GMAW Basics, How to improve your MIG welds with 5 simple steps. Fabrication 101

ready [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] not bad alright this is mig welding or gmaw is a lot of people should call it this is probably one of the most commonly used welding processes for hobbyists because it's a very simple process to pick up the machines can be relatively cheap especially getting nowadays but because it is unlike a lot of other processes where you have two parameters that have to work together I believe it makes it one of the hardest processes to learn how to do really well and so here are my 5 tips to improve your MIG welding tip number one if you're struggling with your wire feeder your MIG welds one of the first things I always go to look at is the parts of the system and the little parts we're talking about your liner your contact tips and your nozzle so let's start with the liner the liner is a part that goes inside of your gun cable that your wire runs inside of and it is sized to fit your wire pretty close there is a little bit of a range like what I have is an O 3 o 2 O 3 v liner in this machine you want to take care of the liner you don't you want to try not to bend or kink your lead real bad make sure that you keep your wire clean here's a quick little thing that I do a lot of times with my machines to help kind of keep dust and debris off of my wire is I just take a little ear plug foam ear plug and I run it on the wire run the wire through that and it helps to kind of wipe any dirt or dust off of the the wire before it goes into the guide tubes and the drive rolls so a good way to check your to see what the condition of your liner is if maybe you might need to start thinking about getting a new one as - first you want to go in and release your driver old tension depending on what kind of machine you might have it might be a little bit differently and then next what you want to do is stretch your lead out nice and long and straight as best you can if I pull on the wire and there's still a little bit of a curve to it I should be able to pull relatively easily and that's not too bad but I know if I straighten my line my lead out a little bit more it actually gets considerably easier and I think that's because I have a pretty good Bend up by the machine just from the way the wire sits it is a good idea to pull the nozzle in the contact tip off before you do that just to make things a little bit easier and as always before you do any work on your wire feeds or any welding machines you want to disconnect the power from the machine when you're checking your liner it's always a good idea to remove your contact tip from the gas diffuser and since we're talking about contact tips this is your contact up or a contact tip style there's lots of different styles of these depending on the manufacturer the Machine you have they are sized again also like the liner to fit the wire size in your machine I have in the past troubleshooted machines for people where it was really just a simple thing as they were using the wrong contact tip either the wrong threads on the end or they had the wrong size for the wire they were using this is your main electrical contact point for your wire you're welding current does not get conducted to the wire until it goes through this contact tip and like any other electrical connection if the wire is loose inside of there or if the contact tip is loose in your gas diffuser it's gonna cause you some difficulties and some headaches contact tips do wear out and you can see how this wire is coming out of here with a curve to it they call that the cast of the wire and that does cause the end of the contact to wear out to oval especially on styles like this where they're threaded instead of held in by the nozzle which there's different types that do different things but the contact tips do wear out if you're one of those people who can weld and weld and weld without ruining a contact tip they do wear out they do need be replaced everyone saw and it's due to that cast in the wire wears an oval in the whole opening so you want to make sure your contact tips are in there and that they are in there and they're good and snug a good tool to have if you're gonna do a lot of MIG welding or wire feed work is a pair of well purrs or excuse me welt mig pliers the well per is a brand name but these have a little spot right in there just for grabbing on the contact tips and giving them a little twist one of the last little parts we're gonna talk about here is your nozzle and there's a couple different styles of nozzles and this is important to know which type your machine uses and there's some differences in between those this particular miller machine that i have they're just a push on type nozzle kind of a standard nozzle it is important to make sure that these are kept clean these are not normally a consumable item but they do wear out over time the insulation between where this screws onto the the end the gas diffuser end and your nozzle does break down over time and occasionally these will fall apart if you find that there's nothing in between your contact tip and your nozzle and your contact tip is conducting electricity so if your contact tips getting stuck while you're welding that's a pretty good indication that that insulation that's in there is going bad so one other thing with your nozzle that's important to pay attention to is whether it is like this style where it's nearly flush where the contact tip is nearly flush with the end of the nozzle or if it's the style where the contact tip sits a little further back