Does beveling increase weld strength?? Deep dive

what is up most distinguished patrons of this channel so today we are going to be dealing with beveling plates and whether or not it makes a difference in the strength of what you're welding and everything to do with that so let's get into it so without a doubt the most controversial topic that has come up on my channel consistently is beveling and I can't count how many comments that I've gotten since I started this channel on break tests and weld tests I've done where people always say well that's stupid nobody welds 38 placeat without beveling or always bevel and it's just a controversy that won't die and that's the point of testing it in this video now right away I got to tell you guys that regardless of what is found in this video or what other YouTuber says about beveling or welding in general you have got to get out and test your own welds you cannot rely on what somebody else gets is a magical sauce to where you get the same results you have to test and it doesn't matter if you're doing break test cutting etch do something if you're welding a higher strength or or something that requires high strength you can't just put a weld down say yep it'll hold it's good when you have no concept of whether or not you're getting any fusion with your welds like your weld might look good on the the surface but underneath it could be completely trash with no fusion and I found that out on multiple different videos on this channel that I've done where it looks good but it's not that's a common theme with welding and that stresses the importance you have got to test stuff that you're welding with your machine and your capability to understand if you are getting the results that you should be to weld at higher strength okay now with that said we're going to be doing a ton of different tests dealing with bevels so we're going to do different angles we're going to do gaps we're going to do bevel an a gap we're going to do lower settings like what you could do with 140 amp MIG welder we're going to look at that as well so before we get into the actual welding part we need to do some book learning because there's a lot to this and if I don't cover this there's going to be a lot of confusion so let's get into that there are a couple key terms that we need to discuss right away and it has to do with bevels and angles so when I say bevel I'm talking about basically grinding or Machining off the edge of a plate to where you have an actual bevel so this would be more or less a steep bevel same with number three a less steep bevel would be like number four and then a bevel with what's called a landing would be like number two the landing is basically the material that's left that's flat of the the original plate Edge now in most welding say like pipe welding or a open Root butt joint you're not going to have much of a landing on that so you're going to be down to knife edge or maybe like a 11/16th landing or about the thickness of a dime and by having a knife edge you have to run a tighter Gap or you can blow that edge off by having a thicker Landing like a 11/16th you can run a little bit more of an open gap between say two butt joints or a butt joint and it allows you to not blow the edge out so that comes down to a lot of personal preference and it depends on what position you're welding in and what you're welding on but for the sake of what we're going to be doing today we're going to be testing fairly steep bevels with a knife edge we're going to test bevels with a landing we're going to test shallow bevels we're going to look at all of that now there's a couple other key things that we need to talk about regarding this and it has to do with weld penetration one of the things people are confused about is they think that if you just magically bevel something that somehow you can melt more of it and this video is going to prove that that simply isn't the case depending on what you're welding now if you're welding a open Root pipe or butt joint where it looks like this and you have two beveled angles and its knife edge or or near knife edge yes you can weld right through that with almost a sparkler it takes very little heat to melt that Infuse that the problem is is that us at home and most of what you would probably weld unless you're welding on pipe all day is not open Root butt joints commonly we weld fillet welds or lap welds which are more or less like this and one of the things and I've tried to be pretty specific when I respond to people regarding this when they say beveled as a solution is that beveling increases penetration on joints like this tremendously when you have a fillet weld or a lap weld but we'll talk about fillet welds and you Bevel one member of the two part member and then weld on it you might see increased penetration fusion into this top plate but what about this right here this is not beveled it's not thinned down and in a case of like three 38 plate which would be something that a lot of people say you should bevel you're not going to get increased fusion into the thicker plate if anything like I said you're going to see a weld nugget that would penetrate and fuse more into here because it's thinner and then lessen to here and that's what I'm predicting is going to happen in this video but it's something that a lot of guys just flat out don't think of because how are you going to get more fusion into thick plate by only B ing one of the two I don't know and we're going to find out if that's the truth the other thing is in theory you could grind this whole thing down and then slam this in here and weld it and that actually might work but who does that nobody I know I don't and