How NOT TO Weld: Most Common MIG Welding Mistakes

good golly Miss Molly no Cub where's a grinder today we want to do seven common mistakes in MIG welding we want to make some good beads we want to show you seven different variables or common mistakes that you can identify and correct so let's get to it the first one happens to be material preparation want to weld on some clean material make some decent looking beads and we'll show the effect of welding on dirty material or unprepped material can be all that slight variation depends on how much rust and mill scale it could be a huge difference when we get into slag or heavy amounts of rust so let's get started fairly smooth decent bead the sound to me was pretty crispy and pretty solid it's round the bead rounded up a bit doesn't have any place for it to go I'm just listening to the Machine for stability this was on a piece of clean material and now I want to contrast that to something that has a fair amount of rust and mill scale on it I want to do a bead right next to that on this rusted surface just to see what's going to happen to me that looks like and sounded like it was colder rust and mill scale as I see it under the under the weld good here under the land it's like it starves the weld pool of fluidity and keeps the edges from blending into the parent metal if this had heavy rust on it we'd probably notice an interruption in the arc the sound would be different it would spatter more okay so that's one effect of unclean material and by the way when I clean this one I simply scratched it lightly with a flapper disc it came off pretty nice and clean instantly I didn't have to spend a lot of time on this the next common mistake is the voltage adjustment so on this first bead we established a decent baseline here our voltage was 19.5 volts and 200 inches a minute on wire feed speed and it's okay we'll just establish everything off of that so this next common mistake would be voltage too high or too low I'm gonna leave the wire feed speed alone go to my baseline setting of nineteen point five let's go to twenty five point five we're relieving the wire feed speed alone that bead is very wide and as you could see as I was making the weld and the end of the wire was melting off and did globs by the way that's what that transfer method is called three very common transfer methods with gas metal arc welding or mig welding short circuit globular and spray this was more toward the globular it's very hot and the end of the wire was kind of melting off in big balls the next one we're gonna run is voltage to low and i think we're going to turn it down - we were at nineteen five let's go down to fifteen volts again we're gonna leave the wire feed speed alone Wow I think I recognized that condition as you could tell by the arc shot by the bead appearance it's very cold backed up we weren't actually even clearing any kind of a trench or in establishing the weld pool to me what it looked like under my hood it's just stacking on top of each other it's not really melting or fusing into the bead this third common mistake that we're going to identify is wire feed speed too high or too low so let's run too high or baseline was nineteen point five volts two hundred inches a minute I'm going to crank the wire feed speed up to 325 somewhere in that range that's fairly close the voltage to low again there's enough to melt that it's coming out of there so fast it can't clear and make a transition it's just been one melt it's too hot that was wire feed speed too high the next one was gonna be too low these are kind of ridiculous numbers and obvious but that's what we're trying to drive home well I think from 200 let's go down to let's go down to as low as the Machine goes I'll just turn it way down that was a little strange that's over the top I'm gonna speed the wire up just a little bit we went into the low as we could I'm gonna turn it up to 115 and see if I can't make this a little more stable and realistic and that folks was a slow motion in real time of how short arc actually works the wire comes down and bumps into the grounded material initiates the arc wire burn the back the transition the ball falls off it just keeps doing that over and over the sizzling sound that you hear with MIG welding is 50 to 200 times per second okay so you can kind of get a perspective of what's happening but the relationship between voltage and wire feed speed wire feed speed relates to amperage on MIG welding the next common fault we want to identify we say fault common mistake is electrical stick out too high or too low electrical stick out is defined as how far the wire is sticking out past the contact tip not the nozzle to the material okay so you know ideally for short-circuit MIG welding we want to hold about 3/8 of an inch to a half-inch okay so this right now is about 3/8 of an inch to me I have to get underneath the nozzle here so I'm probably holding more of about a half-inch so in a weld a little bit of bead correctly and then I want to pull this way up [Music] but is the electrical stick out way too long obviously but I need to mention this I was impressed by that that was extremely long and the machine still fine to run it stayed fairly stable what happens here is I have gas coming out of this nozzle we mentioned that before that's what protects your weld pool from the atmosphere as I pull this way back I noticed the weld got kind of crowned up and it looks strange there's probably porosity or bug holes impressions voids in this weld bead I would have to grind the top of it off to tell you for sure I know that there are some strange-looking bumps in here where the machine actually did kind of poop out but I'm telling you that was I was pretty impressive this next condition actually it's the opposite of this is too low or too short of electrical stick out and here's where it becomes dangerous for me I don't want to ruin this contact tip I'm gonna try to cram it down in there too far I don't want to touch the contact tip to the weld metal because then I'll weld the wire into the copper contact tip so and then obviously I'm not gonna be able to see you'll probably see me move way over here and lay down because I'm having to look underneath the nozzle but make this weld so it's not going to be a drastic change like this but it will make a little bit of a difference did it weld with too short or less of a electrical stick out yes it did however it's just I can't see I wasn't going in a straight line it's really hard to do plus you take the chance of actually welding the wire into the contact tip here so that's not a good condition