Co2 Vs C25 mig gas: Lets test the differences

what is up most distinguished patrons of this Channel today I have a treat for you no it's not laughing gas so don't ask but what I got here is a CO2 cylinder now I do a lot of off-roading and I don't like carrying an air compressor to fix flat tires so I carry this CO2 tank with a regulator that I hook up uh air Chuck to fill tires and you can even run air tools on this but that's not what what we're going to be doing today we're going to be using this 100% CO2 in place of c25 gas which is 25% CO2 uh for mig welding and see what effect that it has on our welds so with that said let's get into it so a couple things before we get to doing some actual welds and comparing them when you run c25 gas your regulator is going to look something like this guy right here so basically your bottle whatever your tank is uses this and then your regulator has a male fitting that screws into there well if you buy a smaller CO2 tank you're going to find out in a hurry that it's not going to work for your needs the fitting is more or less like this where it's flat uses a ceiling washer and this is threads on the bottle so you may need to get one of these to use a 100% Co 2 bottle for your welding needs uh I bought this on Amazon your local welding store probably has one of these so I'll put up right now what it's called so you can find it now with that said the question comes up why would you want to use 100% CO2 shielding gas and the answer is simple well at least on face value 100% CO2 which can be done with the shortcircuit Mig process can be used for it uh should in Theory have higher heat input and possibly better penetration now if you've watched any of my videos uh dealing with short circuit Mig you would know by now that it has a pretty significant lack of penetration issue when you start talking 38 and above steel and it really doesn't matter what your settings are you simply can't burn in that route very well on a fillet weld would be a great example and the thought at least a lot of viewers have suggested over the past I don't know eight months that I said I would get to this was that 100% CO2 might see an increase in fusion and I agree it very well might and we won't know that unless we actually test it so that's what we're going to do today now as far as why it has higher heat input uh it's kind of a simple thing and this is very important so listen up 100% CO2 requires higher voltage from your MIG welder in order to run properly so whatever your c25 settings are you're probably going to need a volt and a half to two volts higher than that to get 100% CO2 to run properly that extra voltage combined with the amperage that the machine is putting out in order to keep that wire shorting out and feeding in long story short gives you higher wattage and higher wattage means more heat so effectively you're able to run higher voltage without an aut of control really wide Arc cone that would make your weld very flat and wet it out uh at typically no increase in penetration and if you watched a couple videos I did on spray arc you would know how much a slight change in gas mixture combined with a lot higher voltage uh how much that can do for root fusion and penetration it's night and day difference so will we see that with this probably not but I would anticipate a little bit better fusion and we're going to try quarter inch plate to do a fair comparison on this also there are drawbacks to 100% CO2 besides the fact you may have to get a different regulator setup or at least an adapter depending on the size of your bottle and what regulator you have 100% CO2 will have more spatter than c25 it also from what I've heard don't quote me on it is harder to run with sheet metal because it tends to run too hot well if you have to run a volt and a half more that's a pretty good indication that yeah you're probably going to be a little bit too hot on sheet metal but again I don't know on that we're not going to be testing sheet metal now again on a plus side uh 100% CO2 from what I've heard is cheaper now I don't look at what I pay for shielding gases I'll have to do a video on that in the future but but my guess is yes it is indeed cheaper than uh an argon blend so that is also a benefit but for the sake of what we're doing today we're going to do a quarter inch test plate where I'm going to do a bunch of welds with c25 a bunch of welds with c100 we're going to cut and etch that and then I'm going to do a couple fillet welds with 100% CO2 and just see what the hell happens in a cut and edch uh and we'll go from there so let's get the welding [Music] so I did a bunch of test welds and let me describe a little bit of what I saw off so first off 100% CO2 I see no more spatter whatsoever over c25 it's not that that is a myth but what can happen is a lot of people with the home hobby mig welders that can't produce 2425 volts which is what uh C 100 runs at what'll happen is if you don't have enough voltage to run with it you're going to end up having a big issue with spatter not to mention if you pump the voltage up too high you can enter into what's called globular transfer and where Big Balls of metal basically fall off the wire and you're going to get a metric ton of spatter with that so it's just a settings issue I think but both of these fillet welds are run at the same wire feed 430 in per minute this was done just at a higher voltage with 100% CO2 this was done at I don't know 21 A2 or so with c25 and equal spatter I mean there's even less spatter on this now there are differences to the weld when you look at these two and let me zoom in the c100 versus c25 here the pure CO2 produced a rougher bead appearance and that kind of coincides with what I saw in the weld poool where the weld poool just seemed to have like Peaks and valleys to it it wasn't just like a smooth molten pool and this bead with the c25 is super smooth and and more or less like a 7018 pass so the CO2 definitely has an effect on the weld pool luckily it doesn't really increase spatter much because you can see they're basically identical heat input wise the voltage was obviously higher with the 100% CO2 but I can tell you from past experience just cranking up the voltage with c25 doesn't give you more penetration after a certain point so when you're running 21 and A2 22 volt you know at 430 420 inch a in a wire speed you know going up another Volt or two isn't going to make a huge difference which is why I'm pretty curious as to what's going on in the internals of this if we're going to see more penetration because they were both run at the same wire speed let's look at uh some of these passes up close so when you look at these you can clearly tell which ones are the c25 up to here and then these are the 100% CO2 you can tell simply by how the weld terminates it has like kind of a rough appearance to it versus this is very very smooth so a little bit difference in wellbe appearance no spatter difference whatsoever so that's really good when we look at this here which the right one was done with c25 the left one was done with c100 uh the differences between those less significant I would say but it still is a bit rougher on the c100 well let's cut all this up and see what the hell we got well that was kind of a pain in the ass to cut all these but I did it