Great Aluminum TIG Practice

sometimes it's helpful to watch somebody Weld and follow along with them other times you need a little bit more assistance like somebody to teach you one-on-one so if you're trying to follow along with this drill and you're getting less than spectacular or desirable results book a 2-hour aluminum TIG class at weld coach.com and tell your coach that you want to do the five coupon welding drill or the lap Corner lap butt butt fill it fill it fill it extra size uh this thing it's weld coach your personal welding instructor anywhere let's begin with our setup our materials are torch our machine settings our gas settings first and foremost we're going to be using 8in aluminum welding coupons five of them in total and the coupons that I'm using are from the weld Metals online aluminum TIG welding starter kit this is the exact same kit that ships or dispatches to your door when you book an aluminum TIG welding class at weld coach.com so if you want the best results this is the kit you should purchase especially if you want to follow along here we're primarily going to be using 332 in filler wire however I will break out some 116th and show you the differences in between the two of those and why we want to use one over the other my tungsten of choice for this is 3302 laser tungsten it's the same tungsten that is included with the kit and it's the same tungsten that I use for virtually everything that I do if you want to use a different color tungsten that's really okay and if you're not sure about what all the tungsten colors used to mean then you should definitely check out the tungsten color Theory episode that I did which will help explain all of that so whichever color you want is fine just make sure it's nice and good and prepped and well theoretically that you have enough of them because dipping your tungsten is something you're going to do a lot of my torch of choice for this exercise is the CK Worldwide 26 Trimline Flex headed TIG torch that is a mouthful but it doesn't matter which torch you have as long as you know which torch you have so that way you have the correct consumables my consumables are a stubby number five standard kit that basically ships from Wild medals online.com the aluminum stubby kit is what it's effectively called it's a number five standard cup I don't use gas lenses on aluminum because they're not quite necessary but if you did want to use a gas lens with any number cup all the way up to number eight you should be just fine I just like the tighter etching Zone and the better control you get out of a standard number five my tungsten of course 332 laser tungsten from CK Worldwide the angle that I have it sharpened to is about 35° somewhere between 30 and 40° will do just fine but you don't want to sharpen your tungsten to any more or outside of that range somewhere around 35 is fine it doesn't have to be dead on you don't need to be like oh down to the decimal it's not going to make a difference as long as you're somewhere between 30 and 40° for this exercise the flow meter on my argon tank is currently set to 15 cfh that is the North End of how much you want to run one of these small cups for if you're not sure where to set your cup at you take the number of the cup and you multiply it by two that that's your minimum gas flow rate if you multiply it by 2.5 that's your maximum gas flow rate if you put it in there somewhere in the middle that's just fine this is the window that it operates and if your flow meter uses a floating ball then the measurement or where you reference it would be at the center of the ball because that is the point of Maximum resistance or where the ball floats at so set it somewhere between the lowest and the highest number and if you want to learn more about TIG cups I do also have a great episode that explains how I can weld every single metal in the history of ever with only four cups and these days I only use three because I have argon money once again I'm using the prime weld 325x for this exercise you can use whatever machine you've got but you'll want to set it up accordingly first and foremost we're an alternating current or AC that's what we use to weld aluminum with so make sure that you're set to AC your torch is in the negative Port your clamp is in the positive Port set your balance to the 30% positive to 70% negative ratio now if you know which side your machine referen is go ahead and set it to either 30 or 70 if you're not sure which one it references you can set the dial to 70 and step on the pedal if the tungsten explodes or basically violently reacts and kind of blows away and is extremely unstable then you're on the wrong side you should turn it back to 30 and that's where you need to set it and forget it and vice versa if you set it to 30 and it goes kapoy then you need to be on 70 the frequency I'm running with today is going to be 90 HZ because that's my own personal Jam that's where I I like my frequency set to for this exercise if you're not familiar with AC frequencies or what do or anything like that you can set it somewhere between 90 and 120 hertz if you want the most control or the most amount of time to kind of process and work with something and keep it relatively tight go to 120 HZ it doesn't matter where you set the frequency to technically at the end of the day as long as you can control it but for this thickness and the amperage that we're running 90 to 120 Herz is pretty average if you're not sure just set it to 120 it will