(sizzling) - This is one of the best
welds I've made in weeks, man. Months. Apparently it's hurting his eyes. I just laid down a beauty,
a veritable sparkle show. Ah it smells like porosity. Well back we did a video TIG 101 and it was geared toward putting everything together, and getting started in
the TIG welding world. We had a lot of great comments. Some of those comments centered around, well how do I set my gas? What is the proper gas
flow for TIG welding? So before we get back to
this beautiful guy here, we need to go back on the
machine and set our gas and talk about a few things. The very first thing that I need to do is to slowly open this,
and open it all the way. My pressure cylinder is open all the way. Our flow meter is calibrated for argon and helium, cubic feet per hour. In order for me to set the gas with this particular machine, I need to depress the foot pedal to energize the gas selenoid. I can go from five to
50 cubic feet per hour which is excessive, that's way high. Since we're in an enclosed
shop, no wind, no breeze, and I'm using standard size components, collet, collet body, number seven cup, 15 to 20 cubic feet per hour is plenty. We'll get into using gas lenses and some of this cubic feet
per hour will change slightly when we're using other components. The next thing we need to look at is what's available on the
machine to set as far as gas. And on this particular model machine, I have everything
amperage, everything pulse, AC and AC balance, I only have post flow on this particular machine, OK? Some machines have a pre
flow function which means when you depress the foot pedal, you can set a timer where
you'll get a few seconds, even a half of a second or a full second of preflow of gas, this
is beneficial on stainless and some aluminum welding, it's
not real critical on steels. So I can do that manually by
just depressing the foot pedal and have a little bit of
gas coverage in my area, my weld area, I can pre flood that. But getting back to this machine, it only has a post flow setting. With the three 3/32 sized
tungsten that I'm using, I'm welding at 135 amps, about five to six seconds is plenty. It allows my argon to flow out of the cup around the tungsten to protect
it as it's cooling down. So I'm gonna set that
at about five seconds. If I don't have enough post flow, let's say that I'm welding at 135 amps, and I set my post flow at like two seconds or one second which is obviously low, then I should notice my
tungsten would turn dark gray or even it would be a dark color. Your tungsten should be the original color after you get through
welding and it cools off. It should stay the original
color of the tungsten. If it turns black, dark
gray, some weird color, then you might wanna
turn your post flow up a few more seconds. Again, I'm setting this at five. So this should cover the
comment, how to set my gas, how to set my machine properly. And I'll show you what this looks like. Hopefully I can make some good welds. But then after we get through with that, we're gonna mess some things up. We'll go through some scenarios
and show you what happens if we make some adjustments
and they're not right. Hopefully we can show you exactly how to troubleshoot this
step and correct it. (whirring) As you can see, we are not
getting all that porosity and the sparkle show, everything
is smooth, stable, clean. Everything is just fine. It's fine! Let's talk about post
flow for just a second. As I terminated this weld you'll notice that I stayed over my weld area. That's kind of a habit that I get into long time ago just to help if
I'm welding on stainless steel I always like to leave that post flow over the top of this weld area. I do it on carbon steel too. Again, everything is real clean. My tungsten has good color to it, I maintain the (speaking foreign language) the good grind angle. So one of the things that we
can change here is post flow. So the first thing we can talk about is what if I have too much post flow? What if I have 15 to 20
seconds of post flow? Is that doing anything? No, you're just wasting gas really. This machine goes to 10 seconds. I could have 10 seconds of post flow. It's not gonna really do anything. It's not gonna change the color. It's not gonna protect
the tungsten any more, as it's cooling off. But if I have it too low,
let's see what that looks like. I want to adjust this down to oh we'll go a little above one second. We'll go in between one and three seconds. I'll make the same weld,
the weld should look essentially the same, but
when I terminate the weld, we should notice something
with the tungsten here should turn dark, let's see what happens. As you can see everything