I don't know anyone that does and that's why like this to me I think the beveling question it really depends on what you're welding on the other thing to consider too with beveling is when you w w a just a standard let's draw it right here and you just weld a normal fillet weld with a straight 90 Corner not beveled when you weld on this and put a weld here it's going to pull this this way okay but not that bad when you start doing way bevels like way far in here the amount that this is going to warp in my opinion and in my experience is going to be more than just doing this so you got to watch that if tolerances or how something is angled when you're done welding it you can Implement quite a lot of bending and twisting of something by doing this so that's another thing you got to worry about all right let's move on so the key things that we're going to test in this video are one welding thick plate with 140 amp MIG welder is it possible to do that with a bevel because people have suggested it that all you need to do is bevel and it solves the issue of the lack of fusion two it always boosts strength by beveling three increases penetration four wide bevel is better than a narrow bevel and five Gap is better than a bevel and we'll test some other things that we'll go through and mention but these are the key things we're going to hopefully answer now with that said I got to be upfront and honest with you guys two things one this is going to be small control set and this is not absolute guaranteed results if you follow what's in this video you'll get the same results because it is a small sample size now when you see why certain things happen I think you're going to understand the differences between all these bevel angles and all of this to where you can kind of make accurate predictions to what would happen on your own but again you have to test your own welds to understand what's going on and two again I'll be upfront and honest I did this test already fully and the video footage to it got taken uh when my camera got stolen well I got a new camera now and I'm redoing this whole testing so the good news is is that I do have a bigger sample pool the bad news is is that well I don't have any video evidence of the previous tests but I do have an opinion on what happened and I predict that very much the same is going to happen with these that happened in that and I if that is what happens I will tell you if it's opposite of what happened in the previous video I will tell you that as well so it's the sample size is bigger than what you're seeing now now a third thing as well that I'll mention this is a very difficult test to do 100% under controlled circumstances ideally I would have a track torch or something for the Mig gun and I would set it for the speed and I would take myself complete out of the picture on this because uh Small Change in travel speed can change the amount of weld metal deposited and can completely change the results and I'm only going to be doing single passes on all this metal whereas under normal circumstances you would do multiple passes so we're only looking at essentially the root pass and again very difficult to be consistent on this because when you weld a bevel you have to deposit more metal and change your travel speed slightly to get it to work because the way the weld Pool Works is completely different than when you're welding to a 90° corner so I'm going to do my best at this to do a good job but there will be variables again do this on your own test your results and then you can build confidence that way knowing that you have what you should all right enough said I'm going to get to beving some of these and then we're going to weld them all up [Music] I have four of these test welds set up to break and the first one is going to be our control this guy was done with no bevel nothing just straight in and a drag angle all these were done with a drag angle which generally does increase penetration so let's see what this guy breaks at 97.7 pretty typical and we don't have much root Fusion due to all of these being done with the short Arc process with multiple passes it would be higher but again we're comparing single passes and the main purpose of this isn't so much to compare the results here it's to look at the penetration inside of the weld is really what we're here for but I'll throw this in so we all have an idea now this guy is a wide bevel 100 12 it cleared itself sorry about that slightly higher which is promising this guy is a knife edge bevel so this would be a wider bevel but done to knife edge without a landing this one had a landing on it 139 again it cleared itself and now this is a narrow bevel let's break that 199 so pretty good result there all right I'm going to finish breaking all these off camera and then we're going to set up and look at the other ones we're going to break those so now we're going to break test the final four of these and of course I was an idiot and welded this one on backwards so I'll have to reverse this in Vice to do that one not a big deal hey happens right so this first one is a medium bevel so halfway between a very wide and a very narrow bevel let's break this 131.0 of course it already reset itself because it's a harber Freight Tool now this next one was welded with a Gap rather than a bevel so to put a number on it I would say an e in within an eighth maybe slightly like a 64th under so an e/ inch maybe a little bit less 144.350 this one set up and I have clamps on the back to keep it from bending forward it should work this is the control for 14 amp mig weld without a bevel and 71.9 pretty abysmal performance all right I'm going to rotate it again and then we're