- My name is Chris McQuay
with Unobtanium Welding and today we're gonna
talk about pulse settings on your Everlast Power TIG 255EXT. (rock music) So why do we want pulse? I consider pulse an advanced setting, something you should move on to once you're an accomplished welder. But the whole idea is
to minimize heat input and maximize penetration. So in theory, with your
pulse settings correct, you could get a deeper penetrating weld that's narrower, inputs
less heat into the work than if you're welding it straight DC. Okay, so before we get
into the machine settings, let's talk about what pulse actually is. What is it doing and why do we care? So our straight DC current is basically a straight line. So we get, if we ask for
70 amps, we get 70 amps. But with pulse, we're allowed
to have these small spikes and then this off time where we don't have the maximum amperage for it to cool down. So we can have this blast of
amperage and some off time. Blast, off. And it can look like this where you have a lot of on time or it can look like that where you have just a quick blast and most of your time is actually spent on the background amps or the off time. So let's look at the actual pulse here. So we set our max amps, so that's the amps that you
actually set on the machine. That's the amplitude. Then you have your pulse time. So how much time are you going
to spend at the max amperage? And then you have your pulse amps or your background amperage. So when it's not on the max amperage, what is it on? And you generally want
that number pretty low. And it's based on a percentage. So we might have a 150
amps set on the machine, our pulse time on and this
here would be about 80% and our pulse amps or our background amps might be as low as 5%. But then you could see here, this tall and skinny one
would be more like 200 amps with a pulse time of maybe 25% and then our background
amps, the same five amps but of course because we're
only using 25% on the max amps, we're gonna have 75%
on that background amp. Okay, so let's go over to the machine and we'll go through how to set this up. So when we're starting to set up pulse, we have to remember that
we have to set the actual amperage we want first on the machine, that's our welding amps
which is our max amps. So when our pulse is on, what's the maximum amperage we want? We're gonna set that at a 100 then we'll go in, then
we'll do pulse time on. We'll set this one at 80. So 80% of the time, we're
gonna be at that 100 amps. Now if you push it again, we get the pulse amps which
is our background amps. So what percentage of the max amperage are we gonna get, and we're
gonna leave that at 10%. So 10% of a 100 is 10 amps. So when it's on, it will be a 100 amps. When it's off in its background
phase, it will be 10 amps. And next we'll set up that frequency and so that's how often per
second are we gonna do this and we'll leave that at one, one pulse per second. So when we come over to the board here is what that looks like. We set our amps at 100 amps. We set our pulse time on at 80 and we had our background amps at 10. And then this is our one pulses per second. So we're only getting one
of these cycles in a second. So now that we have all
of our settings input, let's go ahead and get under the hood. We'll strike an arc and I'll
show you what it looks like. Okay so we initiate our arc
the same way with the pedal and you'll already see that
we are getting that on time and then background amps. So one reason the pulse, we get this exaggerated dimed look even though we didn't add
any filler, we still get this look of filler because
we have our 100 amp pulse and then we have our 10 amp background. So that blast of amperage
and then where the puddle almost freezes again, that's what gives us this look. So the idea is to get less
average amperage heat input for the same weld. So now we're just gonna
change one variable. We're gonna leave our 100 amps and we're gonna leave our 80% on time and we're gonna leave our
background amps at 10% but we're gonna change our frequency. So from one pulses per second, we're gonna go to three pulses per second. So over the same time, we'll be doing this up and down wave three times and you'll see how that
will tighten up the arc. So on the machine, we have to select. We're gonna leave our pulse
time and our pulse amps but we're gonna turn up this frequency to three pulses per second and then we'll show you
10 pulses per second. Okay so now we have
three pulses per second. So we're gonna be running
that cycle three times as fast and you'll see how I really
tightens up the puddle. Okay, so you could our three
pulses per second bead. It's much narrower despite
relatively the same travel speed. The ripples are not nearly as obvious 'cause it's happening three times as often and we definitely put a
little bit less heat input. You can see that our gray area's smaller and even on the end of the
weld, it didn't go fully gray. So we'll swap to 10 pulses
per second, run it here and it will give us a good
range to see what happens. So the higher the frequency, the more it tighten up that puddle. So now we're running 10 pulses per second. You could see even visually the difference in how fast it's flashing but also now the puddle starts
to become pretty smooth. So we're running enough pulses per second that it's starting to feel
less like a pulse puddle and more like a DC puddle. So can see this 10 pulses per second bead has much tighter ripples in it. It's much narrower and the
sides are much straighter because as I mentioned,
it's much more like running a DC puddle. You don't have these
big blasts of amperage. You have so many of them per second that it becomes less perceivable. So this bead will have good penetration but it's a little bit
narrower than that one. You could see I've slowed
down because now it's starting to tighten the puddle enough that the puddle doesn't run forward the same way it does in the lower pulses. So pulse is very specific per application. It's important to know what it is but you have to know how it
works best for your application. Some applications work great with one, some will work better with 10 and some might require
the 500, which is the max that your Power Tig 255 will go to. Okay, so now that we've
covered the basic set up and the basic pulse settings, the next video we're gonna
get into some stainless. This is Chris McQuay
from Unobtanium Welding. Weld mean, weld green. (hammering)