is set essentially the same. Nothing's gonna happen here. This was an adjustment in post flow. So gas coverage is essentially
the same over the weld. It's only when I terminate the weld, and the tip of our tungsten got black. Is it foul to the point of not using it? Not necessarily and on
a non critical weld, we can light right back up,
reset the post flow, keep going. Critical application, I would
change this tungsten out. So there's two examples of nothing, the only adjustment we
made was the post flow, one normal at five to six
seconds and one at one second or one and a half seconds. The welds look essentially the same. The only thing that happened was it turned the tungsten black. On steels it's not that big of a deal, OK? On stainless steel, nickel based alloys and some exotic metals, it's
nice to have some post flow and leave your torch
down around there to help blanket the material as it's cooling off. Now we'll do a couple
of samples here where let's just turn the gas all the way up. You know I never have. Seriously, I have never
turned the gas all the way up to the top of a post
flow so this is gonna be, it'll be a little fun for me. I'm gonna crank it up to
55, whatever it'll go to. Again, we're running standard components, and a number seven cup
so let's experiment. Pedal to the metal,
crank 'er all the way up! Whoo, she ridin' up on top there, 55, 50 cubic feet an hour, plus. Anybody heard of a Venturi effect of gas? I can sure hear the gas
runnin' out of there hard. I notice my weld is smaller. Venturi effect is where it
would be rushing out of the cup so fast that it draws
in air behind the weld. The pool looked a little funny
to me as I was weldin' it. But it looks fine visually afterwards. I thought I noticed a
little spit thing in there. One thing I do notice
is the edges of my weld are nice and black for some reason. You know really all I'm
doing is wasting gas. It's coming out of there so fast, all this excess gas is not doing anything. So essentially I'm wasting gas. All right so the next thing we could do is turn our gas from our normal 15, 20 and turn it way down so
we don't have enough gas. Let's see what that does. In this weld we have
too low a gas coverage. It acts like it wants to weld. But it's getting little bubble
riser in there, I see it. I know there's porosity
coming out on the back side. Lovely. I've labored to produce a weld
with a bunch of 'oles in it. 'Oles, oh there's that
old brown manky stuff that I tried to get in one of my videos when I said it leaves
this orange brown crap on your weld plate, didn't
get enough gas coverage. That's a beauty. Got a nice little riser on the end there. I'd call that somethin' but I
don't want to offend anybody. Camera guy is kinda verbally
sensitive these days. So you know here's the
deal, we went through the post flow settings, we
don't notice hardly any change whatsoever, we turn the gas all the way up which is essentially wasting gas just like having too many seconds of
post flow, just wasting argon. And then the obvious thing here of created this beautiful visual aid here of not enough gas period. You're just gonna get porosity. Once it starts you
really can't correct it. Is this repairable? Sure. Grind it out, grind it down
to good clean base metal, turn your gas back to
where it's supposed to be and weld it properly and you'd be fine. So this porosity problem here was caused by not enough gas coverage,
I had it set way too low. Let's get back to that
beauty I laid down for you at the beginning of this video
with everything set properly, I still got porosity pretty bad. Which leads us back to
the viewer question, question revolved around what
do I do with my tungsten? How far do I stick the tungsten out? Do I have it real close to the cup? That particular weld I
had it way out there. Even though I had my gas set correctly, my tungsten is so far out there that my gas argon envelope was
not around this weld pool, didn't have a chance. OK, so let's reproduce that scenario. I've got a number seven cup
on here and I'm out like one, two, three times as
far as what I should be. I'm out here a good inch
and a half and that's, my gas coverage is not gonna
be around this weld pool. So here's how I produce
the beauty for you. See if we can do another one. There's some more of that
brown orangey crap on there. You know what that reminded me of was gasless flux core wire
that was set incorrectly, she loaded with porosity. Too much tungsten stickout. Got no chance, no coverage. Well some of you may be thinking
to yourselves saying, self, how do I correct that? Let's go turn the gas
all the way up again. Let's go crank it all the way up plus have our tungsten stuck