going to bend the beveled plate so this is the beveled plate with 140 amp weld on it let's see if it breaks higher 83.4 little bit higher all right let's go and break all these up and look at the results on the Welding Table so we got all of these that were done with settings that are appropriate for around 200 210 amps we're going to look at the lower amperage ones completely separate so let's start out with the control and the wide bevel this is a control weld you can see it has some fusion at the start it as it carried heat got a little bit better near the end in the middle of it we can kind of see bits and pieces of that original plate Edge not really the best penetration by any means there and this is typical for short circuit Mig there's really no way around this you got to switch processes to like spray arc now the bottom plate is quite interesting cuz when you look here very little bit into this plate at all so not only did it tear off here but the width of the fusion there're very limited now this weld goes from about right here to right here so clearly a lot of it didn't even fuse on there now this weld is actually the smallest out of all of them for the most part so that's part of the reason why it broke at probably a little bit less than it should have but let's face it guys you're just not going to get much Fusion when you run straight in a corner like this with the short circuit process spray arc is by far better now let's look at the wide bevel so the wide bevel as I expected did not break down that uh inner landing at all and you're simply not going to with the shortcircuit process as that wire hits and starts depositing metal you have to weld through that weld pool in in order to break this down well so much of your heat is pulled off into this top plate and into the bottom plate that there isn't anything left when for that wire to basically melt in here the only way you're going to break that down would be to leave a fairly big gap in there with that wide bevel and then weld it that would work but if you just have it tight even that thin of a knife edge and it's not even knife edge a little bit of Landing is not going to break down so the root Fusion really isn't going to be better with it however our depth of weld is going to be better because it's further into the plate now this is actually a little bit bigger of a weld than this guy which did also help it a little bit in the strength department and that's kind of one of those things where it's very hard to be completely consistent and fair however this did perform better uh than it did previously for the control uh one thing you look at these two see how much more bit into the bottom plate and part of that could be the angle that the wire was coming and put more heat here but that's a better result when you start seeing stuff like this you got issues this nice and wide you know it bit in some but it completely broke off the bottom plate likely because it had more fusion into the top plate which would be expected because the bevel is going to melt this easier than this because of the heat input all right let's look look at the medium bevel bevel and the narrow bevel so the medium bevel again complete lack of fusion near the landing and you're simply not going to get it like I said earlier the weld on this is actually quite a bit bigger than the control weld for the metal deposited and you can see I almost made it out flush I really wasn't intending on doing that so that did help the performance of this a little bit but again not stellar here and that isn't a good sign now it broke off this plate quite a bit of the material it's not very deep the fusion there isn't really going to be that good anyways because of the 38 plate remember this is UN beveled results here I would say better than the control but not really again most of the strength of this came from the fact that uh we put a bigger weld down now the narrow bevel if you look look right here there's completely untouched half of that bevel cuz simply it's not going to melt further in than what the wire can get through the molten puddle at so completely untouched it did bite really good into the plate here as well as you can see it broke off of this plate more so than here it likely bit very well into here and this posted very good numbers as well so in the sake of testing purposes this perform Med better than I would have thought however once again putting a ful length bevel on it like this is not going to be utilized without running a Gap a wide gap between the plates plus the bevel so interesting there let's move over to the knife edge in a gap so this knife edge bevel did not break down that at all and that's because we were not running a gap at all that's the only way you're going to achieve that and that's one thing we can be certain of on here is that just running that bevel is not a guarantee full Fusion weld you're going to wind up with stuff like this now again it broke more off of the bottom plate than the top plate and it's not very far penetrated but it is better than the control by a little bit and remember guys gun angle and everything can change the effect that this has if you were to favor the top plate far more like you come in with an angle like this rather than an angle like this you could end up fusing almost everything to here and have very very little strength into this bottom plate so be mindful of your angle of your gun or if you're stick welding the angle of your Rod let's look at the Gap now the Gap performed really well better than some of the other ones and it clearly stuck to the bottom plate very well the top plate here it tore quite a bit out of it which I would say is a good