Beginner Tig welding Settings

welcome back guys today i want to answer the most common question that i get when people see my welds and that is dude what are your settings so today we're going to go over what i would recommend for settings for your three most common materials that you're going to be tig welding that would be aluminum mild steel and or stainless today we're going to be using our prime weld tig 225 now these settings will directly apply to most any other newer inverter welders the knobs and buttons might be slightly different but the general principles will apply so let's get started but before we get started with that i want to be able to bring you guys the most value and i'm going to make a little assumption here and the question of what are your settings i'm going to assume that your intention behind that question is to be able to maximize your own skill and learn how to be able to make a good clean weld but stepping back from that i want to kind of ask you a question now that question being very valid and important making and making a clear clean weld there are lots of different things that go into it and i feel like your settings are a very minute part of that so i kind of want to ask you a quick question so i'm going to say metaphorically this morning i walked up to you this morning when we got to work and i was like man i seen you driving on the way to work this morning you were just making a straight run down the road it was a beautiful pass looked great looked like with great skill and quality what were your settings and you'd look at me kind of funny like what the heck are you talking about i mean like yeah like what was the camera in your front end set at like what was your tire pressure set at and maybe what was the volume of your radio set at and you might look at me kind of funny same thing with welding although your settings are very critical and do play a key part the primary thing that allowed you to drive straight down the road is experience and seat time being able to get that time in learning cause and effect learning that if there's a bump in the road you know how to turn out of the way or compensate it with more pedal or less puddle or vice versa your settings are important it is going to affect the way that it runs but getting that seat time and learning those cause and effects maybe having a mentor there to show you hey when you do this this happens or if you don't have a mentor there stepping back and looking at your own welds and trying to break down what you actually did so the other things that play i believe a higher role in making a good weld are your feed rate and your travel speed and regulating your pedal depending on how far you are into the weld because when you start off your ambient material is going to be cooler so you're going to need more amperage but as you continue on and progressively you're going to need to back out of that pedal because the material itself is heating up so therefore you do not need to put as much amperage into it to be able to heat that material up and maintain that temperature to carry out a quality well so that's my little rant there hopefully that makes sense and hopefully that was a value let me know in the comments and let's get started with our settings okay let's get started with our settings here so i'm not going to go over any of the pulse features or anything like that i'm just going to show you the standard run of the middle settings that you're going to need to get started with this and to start off with we are going to start with the settings that you would use for either mild steel and or stainless steel so now when we look at the front of our machine here this can be kind of intimidating there's lots of knobs and buttons and stuff but we're going to simplify this for you so okay hopefully this looks a little less intimidating we only have three knobs and four switches that we want to deal with and we want to remember that this is for mild steel and stainless steel now the first thing that you're going to want to do on your prime weld is you want to make sure that you are in the tig functions we want that switch switched up we are going to want to run in dc so switch this guy down to dc this is assuming that you're going to be running a pedal so if you're running your pedal you want to flip this switch over here to the t2 function we have our amperage our pre-flow and our post flow now there are multiple different opinions on this i'm just going to show you what i would recommend and you can do your due diligence so on pre-flow it's going to be a little more critical to have some more volume on stainless but i recommend if you're practicing to keep that down pretty low just to conserve gas now your amperage when you turn this guy it will show on the digital readout here for amperage we want to use our general rule of thumb so the general rule of thumb is one amp per thousandth of an inch so if you're running eighth inch material or roughly three millimeters i believe eighth inch material is 125 thousands so by the rule of thumb you would want to set your amperage to 125. now i actually like to use that rule of thumb and then up it by 50 amps so if it's 125 thousandths i'm gonna up it to 175 thousands and that is just so i have a larger range if i need that heat i can compensate for it and it's there now i'll put a video up here kind of explaining why i like to do that and why i feel it's important especially to keep your heat signatures down yes turning your amperage up can keep your heat signatures down and this little video will explain that and the final knob is your post flow i recommend keeping your post flow if you're practicing somewhere in between five and ten seconds and yeah it's as simple as that for our mild steel and stainless that is the only settings that you're going