want to make sure that you don't have too much of the positive side of the AC balance so anytime you fire up a well that's pretty hot and you tend to notice the little tip you tend to notice the ball and your tungsten fluttering that's generally what happens I would recommend you turn your AC balance down a little bit so it's running a little more negative than positive so they have a setting I set up on my machine was the Hertz or the frequency as it's most commonly labeled on most machines this is something that's a little bit interesting it's kind of a newer development in the last like five or whatever years but inverter type machines became really common so before inverter type machines there was transformer type machines as some people know if you don't know a transformer type machine was a fixed frequency it ran at 60 Hertz and what I mean by Hertz is that AC wave that we talked about my Hertz so if it's 60 Hertz that AC wave happens 60 times in one second so if we have something else where we can adjust our frequency so like all the inverter type stuff that's coming out nowadays you can really finely tune the Hertz that happens on a machine that you well that so you can run it like these machines here will go anywhere from 250 Hertz all the way down like 40 Hertz or something like that so 40 cycles a second or you crank it all the way up to 250 it's gonna happen 250 times a second it's so real fast so again there's different uses for this I won't get into all that technical stuff right now but you can play with that a little bit that's not really gonna be imperative to what we're doing today here we're just gonna run a nice clean weld that's also I'm gonna run it at a hundred Hertz that means our AC cycle is happening 100 times per second so aside from that the other settings that we set up was we're running a hundred and eighty amps so nothing too extreme the material I'm gonna be using today is just 3/16 aluminum plate nothing fancy I've already wire brushed it real clean hit it with a little bit of acetone so any surface stuff is already gone these guys are nice and clean and ready to go so when you do this make sure your stuff's clean so as you can see I've already wire brushed it real well this guy has been hit by acetone so there's no grease or anything on the surface it's a pretty clean right there so this is what you want to look for before you get welding do whatever weld anything that's dirty it's just gonna make it real frustrating for yourself so make sure it's nice and clean so a couple other quick things I'll discuss before we get welding here stand off distance stand off distance is something that a lot of people kind of struggle with when they first get them going reason being is that people are a little bit too scared to get too close to their work because they don't want to dip their tungsten totally understandable but unfortunately what can happen is that if somebody is running too much standoff distance so that means that they're running too far away from their plate your arc is not going to be strong enough to totally cover the weld puddle that you've just established so you're gonna take the time to start up a nice weld puddle and then if you move it too far away like so a lot of oxygen and stuff like that in our atmosphere is gonna get into that art cone and it's gonna contaminate the weld so again we don't want to be too close because unfortunately if we're too close you're going to be tapping and contaminating your tungsten however if you're too far away you're also going to be contaminating your weld with oxide and just gas turbulence and stuff like that so there's a real sweet spot there the general rule of thumb as far as your standoff distance should be they recommend no more than twice the thickness of your tungsten for example if you're running an 8 inch tungsten eighth inch times two quarter inch you don't want to run any further than a quarter inch away from your workpiece at the most so again that's something that will just come with comfort the more you do take a welding you get a little bit more comfortable with getting it nice and tight and not dipping so that will come with time so that's about it as far as our setup goes I'm going to click the gas and the machine on here so my gas running about 17 cfh so cubic feet per hour and then we've already been over the settings for the machines so let's fire it up ok so like I said we got 3/16 inch aluminum plate here it's pretty clean yeah we're just gonna run a straight feed right down the middle and we're just gonna try and get it as clean as possible okay so like I said we're using clean tungsten here we got one eight tick rod we're running 17 that 17 cfh on our gas flow working pressure 180 amps and then we'll refine to kind of the details of the UKC balance so we're running 30% on the positive side football 100 Hertz so let's light it up okay so I'm gonna do is I'm gonna set up to weld about half of our way here maybe 2/3 you see how it's going but making sure my standoff distance is nice and close that's far away nice and comfortable see everything real well yep go for it here so again hands nice and comfortable standoff distance real good and I here we go [Music] let's stop take a look at it so overall looks pretty good we got our edges wet and a nice and smoothly everything looks nice and clean puddle height and puddle reinforcement looks pretty good we're all pretty happy with that guy turned out pretty clean as you can see we've got this white frosting on either side here that's called our arc for a spur and some people call it but it's even both sides that what I mean by that is we have the same amount of our arc through and they're Gasper and either side so that means our torch angle looks pretty good so yeah overall that well came up to the clean finish draw all right so no not very far to go I probably should have just finished that first pass the whole way but regardless here we go let's finish off the last a little bit so again my hands nice and comfy paying attention to my stand off distance light it over [Music] [Music] all right there we go she really should have done that in one pass here we are overall that turned out free though I'm happy with that as you clean nice and straight our bubble reinforcement is real good what I mean by reinforcement is the height of the weld so overall or well if we threw something straight across it you see it's only about it's less than an eighth off the surface of the parent material so well that's pretty good that's pretty