result overall and we did not achieve more than halfway Fusion in that because remember this just had a gap in no bevel well it penetrated somewhere around about an eighth and Fus that and that was it when you look here you can see there's clean metal down in here where it wasn't even obviously touching anything because of that Gap and then it broke off here so this again fairly high strength and the reason for that high strength really just like this guy the medium bevel the more that you can get a weld to to fuse to both the top and a bottom plate the better your strength numbers are going to be anytime you have pour fusion into one of the two plates you're going to have issues where it's going to want to pull off of that weaker penetrated plate all right that's enough of this let's look at the 140 amp so I brought out the control on the higher amperage to the control at 140 amps to compare and contrast right away so you can see on this 140 amp there is no breakdown of that route whatsoever which is going to cost us significantly in strength and when you look at the bottom plate the fusion is even worse so right here it gets pretty narrow on this that's not good but here it's even more narrow with more of the Polish plate Edge showing it's not a huge difference but it's there so this broke at lower values despite having similar size and weld simply because of the lack of root Fusion I mean there's none whatsoever and there's a little bit here a little bit will go a long way on this now when you compare to the beveled plate which obviously did increase slightly in strength this guy even worse breakdown of the edge you got what essentially internal cold roll here I mean there's a cavern so dark under there you could hide bats or old bullion in there and interestingly enough we do have a wider area of fusion there but that could be just due to travel speed there's more metal here deposited than on here so I likely went a little bit slower again all variables that are difficult to control my takeaway at least from this is that beveling it slightly increases performance but compare the results of each each of these for breaking to any of them at higher values so no beveling is not an excuse to use 140 amp MIG welder to try and weld thick 3/8 plate you get far better results using hotter settings all right let's go look at a cut NCH so we have the cutting edch of a medium bevel here and as expected absolutely no root Fusion way back in here and you're not going to get it as I said we have better fusion into the top plate if you see where this line is we have penetration past that line in the top plate which is to be expected because it's beveled and it's thinner less Mass to pull the heat out better Fusion the bottom plate which is UN beveled has a complete straight line which is not really desirable and when you look at this it's basically just sitting on the plate now these broke at decently High numbers but you don't want to see this generally speaking in a weld because if you look right here there's a complete lack of fusion there it looks like a crack it basically is just sitting on that plate that gives a great place for a weld to start tearing at when you have that very undesirable So based on what I'm seeing here although it breaks at a fairly high strength level this beveling is no solution to gain Fusion Beyond a certain point so it's not a cural very interesting stuff so let's go through this list and determine if they're fact or myth based on our test results one you can weld thick plate with 140 amp MIG welder simply by beveling it uh I'm going to say busted no you should not be welding a 3/8 plate with 140 amp MIG welder did it increase the strength yes it did by a little bit but is it worthwhile using that and does it make it magically safe no and the issue you would have with 140 amp MIG welder welding that thick of plate is that maybe one will hold maybe one won't but the performance extremely subpar don't do it and it doesn't matter bevel or not and it doesn't matter if you preheat the plate or not I did a video on that a while ago and preheating is very little help to be honest overall so no you have no business welding that thick a plate multipass with a crap rout with 14 mwell are so busted two always boost strengths uh this is plausible and I say plausible because you guys got to remember the angle that you have your gun and where that wire hits and where that weld pool is Will drastically change the performance and that's why I can't stress enough I know I'm beating a dead horse here you have to test what you're doing I do not weld like you you do not weld like me your machine is not mine uh I have adjustable indu on my welder maybe you don't all these things will change the result of the test and you need to test your set up in your skills to determine so always boost strength just beveling something you might see higher strength numbers because well for one in this test the welds were thicker that was a contributing factor but I it's too too many variables to determine this as facts so it's possible but test so we we'll put n I'll still cross it out increases penetration no that's a myth absolutely a myth I'll cross it out what it does is it increases the amount of weld material that you have it does not increase Fusion as you saw the standard short Arc weld on a normal fillet weld that's un beveled barely bit in well guess what it doesn't magically bite in because it's a knife edge bevel now had we run a gap it would have likely broke down that edge a little bit but it does not increase penetration you just have more well deeper into the metal so that's a myth now a wide bevel is better now this is kind of a tricky