Best Pulse Settings For TIG Welding Steel Bike Frames | TIG Tuesdays

welding with a pulse is all about having the right recipe for percentage background amps percent on time and pulses per second and I want to share what I think works great for welding steel bike frame tubing pulse welding is really valuable when you get into thin wall stuff because it allows you to actually get the same depth of fusion and do the same amount of welding with a lower total heat into the workpiece that's what they say it's also really valuable for aesthetics you can sometimes make a more beautiful well more easily with the pulse it kind of helps you keep a rhythm and then with the formula that I use it gives you a big burst of current and then no background current basically and another big burst of current and it allows it you to more easily stack those dimes and make that nice beautiful ripple and your weld and hold some consistency as you go around so when you I learned to weld a lot from Jody that welding tips and tricks which is amazing the resource is so powerful but he gives a pretty generalized pulse setting recipe he says as a starting place you can use the rule of 33s 33% background amps 33% on time 33 pulses per second and that's a really general starter place for pulse welding that is really effective for a lot of people in a lot of applications and the recipe that I found on MTB are in the frame building forums and that I've seen some other people say a very similar kind of suggestion is instead of like you know a third of the background amperage when the pulse is off you do 5% background amperage when the pulse is off so if you were to graph that like a square wave that means that when when you have your peak amps it's at you know 100 amps or 80 or whatever it needs to be and then your background amps drops down to five that's just enough to keep your art going that's not really providing much heat at all to the weld it's not giving you any of that penetration it's not really doing much for you it's just keeping that arc alive so you basically with this recipe you're gonna have big bursts of current so you want 5% back Nantz you want 28% on time so that talks about the the width of your square waves right you want to have when the pulse is on it comprises twenty percent twenty eight percent of your total weld time so if you compare twenty eight percent to thirty three percent you know theirs are pretty similar numbers I'm not sure that you would see that much of a difference but twenty eight was the number that was thrown out to me and so that's the one that I remember and the one that I tell people when they ask me about my settings twenty-eight percent on time then when you're talking about pulses per second I do somewhere around one pulse per second as I outlined in another video about my welder it's hard for me to discern exactly how many pulses per second this is set to because of the nature of my analog knob in it not showing up on the digital readout the only way to really accurately figure out how many pulses per second you're working with is to use like something like a metronome and compare the pulse frequency you're hearing to another source and then do some math which is kind of a pain in the butt but basically I like to set it at a low frequency something that my coordination can keep up with I don't weld bike frames day in and day out in a production setting so I never developed an incredible amount of coordination and if it was a real fast pulse I think I would have a harder time keeping up and so I do something like a pulse per second 1.2 pulses per second you know something that's like the ticking of a clock or maybe a little bit faster and you can kind of keep up with that rate a little bit more easily I also like to use a lay wire technique with these pulse settings and if you were not using a light wire technique but you were dipping the rod in the puddle dabbing the rod in the puddle you might want totally different pulse settings I think this works really well for the lay wire technique which if you're not familiar the leg wire technique is where you move your torch hand in and your filler and rather than dipping in the puddle every time you want to leave you know a dime or you know your freeze pattern you see the little freezes rather than adding rod as independent motions you lay the rod down in the joint and you you move your torch across and then it the the pulse breaks up your freeze pattern and so that pulse gives you that sort of beautiful aesthetic more easily sometimes then if you were to dip into the the puddle with your rod no fear of this is that you can pretty easily make what looks like a nice weld and if you're not careful it might be undercut you might not be adding enough rod or you know all those other considerations of the well that makes it a little bit easier to make a pretty looking weld because the freeze pattern is so consistent and you need to be careful of that but by having that big burst of current with low background amps it allows you to make that nice pretty looking that weld right around there with a lower total heat input so for me when I was learning to weld with a pulse it was hard for me to coordinate and I couldn't get used to it and you know I was like already welding bike frames at that point without without the the pulse I would use straight current and I would just be you know modulating with my foot not pulsing with my foot and I would dip the rod in and it was really weird to me to try and get used to pulse settings and what I did was I spent a couple days straight just like an hour a day or half an hour a day and I would just try and make these pulse settings work because I had heard heard about them and a lot of people seem to think that they were good settings and and I made myself get more used to it and it became more natural I got familiar with it and now it feels really comfortable so I would say if you're already used to welding bike tubing and you want to integrate this kind of pulse or these new kind of pulse parameters just you know sit there and practice it for a while on scrap tubing that's a really good way to get up to speed with it and familiar with it so that in the in the heat of the moment in the heat of the moment right as you're welding and you're welding in some tight spot or something you're not gonna blow a hole in something you're not going to get really nervous because you're you're familiar with it and you know how to handle it so right now I have my peak amps set at 110 ants I have my background current at five percent my percent on time at 28% and my pulse per second at whatever you see here I think it's a little bit stur than one pulse per second you can see the pulse makes it easier to make a distinct and consistent freeze pattern that won't keep you from undercutting the weld it doesn't do everything for you but you know I'm pretty rusty these days I haven't been welding much and already these are looking you know pretty consistent pretty smooth and the Pulsar kind of helps with that while reducing some of the total heat input don't feel like you need to use a pulsar I think there's a lot of skilled bike frame builders who make beautiful frames who don't use the Pulsar for steel and so it's not really a requirement I'm not sure that it's necessarily better that it makes the bikes better but I think you can put lower total heat into the the well that's possible maybe to have a smaller heat affected zone I'm not really an expert on that I like using it because I'm used to it now and because it makes it a little bit easier to use that lay wire technique and get the the consistent freeze patterns try it see if you like it and thanks for watching the video please subscribe [Music]

Channel: Cobra Framebuilding

Views: 5,816

Rating: 4.8734179 out of 5

Keywords: tig welding, pulse tig welding, tig welding bike frames, tig welding steel bike frames, steel bike frame welding, bike frame welding, bicycle welding, tig welding bicycles, tig welding tips, pulse settings, bicycle frame building, bike welding, pulse tig, pulsed tig welding, welding bike frames, TIG welding bicycles, best TIG settings, TIG settings, framebuilding, frame building, bicycle frame welding, cobra frames, TIG tuesdays, lay wire technique, TIG technique, welding

Id: 30Y1Q_SxZdU

Length: 7min 43sec (463 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 08 2019