sound a little bit different than my frequency but try any number I mean it technically doesn't matter any anyway now my main amperage is going to be set to 140 amps and I will be using my foot pedal so if I step on my foot pedal all the way I will have 140 amps if I step on my foot pedal halfway I'll have about 70 amps and that's generally speaking about how it goes but it depends on how many amps your machine starts with now that 140 amps may seem just a little bit high for pieces this small but in certain joints like the fillet joint for example that we have a few of you need a lot of amps because you're actually lighting up on two different surfaces so the extra amps is wide if your machine has pre flow set it to a half a second you can leave it there for virtually everything you're going to weld and as far as the post flow is concerned set it to 10 seconds I usually tell people 8 to 12 seconds but 10 is pretty good aluminum does not require a whole lot of post flow as in you don't need to Shield the aluminum as it's cooling and solidifying and everything else like that but the tungsten itself does if you whip the torch away too fast or you don't allow enough argon to to Shield the tungsten as after you weld it while it's glowing red hot then it can oxidize the tungsten which results in rough Arc starts and a bunch of uh little junk and things floating around in your Weld and yeah you don't want that you should be in a relatively comfortable position on wherever you're sitting notice that I am sitting relatively low on this table or the table is high in relation to my bust if you will uh that's because I like to work in nice tight close proximity to what I'm doing and uh it is more relaxing than working below me or far away from me or whatever the case right so this is where I like to sit so you should be all set up here let's start the exercise okay first two coupons we're going to set them up in a lap joint configuration let's make them even on both ends and we're going to do roughly a 50% overlap my goal here is to do a tack weld a toyous tack basically meaning without filler so we're going to point our tungsten kind of at an angle about 45° down onto it and I'm going to aim for the tip of the tungsten to hit that upper coupon slowly roll into it with the foot pedal and as soon as I see it get liquid I'm going to point it downward toward the bottom coupon and they should stick together watch your fingers make sure that they don't get burned here we [Applause] go so we liquid let's roll it down I see the two of them stick together slowly take my foot off the pedal that part is done three more to go I have a little bit of adjustment room here I can kind of move it just a tiny bit to straighten it out if I really felt so inclined I'm actually going to flip it over and do the opposite side this will help prevent Distortion nice and easy increase my amps I see them stuck together I'm out opposite side same story and this one I'm going to do a bit faster we're just going to smash into it there we go that one's done set it aside next one we're going to set this up as a true outside corner that means corner to corner no overlaps in any side Direction whatever the case is going to rest my pinky of my torch hand on one coupon so it can balance One Direction or the other and the other one is going to hold the two of them pretty much together I'm going to take my time and really scrutinize this your Ang doesn't have to be perfect just that the two of them are together again nice and slow just going to light this up and slowly increase amps until I see the two of them stuck together and then I'm out that's it alternatively you can go toward the edge of your table get your angle set just right again really scrutinize it make sure it's you're corner to corner done and then I'll put a little tiny one right here in the middle in fact we'll use this as a as a reference when we uh when we go to weld this we'll use that as a restart Point okay now with this one when I set this uh this joint up right here I want to set this edge of the corner piece that we just tacked up I want to set like half of it to where it's on the double thick side of the fillet or the lap joint excuse me and then I want to set the other side up to where it's on a single layer so one of our joints is going to be welded with the same thickness the other one's going to be welded as if the lower or the other coupon or portion of metal is going to be twice as thick that's going to present a challenge and we want them intentionally do that here we're going to go into the upper coupon or the one that's vertical we're going to try and Blast away that corner slightly as soon as it gets wet we're just going to direct the torch or Focus or point it downward to the lower coupon and we should see the two of them stick together again watch your fingers so just initiating The Arc very light on the pedal it's nice and pulled move it down two of them fused I'm out okay I got a little bit of room to adjust here and same story Corner's blown away they're stuck together done and done last coupon butt weld this also uh keeps it from wanting to flop over that way and it will present a couple of challenges to us which we want I'm going to tack these together slightly in board so maybe I don't know a/ inch or so just going to fire it straight down see which side it wants to grab a hold of and then move the ark accordingly until the both of them stick together you could also use a piece of filler