one because in the testing I did before this video I had a little bit more variables in my test results and some of that was simply I was less consistent so I tried to make a lot of effort to make similar size welds to try and make a more apples apples comparison but I can tell you the wide bevel is better generally speaking the thinner your top plate is on a fillet weld the more Fusion you're going to get into that but it does not change how much Fusion you have into the bottom plate so the performance that you have will be quite variable but generally speaking I would say a slightly wider bevel will prove on a multipass to be a little bit better than a narrow bevel again very variables you don't want variables when you want predictable results it's like do you want two or three variables to worry about or 30 well guess what the fewer the better so wider bevels better uh plausible plausible uh it really dependo it didn't really show up too well in this test but again uh you will gain more fusion into the top plate that's beveled so we'll just cross it out Gap is better than a bevel um this again it all depends we saw saw good results running a gap part of it was that I put more metal down than say without a gap and just a straight 90° fillet but again I would say that this is not really it's give or take I would say more or less a myth it is a increase in depth of fusion by a little bit but is it better than a bevel hard to say I would say that if you're going to do anything and you don't want to Bevel something leaving a little Gap will likely help a little bit again depends on what you're building though that this is again really dependent on the situation if you want to create the strongest fillet welds beveling is part of the picture but it's not the end all be all this weld right here is the typical result we saw today where we have a bigger throat depth if I were to fully weld those out to the face uh because while we're putting metal and we're fusing it back in here where you would never achieve Fusion on a normal fillet weld so that can be a benefit but what we saw today is this little area back here that I'm coloring in has no Fusion so is this as strong as it could be absolutely not now a typical fillet weld if you only weld one side you end up having to oversiz that weld to compensate for the fact that you do not have any weld material on the back side of it so if you find yourself in a situation like this where you can't weld the backside a oversized fillet weld may be acceptable to get your strength that you're losing by not welding the back now that comes with a lot of drawbacks which one of which is this is going to flex and bend and shrink and move on you so that sucks so this is you know situational dependent now it's also possible on a filet weld if you were to run a knife edge or slight Landing and in a gap between it and you were to basically weld fully through where you reinforce the back and then weld it all the way out to the face you can have a full strength fillet weld here with welding it from one side only so if the back is inaccessible this would also work this takes the most skill okay now another solution would be what's depicted here which is simply to put a weld on both sides of the plate and this is actually drawn kind of a bit ridic ridiculous you wouldn't need a three pass weld on both sides depending on how thick a material it is but this if you have access to both sides simply welding both sides will give you the highest strength with the least amount of around and worrying about having proper Fusion so the truth is is that beveling is part of making really strong welds and Joints but it's not the solution in all cases and unless you're actually achieving Fusion you're not getting the most out of it so again should you be in the habit of doing it it can help out but it's not the end all be all and it's always important to test to see where things are at there's a one more thing I want to mention too this I did all this with short circuit Mig if you think that stick welding would have better results the truth is is that it's not really any better especially with 7018 and I'll put a picture up right now of a 7018 they all basically all welding process have the same issue at lower amperage and that is achieving any kind of penetration INF Fusion is rather difficult and thick steel so stick is not the end all be in this not to mention when you start dealing with really odd bevel sizes what'll happen is and I'll depict it right here so this is the bevel your stick electrode may be this wide okay this this is obviously not drawn the scale and what happens is is that you effectively get a really long AR Gap in here and you can create undercut and slag inclusions and the rod runs like crap and you get uh Ark wanding so stick welding bevels it's super critical that your bevel is wide enough that your Rod fits in there to where you don't have a massively Big Arc Gap so beveling there's a lot more leeway with wire processes because of how thin that wire is than there is with stick stick the performance of this video would have been all over the map depending on what the bevel angle is so the variables matter even more for stick so with that said I think I covered this good enough you can learn a lot by doing your own tests and doing all of this and this will hopefully give you a better idea of what's going on and maybe what you should do on future projects so with that said thanks for sticking around guys until next time

Channel: Making mistakes with Greg

Views: 20,183

Keywords: How to weld, Welding, weld strength, mig welding

Id: qrFH0995IgQ

Length: 34min 8sec (2048 seconds)

Published: Sun May 26 2024