and I see people weld like that they have a hard time following any kind of a joint configuration like a lap weld or a tea will to make it fill it or in a groove sometimes can't you can't kind of see where you're going I like that proper electrical stick out that we mentioned a 3/8 to 1/2 of an inch personally I positioned myself where I can see where I'm going and the finished weld pool all at the same time the next condition that we're going to talk about is the gas flow itself obviously we can turn it way low and we're probably going to see like over here we're going to create some porosity we can turn it way up we may not notice a super effect into the weld pool but we're wasting gas and we can also create porosity that way gas of B coming out of this nozzle so fast that it creates what we call a venturi effect and it draws air in behind the gas and puts it in the weld pool it may happen it may not but again you're wasting gas so there's no need for it we have our gas today set at 20 cubic feet per hour so from here we're going to turn it let's just follow the same pattern let's just turn it way up first Wow gas way too high again nothing really happened but I can hear the ripping out of this and although it's not adding any effect or benefit for the world school didn't make it better is what I'm saying we're just wasting gas let's go the opposite way and turn the gas down to the five cubic feet per hour maybe even we don't want to turn it off obviously it's go down to five cubic feet per hour [Music] that was gas to love it did what I kind of expected to have some bug holes in well be with the table ferocity and the rest of it really tried to run okay but I I could tell there was a difference in sound we've got some nice little bug holes here to start and it and it looked like it was trying to create him in the bead they didn't quite pop out to the top of the bead but I really think they are in there because of the sound and the way it looked so the next variable that is commonly incorrect I should say is travel speed we're having to travel along in such a manner that we creating the bead of the same width same height so if we go too fast we can get a condition where our bear a bead gets real narrow kind of peeking and again we could have some fusion problem getting into the parent metal watch this see what happens so I started out and I do my normal thing which is kind of a tick-tock a very gentle tick-tock that's how I learned to well that's how I moved in it obviously right over here just kind of sped up things got kind of narrow very inconsistent and we're not directing that pool to fuse into the parent metal this next one we're gonna do just the opposite we're gonna start out and weld normal and then we're gonna go to slow nothing's really gonna happen drastically other than the weld is gonna get a little wider and it's gonna build up quite a bit more I should say more okay two things here I realize that's out on the edge of the plate and you're getting a drastic glow of red-hot I can reproduce it elsewhere but you get the gist of what's happening here I slowed way down it got real wide and now I'm just cooking the material and the bee staying hot for a long time excessive amounts of well do not produce more quality well just you know a little bit is good and more better that's not the way that works so correct travel speed you want to maintain that beat appearance and width and the crown too high we jet forward we get real narrow we've got problems inconsistencies too slow we're just stacking more excessive weld on there that's not adding any more strength to the material the last variable or common mistake that we want to talk about that people do is gun angle I have been welding most of these at a little bit of a tilt forward you have a window of a push angle or a drag angle from dead zero I keep mine anywhere around 10 degrees leading or trailing pushing or pulling a slight effect on what it does to the weld pool now we're going to really show what happens here when we do I'm gonna I guess since I've been doing this in a slight drag angle then I'm going to start that way and I'm gonna really lean it over here and get stupid probably throw some nice dingleberries on my shirt and then the opposite of that will start out do the same thing and I'll lean it way over here and a big push angle and a shoe to spit some bb's out we started out normal and then I've twisted this handle and kind of laid this over by doing that I automatically increased the wire stick out we talked about that condition but I tried to keep it in there fairly close and within range and I need to tell you again by doing that this machine didn't didn't do what I call crapping out it didn't start getting weird and bucking around it stayed in there pretty smooth so this next one you know I'm gonna stay at this baseline and we're just going to change gun angle I'm going to start out up here round top dead zero a little bit of bean and then I'm gonna lean this way forward again it creates conditions were to me it feels like I'm just automatically out of control with making any kind of a consistent feed I don't I don't feel comfortable doing that it can also cause problems with shielding gas we're not you know we're leaned over so far that we're not getting that nice blanket of argon co2 shielding gas around the weld pool so you know again we wanted to say we want to identify some of these variables how to master them how to overcome some problems if you identify something in machine settings you know first thing let's prep our material and get it fairly clean you don't need to spend huge amounts of time and just buff it down the mirror finish polish or anything but knock the scale and poop off of it you know help yourself out establish a baseline if you hear anything or see anything that you saw in this video you can kind of identify then you'll know oh wait a minute I need to turn my wire up or my voltage down or something you kind of know where to go with this material prep voltage to high to low wire to high to low electrical stick out gas flow travel speed gun angle it sounds like a lot you're doing it when you pull the trigger anyway so now you kind of know what to look for if we can help in any way please put it in the comments we've appreciated your 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Channel: Weld.com

Views: 964,397

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Keywords: welding, weld.com, mig monday, tig time, how to weld, learn how to weld

Id: Xod-ByrxHg4

Length: 16min 44sec (1004 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 14 2019