to tack these together but we'll we'll just try autogenous for right now let's see if we can make it happen sometimes it's a good idea to try and intentionally screw yourself up I'm going to back out of this slightly or ease off the pedal nice and easy like so that way it doesn't force it to crack lit up they're together let me back off of this a little bit lighter than that there we go I'm also going to toss one on the back here I want to flatten it out a little bit just to make it a little cleaner and perfect dunies now if we take a look at this joint we've got one fillet here that's welded you know regular size to a thicker piece we have one fillet on the back side that's a little bit hard to access which is great uh that it's going to be welded this size to this size or same size pieces we have an inside corner same thing as a fillet but when you put this into different positions you'll notice that the accessibility on it is difficult in some situations right we have an outside corner that's kind of floating but we can put this in any position to make it you know somewhat easy but it doesn't usually want to stay there so we're kind of forced to weld it in this position which is great and we also have two lap joints one of them easily in position the other one will be slightly out of position which gives us something to work on a little bit of a challenge great for warming up and then we have a butt weld that will be air gaped and then we have a butt weld that if we sit it flat it will not be air GED so the table will be absorbing some of that that butt weld whereas when we flip it over it won't be it's going to be in midair so we really have to control our weld pool with our foot pedal now here's a fun fact for you gloves are not for handling hot metal they are for accidental encounters with hot metal so if you finish welding your part and you go to grab it you're going to destroy your gloves burn them and render them damn near useless so pliers you should have some pliers on your desk to move your metal around when it is hot what do you think I should start with I think I'm going to start with the fill the uh well let's start with the lap joint I haven't done one of those in a while 332 filler I like to sit next to my part or as in next to the table my filler hand can rest at the edge of it and I can easily access and add filler into it my whole arm can sit on the table it makes it a lot more comfortable for me with the lap joint we want to focus our Arc more toward the lower coupon and then move into it toward the edge of that joint to burn up to the upper edge of it right it may turn into like a horseshoe what's looking like a puddle but if the top runs away don't chase it you're got to pull back your focus a little bit so that way the edge of the weld pool actually moves up to the edge of the upper coupon so we're going to control how much power we give it with our foot pedal and I'm going to start just ahead of it and then back up into that tack and then start moving again 33 second filler got my pool going now I'm adding quite a bit of filler and the reason why is because this joint is rather large and if I had a smaller amount of filler I'd have to push a whole bunch into it but with the 332 size I don't coming up toward the end I'm backing off the foot pedal I'm backing off just enough to where I can see that the weld pool is staying the exact same all the way across that looks pretty good to be honest I haven't welded in a little while uh maybe we'll attack the uh the outside corner here this one again we want to be perpendicular to our root so the angle of the torch is going to go into the joint here not onto the joint not fired at the side of the joint just 45° into that joint gravity is kind of going to want to pull it downward a little bit so we're just going to have to monitor that with the foot pedal I'm going to run right up to the uh this tack weld right here and then I'm going to stop and then we'll practice a restart why not so got a nice pool this one I'm dabbing pretty tight as in I'm not going too far ahead or advancing too far with the torch all right yeah I got a little hot on that corner in the beginning maybe it's just because I was talking too much this is not going to be enough filler you know what let's let's do a compare and contrast I'll use some 11/16th filler let's see what that does starting just ahead get my pool established back up into it and here I have to push a ton of filler feels like mud feels like it's just not enough as if I've got like too many amps and I can't control it now we did manage to get full penetration all the way through the back which ultimately is what we want but using the thinner filler uh kind of sacrific the looks a little bit while I'm here and I've got it flipped over let's run this upper with the uh we'll do it with the 116 filler again focusing more on the lower than on the upper let's see if I can go a little bit slower and with the 116th filler I'm going to do a a tighter bead again if that uh upper coupon or the one with the exposed Edge if that runs away and turns it into like a horseshoe don't chase it look I'm running out of filler here I don't think I'll have enough and I'm not going to burn my gloves here I'll use a couple Dabs out of this 3 302 here ah see that's much easier to run with not as easy to maintain that tight profile though so you might notice that there's a awful lot of junk inside of this weld poool right here at least in this bead right