just for you guys so why don't we start out by looking at the cut and etch on this strip so we do have some differences here when you look at the c25 very typical mig weld beads where you have decent pen ation in the center and then out to the sides there's virtually nothing the lower you go in settings the more or less it just sits on there like a beat of with only penetration in the center now the c100 is quite interesting because it's more or less like a 7018 stick weld where you have a wider penetration so the differences there were subtle there were some and it's kind of leaning towards the 100% Co to having more penetration or at least a wider penetration which that is a good thing why don't we look at this which I ran settings somewhere around 420 in per minute and 21 A2 or 22 with a c25 and I ran 25 volts with the c100 and this is a little bit different I won't ruin it let's look at it so there's a bigger difference on this I ran higher settings for this plate than what you would typically run and this is 3/16 thick so a little bit thinner than the quarter we just saw and you can see that that c100 weld almost burned all the way through the plate had I ran maybe a pinch More Voltage and a little bit more wire I think I could have achieved 100% Fusion through that which is pretty impressive the c25 gas that's about all you can expect at a short circuit Mig which isn't really that bad someday I'm going to have to do a comparison between stick and Mig in a video and you're going to see that Mig really isn't that bad of a process and if anything I don't give it as much credit as it probably should have all right let's move on now based on what you saw here I think we can all make a pretty good guesstimate as to what we're going to find in these two so why don't we just look at them this is as typical of a short circuit mig weld on 3/8 plate is you're going to get as you can see there's some sort of penetration there but it really didn't fuse the root where the theoretical 90° intersection is and had I used a little bit different of a gun angle maybe it would have pushed that penetration a little bit more into the upright plate but I've done so many cut and etches like this that the end result is always basically a fail to use a root it's just the nature of it and it's primarily why I always tell you guys you probably shouldn't use short circuit Mig to be welding 38 plate so the short circuit Mig pretty typical nothing really to speak of and very common lack of fusion overall it's not really great it's not the worst I've ever seen but let's look at the 100% CO2 so now this is a completely different result you can see it punched way in there much like spray arc but unlike spray it doesn't have basically a narrow penetration at the root and then the side barely fused in this has a real wide stick light kind of like 6010 mixed with 7018 rods penetration profile so that's exceptionally good now when you look at the bead I think I hit a 45° angle uh for my big gun but the bead kind of sunk so I definitely would want to aim more for the upright plate to try and keep the bead more or less even it's a little bit slumped down but you know who knows maybe that's just a side effect of the CO2 and the increase in heat input where that's going to be a battle to keep it flatter well that uh was more of a significant difference than I would have ever expected in this test and it's funny because just looking at these beads to an untrained eye honestly they're not really that much different visually looking at them from the surface I mean sure you can kind of tell that the 100% CO2 is a bit rougher of a bead but if you just gave me these and told me which one of these are going to have the most penetration you're splitting hairs just visually but yet the internals are night and day difference especially on the 3/8 plate so where does does that leave us well I can say even though this is a small scale test that everything's kind of pointing to a pretty strong evidence that 100% CO2 will give you quite a big difference in penetration over c25 now it's not a free lunch unfortunately gentlemen the biggest limitation is your wire welder has to be able to run 25 volts in order to hit this kind of numbers of CO2 a lot of your home hobby machines can't hit over say 22 maybe 23 and you're probably going to have a lot more spatter and not really a whole lot better penetration than c25 to be honest with you now in case you're wondering had I just added a couple more volts to the c25 all that really would have happened is the weld would have flattened out a little bit and there really wouldn't have been that much more penetration I've done tests like that in the past maybe not on camera but but I can tell you that the voltage is less of a penetration driver as the shielding gas and extra voltage prime example would be spray arc a simple change in shielding gas plus voltage equals mass of fusion and penetration it's just like 100% CO2 so hopefully if you want to experiment with this your MIG welder can run 25 volts if not you're kind of out of luck on this and I got to say that's a reoccurring theme in all of these wire videos I've done when it comes to welding quarter inch and thicker steel everything always points to the same conclusion and that is that you need a stout wire welder to be able to be welding this stuff so your 200 amp class is the bare minimum provided it can hit 25 volts and realistically you should be up in the 220 to 250 amp class machine to be welding stuff like this wire processes and it's just I don't know I can't beat around a bush guys that is what you need to safely well steel as thick to get the performance now based on what I saw would I make a switch to 100% CO2 um honestly when it comes to welding thick plate I rather use C10 and and do spray arc okay so I don't see myself switching to 100% CO2 for the sake that my machine can spray and spray for me is faster bigger welds and can weld even thicker material so not much of application for me but for you there may be especially cost-wise uh I guess it is cheaper I also like how smooth the beads look with c25 and I primarily wire weld thinner stuff so eth and under that I need a fairly high volume which I really don't do that much anymore anyways so I again I don't think I'm going to be switching but man I got to tell you I really like the way that the fusion looks in there it just it solves the issue that c25 has always had for me which is it's inconsistent as hell and when you go up above even quarter inch plate it just isn't reliable on getting root Fusion who cares about penetration just fuse a root and it's just inconsistent where is stuff like your stick welder or your TIG is just far more reliable on thicker plate in my experience anyways with that said hopefully you learned something hopefully you enjoyed what you saw and you and maybe you're going to make a switch let me know in the comments if you are and what your thoughts are um I definitely didn't plan on this being that much of a difference but that's the great part of testing like this is you never know what you might find all right until next time guys

Channel: Making mistakes with Greg

Views: 6,223

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Id: SoXiZagFkXU

Length: 18min 3sec (1083 seconds)

Published: Fri May 31 2024