much exactly what you're looking for you don't want too much reinforcement because what will happen is it'll pile up too high in the center and then these wetted edges here see how they're nice and smooth and nice and straight if you have too much fill little pile up in the center here and you'll have these really ragged cutting in and out edges it won't wet smoothly to the edge that it has here so it's kind of what we're looking for it's a perfect amount of fill right there again overall this stuff is pretty shiny nice and clean it's exactly why I'd say as far as how we got our machine set up that's pretty good I'm happy of that ok so let's do one more thing here to make our world look even better this is a little trick that I like doing especially if I know I'm gonna be having this well that's not going to be painted sometimes what I do I spend all this time doing a nice weld and it gets powder-coated or painted or something like that if I know it's not getting painted or powder-coated I'll do this little trick here and make it look even better you'll love them one up for Instagram may want to do this so all you need is a some type of aluminum polish this stuff here I argue is probably the best it's at least the best I've ever used by coming to called mothers you buy this stuff online if you click on the link in my description I have an affiliate link to this stuff here so I get a couple cents off that literally a couple cents so useful you're supporting the channels to things this stuff's the best you just need a little tub of this stuff and a little bit of painters tape this little trick here is gonna make a little real real nice sorry I'll just tear off a couple pieces of tape here what you're gonna do is you're gonna just try and sneak the tape right up to the edge of the weld as close as you can so that you're covering up the gas burn or the arc burn whatever you want to call it because the polish will polish the TIG weld but it gets stuck in this gas burn it makes it look real gummy and kind of crappy so you want to make sure you cover up the gas burn cover up the arc burning of a nice straight edge like that and we'll do it again on the other side as well pieces for the in here as well if you tell them a welder not the painter away a handle tape there we go so we got our weld exposed we got the parent material behind it protected and here we go we're going to polish this up and make it look super fly so again you don't need much of this stuff just a little dab you're just gonna rub it on the surface of the well being careful not to get it outside of the tapes that it's on the material elsewhere it's gonna start to look really dirty so what you're actually doing is you're polishing a lot of the oxide off the surface of the metal so it's gonna start to turn black and gummy like that I'm not doing anything wrong that's supposed to happen at least two times you want to get crazy you can do this three or four times and it'll shine up so shiny you won't believe it so getting a pretty shiny here okay you know go one more just for the heck of it oh I put a lot on that time okay so this is almost almost too much here but that's alright we're just gonna give it a quick little rub dry part of the rag wipe a lot of it off clean rag or clean ish take it all off get it all off the edges there all right so let's peel this off there we go you can see that is ridiculously shiny so it also gets rid of your little arc burn from the start stop when we did there if you spend a little bit more time line you could probably get rid of it completely but look at that it's like a mirror it's so shiny there you go that's a little show-off trick get it get ready for Instagram or something like that but yeah I don't know I figured that one out a couple years ago and I've been doing it for like I said any stuff it's gonna be showy like real visible type welding I'll do this to it if I know it's not getting painted or if I'm gonna put it on Instagram I'll definitely do it as well but anyway I hope you enjoyed this video it's fun I liked playing around with the machines and stuff like that like I said this can oh well there's a lot of fun I'm gonna do a demo on kind of a review on the can of weld as well I've also promised a lot of people I'm gonna do a review on my era I have a never last toot an ext as well so I'm gonna do a review on both those machines might do them in the same episode kind of a head-to-head thing or I might do them separately I'm not sure yet but that's what I'm thinkin so I hope you enjoyed this one this one's a lot of fun let me know how it goes if you run this stuff and especially if you're a beginner and you're kind of tinkering around the machine settings that you're using put your work on Instagram and tag me you know I want to see how you did if you've got any ideas for videos you'd like to see if you'd like to see me do some demos on specific things if you'd like to see me try some different tricks with aluminum or stainless or something like that or show a specific thing with the machine leave it in the comments below I read all comments I'll try and get back to you as quick as possible if you have a good idea I might give that a whirl and do an episode for you no promises though but again thank you so much for watching I really really appreciate it everybody that likes some comments and all that stuff I really really appreciate that if you subscribe thank you so much cool news I'm having a website coming up pretty soon so keep your eyes peeled for that I'm really really excited to put a website together I'm going to get a bunch of cool photos put together of all the work I've done so far as well a bunch of videos some how to's and stuff like that so keep your eyes for my new website so hope you enjoyed this one give it a whirl let me know how it goes thanks a lot for watching have a good one peace [Music]

Channel: Pacific Arc Tig Welding

Views: 130,813

Rating: 4.9272509 out of 5

Keywords: aluminum tig welding, aluminum tig welding settings, tig welding, perfect weld, tig, welding, tig weld, weld, Welding filler rod, how to tig weld aluminum, how to tig weld, how to tig, aluminum, tig welding art, welding art, art, welding artist, Tig welding how to, perfect tig welds, tig welding settings, welding settings, settings, tig welding aluminum, tig welding for beginners, welding aluminum, aluminum welding, tig welding tips, how to weld aluminum, How to weld

Id: ZqFnwWUzbOo

Length: 21min 2sec (1262 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 10 2020