now 4043 filler has extra silicon content in it compared to 5356 it has more magnesium in it the Silicon content will kind of boil and bubble out of it and it kind of makes a gritty looking appearance to the weld profile it's because you got it too hot if I would have used 3302 filler on this joint right here it wouldn't have gotten so hot and started boiling all that silicon out of it so again that's why we use the larger filler on this let's see this butt weld is kind of calling for me here let's just knock this out get it kind of out of the way it looks like one of my ts popped luckily we've got other ones on there tack this back on here real quick with a little drop of filler and straight across this one should be nice and easy there's two things that I'm paying attention to on this weld poool one the width of the weld poool I want it to be about 3/16 to 1/4 in in diameter good solid consistency reflective and the second thing is how much of it is burning on one side versus the other side I want both sides to burn equal if they're not burning equal I need to make some form of a correction that one was a little bit warm but not too bad decent penetration not quite cabbage but it'll do now we're going to run it with the air gap I think let's for fun try it with some 330 second when it comes to your filler it gets a little bit difficult to decide which one you want to use but always remember that you can add more from a smaller wire but not always less from a larger one so that kind of helps out and this may demonstrate that that's probably why 116th would be a lot better to work with so I'm trying to add significantly less filler literally just giving it a tap and I'm using a lot less amps to keep the profile nice and tight I'm moving very quick through this and again I'm not pushing a lot of filler into this joint very very little in fact that's pretty tight good nice little stack I'll take it let's do this awkward position fill it torch just barely fits into there I got to get kind of low on the table here and this is one of the reasons why I really like this exercise because it does have some challenges like not being able to access your part very well notice I didn't put like a stubby or a button cap on the back of it I'm still keeping the full length back cap is it realistic not really we would normally change this around you know you always want to set your torch up for Success just the same as you set your machine up and all the rest of that good stuff I have a feeling this is going to be a pretty ugly weld I'm spending a lot of time on this the key to this is uh watching what's in front of you and making your adjustments accordingly in all of TIG wow that's ugly okay not one of my better ones but the key to this and all of TIG welding is you know I see a lot of people that are like oh what's the setting for this or how do I do that or what's the secret well the secret is there is no secret you just got to figure it out and the only way to figure out is to get yourself in that situation and then make your assessment on it and then make your adjustment on it so in that case no I couldn't go as fast as I normally would so I have to back off my amps in order to go slower and since I'm in a very awkward situation I'm going even slower so that way I have time to work the details out or process it but you'll find out at the end of the day that all you're ever really doing as far as TIG welding is concerned is connecting your eyeballs to your foot pedal and you're saying does that look right if the answer is yes then you make a dab and you move forward if the answer is no then you make the correction and then you move forward and there's a thousand different ways to make the same correction which is why you never really get a solid answer sometimes it just helps to watch it also helps to have somebody teach you all of these things in a way that you can ask questions and get answers to those questions from a live one-on-one professional welding instructor and that's exactly where weld coach.com comes in weld coach is not a series of videos that are pre-recorded that you have to subscribe to hope that you can answer a question with or on and get a response no it's an actual person think of it kind of like a zoom call but on steroids now that was a pretty solid weld right there if I say so myself I can't believe I was talking during all of that so there's five coupons and there's a really awesome exercise that you can do with those five coupons to build this up to oh wait I forgot one these slightly less accessible well actually it's more like a 1 F position as in a position one where it's flat and it's a fillet basically a 1 F fillet I haven't done a 1 F fillet in Forever but here we got a little bit of cabbage we have to work through and that cabbage is uh what burned through all the stuff that oxidized on the back [Music] side uh a little slight undesir able appearance to it but hey it'll do either way so that exercise right there solid warmup solid practice you get every single joint that's out there in multiple different configurations and stuff like that now of course at your request if you're on a class at weld coach.com and you want your coach to teach you this or to run you through this exercise do it we'll show you how to do everything

Channel: Weld Coach

Views: 51,368

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Id: nKgLYjannAQ

Length: 24min 19sec (1459 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 19 2023