inside the nozzle those are more for if you're doing flux core wire feed welding because you do want to run a longer stick out with the flux core my preference for MIG welding has always been these flush mount ones with this style that it's a press-on you can actually pull out your nozzle a little bit so that you can adjust it if you need to so my next tip has to do with the consumables so if you're struggling with your machine again you want to make sure you have the right consumables in the in the machine and when I say consumables I'm talking about your wire and your gas primarily now those are the only two consumables and this is a common one if people are burning through thin material I find out a lot is they're using the wrong size wire common size wire for MIG is o two five oh three oh and o3 five oh three fives probably the most common like a lot of welding processes you kind of size your wire based on the thickness of your material and the obviously the thinner materials you want to be using a thinner diameter wire just makes a lot easier your machine sets the amperage based on the size of the wire and how much wire it thinks is coming out so it's important to make sure you have the right size wire now now there are lots of different types of wire and we're not really going to get into all of those there's kind of two that you might want to be aware of if you're kind of a home hobbyist welder ER 70s - and ER 70s six now the s means that it is a solid wire the two has to do with the amount of silica in the wire the two are the six with the two there's not as much so s2 wire is best used for welding on clean material that's nice without a lot of mill scale cleaned off ready to go the s6 is better if you're doing a lot of like repair welding on material that might have some rust on it some mill scale or maybe even some paint or powder coat the s6 wire has a higher silica mount so you're gonna get more of what they call silica islands that form their little brown spots of silica that when they bring the contaminants to the surface of the weld so with your gas there's really basically two types that people run they run straight co2 or they run a mixture of argon and co2 unless you are doing spool gun or wire feed aluminum you are not going to be using straight argon if you are welding on really thick material and I when I say thick I mean like 3/16 and above and you want to be able to do like single pass welds then you may want to look into carbon dioxide now carbon dioxide is going to give you a lot more penetration into the material but it's also going to give you a lot more weld spatter so there's gonna be a lot more cleanup afterwards the 7525 mix is gonna be better for thinner materials you know an eighth inch or less it doesn't produce as much penetration but it does provide you with a little bit cleaner weld especially if you get your machine dialed in properly so speaking of dialing it in the next tip for you check on your machine settings and your machine settings include things your wire feed speed your voltage and your drive roll tension because that can have an effect on how the weld comes out alright so these are those two parameters that I was talking about having to get to play nice together you have your wire feed speed which is the same as your amperage amperage and then you have your voltage which is your arc length now your machine automatically jacks up the amperage or runs the amperage to burn the amount of wire that it thinks is coming out that's how they're made to work so your voltage sets your arc length the higher the voltage the bigger the arc length the lower the voltage the lower the arc length so as you increase your wires feed speed or increase your amperage you also need to increase your voltage so that your wire doesn't start stubbing into your metal wire feed machines are what we call constant voltage or C V machines they want to maintain that arc length or the voltage as much as possible and the reason we want to maintain the voltage is so that we can maintain our arc length because you're not perfect I'm not perfect as you weld you're gonna move in and out a little bit so your your constant voltage maintains your arc length for you so that you don't get huge swings in your voltage okay now you can kind of play with this a little bit and use it to your advantage to if you're welding on thinner material and you see that you're getting close to burning through the material you can pull your gun back a little bit and increase your your stick out that in turn will actually cause the weld to be a little bit cooler and not burn quite through so much all right one of the other parameters I talked about was your drive roll tension having your drive rolls which these are your drive rolls right here and some machines have too and some machines have four of them this is your drive roll tension out here so you can tighten that down or loosen it as you need to to set your driver all tension now your drive roll tension should be set any time you change your liners out so you can make sure it's working properly the one of the ways I've always done it that's been really simple is to have a little bit of wire running out of your gun make sure you're not part of the electrical circuit so that you're not you know touching the ground or anything like that and then you should be able to hold this wire with your bare fingers without having to squeeze super hard and stop it from coming out and you can see here if I squeeze this and pull the trigger you can watch my drive rolls and they're spinning and they're slipping okay see the wire