to need the rest of it is going to be seat time so get in the seat there and get some practice done now we're going to go over aluminum settings now once again i'm going to simplify all this busyness for you so it's a little less overwhelming for our aluminum settings and we're going to do that again and here we are these are the only things that are going to be different on your aluminum we added two extra knobs to the mix here so the only change is your amperage is going or weld current is going to be the same rule of thumb pre-flow can stay the same post flow can stay the same we're not doing pulse features we're staying on t2 we're switching this from dc to ac and then we have our two new knobs here the short answer is 80 of whatever i do i'm gonna have my ac frequency somewhere in between 120 and 140 hertz and my ac balance in between 30 and 40 percent now that's the short answer to the aluminum settings if you want to stick around for just a second i will explain to you a little more in depth on why that's the case and what you can do to change them depending on your situation so we got the markers out here and got something drawn up and hopefully we can make this easy to understand so with aluminum we're going to be using ac current like i mentioned so with ac current you have an up slope and a down slope your up slope is going to be positive and your down slope is going to be negative so just like when you're running your steel you're going to be on dc negative with dc negative your current is going to be running from the negative side of the port which your torch should be plugged into down through your electrode and into your work piece or your substrate when you are on dc positive i don't know if you've ever had a transformer welder an old transformer welder where you had to stick it on dc positive to ball up your tungsten to be able to weld aluminum thankfully we don't have to do this with these machines on dc positive flows from the table from the positive side up into your electrode so that's why you get that hot balling effect and that's why we use ac current because aluminum we have two separate melting points we have our oxide layer and our substrate so if you went to try to just weld this with dc negative just like you would your mild steel you would penetrate through and melt your base layer but you wouldn't have enough heat to melt that oxide layer on the surface and you just have this kind of molten yucky stuff sitting on the top and vice versa if you just had it set on dc positive and the positive polarity that amperage would be coming off the surface of your workplace and that current would be trying to get up into your tungsten and balling up your tungsten and you would be getting zero penetration into your material and just making a mess so this is why it's important to have our alternating current they both serve a good purpose so we're going to start with our balance knob and it is set out in percentages the percentage is the percentage of the wavelength in time meaning if you have your ac balance set to 50 percent 50 percent of the time you're going to be on the upslope cleaning and fifty percent of the time you're gonna be on the down slope penetrating now if you have your knobs set to thirty percent thirty percent of the time you are gonna have your up slope cleaning and thirty percent of the time you are gonna be penetra and seven excuse me seventy percent of time that slope will be penetrating the importance to this if all possible you want to get the most penetration out of your weld and that's why i recommend running your balance somewhere in between thirty and forty percent but also because that is very important to clean your material get a good scotch brite and break off most of that oxide layer so that you can run less percentage on your positive side and more percentage on your negative side and get a better stronger penetrative weld now that being said maybe you're going to be welding some cast aluminum and that's where you might want to be more a 50 50 balance so you have some more time you can generate some more heat to burn out those impurities and then that other person of that time you're penetrating and making that weld stick together so that is what your ac balance knob is going to be doing your other knob that we added on was the hertz now the hertz is how many times this wave happens in one second now one hertz would be one positive and one negative wave happening in one second but i recommend you run upwards in the 120 to 140 hertz range and there's a reason for that so if you're running down on 50 hertz you are going to have 50 of these cycles per second and this is going to be a little bit slower so it's going to give you a wider arc somewhere in between 120 and 140 hertz is going to narrow that arc up and give you good control over that arc and help that puddle to flow along now this machine has the ability to go up to 200 hertz per second and this will serve you well on thinner material when you need to really focus that arc and get it down tight but in most cases i'm going to recommend you sticking between the 120 to 150 140 range that's going to be your best overall multi-purpose 90 of the time that's where i'm sitting at so hopefully this was helpful hopefully it was easy to understand let me know in the comments if it wasn't let me know if it was be much appreciated so thanks for watching guys make sure you hit that bell icon and subscribe we will be definitely making some more videos with our prime weld here and other fabrication products so subscribe like and go build something [Music] bye

Channel: AM Custom fab

Views: 31,632

Keywords: primeweld, tig 225 settings, tig settings, primeweld 225, primweld tig 225

Id: mEKXrXiDv1s

Length: 11min 40sec (700 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 25 2020