out here so we can see. (gas blowing) Mm, yummy. This is a yummy specimen. Oh I definitely have gas
flow 'cause I can hear it. 'Bout the only thing that
I noticed that doing is it threw my sparkles and my good stuff. It was high velocity because
of the gas flow behind it. It still left a mess. Sticking your tungsten out too far is not gonna help you do anything as far as a quality weld pool
out here in the flat plate. Out in the open, gas
coverage it just goes away. So I'm gonna get a fresh bullet here. There's one more thing we can do here and that's run the tungsten way up in the cup or flush with it. I set the gas back to normal, back to about 15 cubic feet per hour where we made our beautiful welds with. So what do you think's gonna happen here? I like to set mine, whatever
the exit diameter of the cup is that's about where I like to start. And on this one, I have
set it pretty much flush with the end of the cup. I stuck it out there just a
little bit so I can see it. I don't think anything is gonna happen as far as the weld pool. I don't think we're gonna
create a really bad weld pool. What's gonna happen is, I'm
not gonna be able to see the end of the tungsten
to judge where I'm at. It pretty much forces me to weld with a long arc. Well I can't drag the cup
physically on the plate. I can't get my filler wire down here where I can get underneath
it so what's gonna happen is I'll have plenty of gas coverage 'cause it's right there
at the end of the cup, but I've got my tungsten
recessed up in here about a 16th, I can't see the end of it. Gonna be hard for me to judge this. Again, this is not something I normally do so this'll be like a first time for me. But these are all based
on viewer questions, viewer comments and helping people out. They're saying well this is what I'm doing and it's not working out or
something's not working out and we find out what it is and so here we go, let's see what happens. (chuckling) I had to put the cup clearly right down on the
material in order to make the high frequency, start the arc. I could not see the end of my tungsten, I was guessing the whole time. Actually to me visually it looked like the arc was coming out off center in the nozzle here, in the cup. Did it make a good weld? Yeah. There's nothing wrong with
the weld as far as porosity, the width is OK. Got that weird black haze on
the side of the start of it but you know again, there's
so many options here. Got that window and that rule of thumb. Anyway, we went through
gas setup, proper flow, post flow and we showed some welds where we changed the post flow to nothing and we got little dark color
on the end of the tungsten. Didn't affect the weld. Post flow has nothing
to do with the gas flow while you're welding, it's
just when you terminate. If you don't have enough time set, this thing cools off and it
oxidizes, it turns black. Hopefully we showed that well enough. And then we had a little
fun there at the end and cranked that tungsten out there about an inch and a half or so. We got no gas coverage 'cause
it was way out there too far. We even turned the gas
up trying to correct it. It's not gonna happen OK? This good envelope of
shielding gas is right around this end of the tungsten here. Again the rule of thumb is
whatever the opening is, that's about how far you
stick your tungsten out. And I keep saying about, you know? We can stick this out a
little bit further than it is. We can go out a little
past half, 5/8 of an inch and we'll be fine. The last thing we did
was shove the tungsten up inside the cup, that was
a little learning experience for me I had a hard time
getting the arc lit because it's up inside there,
forces you to long arc. You don't know where you're at. It's hard to get the filler wire on the leading edge of the pool as well. So I hope that answered the
viewer's questions and concerns about proper gas flow,
trying to link a couple of issues here together
and create some scenarios of what happens if you violate the envelopes, the window of
opportunity for success here. So I sure hope this helps. I learned a little bit,
I hope you did too. Appreciate your subscription to weld.com, hit the dinger button on there, the bell so you can get notified
when we put content out. Please check us out on Facebook
and Instagram, thank you. Lady standing behind me,
she ran into the back of me with her bag and she goes
uh oh, I'm really sorry. I said that's all right, I just thought Dabs
Wellington was on this plane. There's so much gas blowin' outta here I can hear it echoing
through my brain cavity. (loud, erratic gas escaping) Now that's some serious gas flow. Nice!
(laughing)