you can see my earplugs not moving if I let go of the wire how the air plug moves forward and stops that's how this should work so my next tip for you guys has to do with your technique since a lot of issues that people find in their welds a lot of discontinuities or defects can be traced back to technique and when we talk about technique we're talking about your work angle your travel angle your travel speed and then any kind of manipulations that you're gonna do so the first one we talked about your work angle work angle make sure we don't go angel and your work angles depending on the weld that you're doing if you're doing a groove weld you should have about a ninety degree work angle depending on your position for the interests of this video we're just talk about being in the flat position on your table if you're working on a tea joint or a Filat weld or lap joint you want to have about a 45 degree work angle so your work angle is the relationship of your wire or your electrode perpendicular to the direction of travel okay the next one we're going to talk about is your travel angle your travel angle is parallel to the direction of travel and in most cases you're going to want to be between 10 and 15 degrees with MIG or wire feed there's a lot of debate on whether it's better to push or pull my opinion is they're both really about the same what really is important is that you don't change partway through your weld the next one up periods your travel speed this is really hard to put into a term that you'd like a finite you know it should always be this but the way I always try to do this is if this is my weld puddle going along here I always try to keep my wire in this leading edge of the weld puddle and that's how I control my weld speed all right the next part of this technique is your manipulation now you can do just a straight pull or a straight stringer bead with with little or no side-to-side motion and that's perfectly fine another technique that I see a lot of people like to do or and I have done in the past I don't really do it as much anymore it's kind of a modification of a stick welder technique called the whip and pause and it's that's where you whip forward about a half a puddle and then you pause and sometimes in some cases you go back about a half of what you went forward so like an eighth of your puddle and then you wait till your puddle fills out and then you whip forward and come back a little bit you wait till your puddle fills out whip forward and come back and then that's what a lot of people like that gives it that kind of stacked Dimes look I don't particularly do this one much anymore what I kind of default to for the most part and this would tilt still technically be considered a stringer bead as I do little curlicues or cursive ease as I make my way down the weld another technique you can do if you need to is a weave beat and a weave bead is done with side-to-side motion and again there's lots and lots of different techniques that you can try some of the most common ones is just what we call AZ weave or side-to-side movement some people will do like a figure eight weave okay a really common one if you're welding out of position and again we're trying to stick to flat is what's called a box weave and it's really just the same thing as a bunch of curly Q's but you're just doing this one thing I that I always find it's super important regardless of the pattern or the technique that you're using or the manipulation is you have to make it very very consistent Welding is all about consistency the more consistent you can get with it the better okay if you're doing these weaves and for whatever reason one of your woozi's goes way off to one side it's going to be very evident in your weld bead so my last tip for you guys is to get this machine dialed in and to practice and when you're dialing your machine and getting it to where you tuned in it in right where you want it it's important to only adjust one parameter at a time so so I always like to start with my amperage first I get it kind of set where I want it then I start to tune in my voltage so that it drives with my wire speed and they play well together and I get the weld I'm looking for so one of the things I like to do when I'm trying to get a machine dialed in as I do a series of like 1 inch long welds and I do them pretty close together so that I can compare the differences and the last tips I'll give you guys is to practice it practice does not make perfect practice makes permanent and so the goal of welding is always to be as consistent as you can be I'm going to do some practicing in the meantime you guys thank you so much for tuning in if you like in this content make sure you give a like send to subscribe and share this with somebody you know or leave me a comment down below if there's a video you'd like me to do and in the meantime do me a favor do yourself favor and go out there and build something and seen

Channel: Fabrication 101

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Keywords: fabrication101, fabrication 101, metal fabrication, metal fabrication projects, metal fabrication techniques, diy, welding projects, welding, migwelding, mig welding, custom, custom fabrication, ford, ford bronco, early bronco, rock crawler, go build something, gobuildsomething, 1968 bronco, how to, how to fabricate, off road, 101, primeweld, gmaw, gas metal arc welding basics, gas metal arc welding (gmaw), gmaw basics, gmaw welding basics, how to weld, how to mig weld

Id: OBr6Yv54Bgk

Length: 19min 17sec (1157 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 22 2020