How to MIG Weld for Beginners: MIG Welding Basics

[Music] welcome to the shop today we're talking about MIG welding basics for beginners and the good news is there's really only three things that you need to focus on when it comes to your welding technique to be able to do a pretty good job so we're gonna break those down and we're gonna break them down one by one so you only need to focus on one thing at a time and it'll have you MIG welding like a pro in no time let's get started let's talk about the set up a little bit I'm gonna be using solid wire with 75% argon and 25% co2 for my shielding gas you can also use straight co2 for MIG welding when I first started welding I used an aluminum cylinder for a soda fountain them they're a little bit cheaper as stray co2 in it and that that worked pretty well for me but I've since moved on to to the argon co2 blend which is a little bit better but not essential make sure that your ground your work clamp is connected directly to your material or solid through a table because that would throw me off on MIG welding more than it will with stick or TIG welding make sure that your material is pretty clean and go ahead and just set your machine based on the material thickness and your wire diameter to the settings that are on the chart it's a lot more likely that your technique will throw off your weld then it is your setting as well so just set into the chart forget them until you get your technique down and then you can dial them in I made a whole video about settings so check that out on my channel okay so the first thing you need to pay attention to is you weld is your distance some people caught your stick out cuz it's how far the wire sticks out of the contact tip and you want to keep that right around 3/8 to 1/2 inch most of the time when your MIG welding and so if you get propped up here make sure that you can go all the way along your joint and maintain that distance now you know it's good to be able to weld freehand and just use one hand because sometimes you have to in in certain situations but it's always nice to be able to prop up and what I'll usually do is I'll hold my hand vertically here and my other hand here and then I'll just use that to sort of rest and maintain my distance as I work along my joint now you can't do this in every geometry right sometimes your upside down underneath something doing an inside corner joint and you have to do it you have to do but in this case you know welding on the plate remember to just move along so so if you watch here as I well I'm gonna maintain that distance right here and it's it's running pretty well now I'm gonna go ahead and get a little bit far away and what's gonna happen here two things one it's not gonna run as well because you have that wire is effectively a big resistor and so you kind of drop your voltage down there and the second thing that will happen is your shielding gas isn't able to get down to the weld pool and so you're gonna be likely to get a lot of porosity there in the weld now on the other hand I'm going to go ahead and move in really close here and as I well close right the thing that can happen that's really gonna get you is you're gonna burn that wire right back in your contact tip and you can weld it right to it and kind of make a mess so anyway you want to make sure that you're not too far not too close in and the best way to practice that honestly is before your welding go ahead and take some dry runs right until you can do it not welding don't pull that trigger right and so make sure okay I'm holding that that distance all the way along make sure you were able to maintain it and then go ahead and try running a few things that's the first thing distance okay so once you have your distance right the next thing to work on is your angle and you can think of your angle in two different directions one is called your work angle and that's right here so let's say I was welding this joint this T joint right there and I will have my big gun in right here the work angle is where I'm sitting right there right and so if I'm welding a butt joint like this I'm gonna want to be straight up and down with the plate at least in this welding position if I'm welding this T joint here I'm gonna be one I'm gonna want to come in right around 45 degrees you might drop it just a hair but pretty close to 45 degrees and so that's that's what you want to maintain there now the other one is your travel angle and that is angle along the direction that you're welding and you usually want to be somewhere between 10 degrees pushing or 10 degrees dragging and you can debate whether push or drag is better if you drag an apartment get a little bit more penetration if you're welding aluminum you really need to push so that you don't get a bunch of sit on it but if you're just starting out just pick one and do what feels comfortable to you I usually push so you get set up there on your angle and then practice it just the same as your distance and just do these dry runs and make sure you can maintain that angle what happens to a lot of people is as they weld along you'll kind of rock it like this and by the end you're sitting just about parallel to the plate so you need to make sure you're getting all the way across the joint and make those dry runs until you can make a dry run and feel comfortable that you're maintaining your angles all the way along don't pull that trigger I make dry runs all the time and so just keep practicing that now what happens if you get carried away with your angles is you'll get a lot of spatter and it'll really make kind of a mess right and then when you start welding out of position that's where your angle becomes much more critical so when you're welding in vertical or overhead positions you want to make sure that you maintain the right angle there you're typically going to want to point your MIG gun up a little bit anytime you're welding either vertical or an overhead like that there you want to make sure that you're pointing up a little bit more than you normally would alright once you have your distance and your angle worked out now you can focus on your movement and there's two aspects to movement one is your travel speed how fast you so you can see what I'm welding too fast here the beats just very narrow on the other hand where I'm welding too slow it gets really wide and it'll tend to sink through if you're welding on thin material you might burn a hole right through your your part the other is manipulation and there's a few different ways that you can move you can weave back and forth you can do some little curlicues there's some you can leave and have a curve to that which I kind of like because then you're touching the the front end of the puddle and it's usually best if you don't stay right in the center if you touch the sides back and forth and if you're welding something thicker to something thinner stay a little bit longer on the thicker part and then just visit the thin and stay on the thick and then visit the thin right with your weave so it gives you a lot of options there when you start weaving but whatever you do there's no need to get carried away with it and in some cases stringer beads where you're running straight along work just fine let's just take a minute to look at these different welds here so the weld here at the top is one that I did that ran pretty well then I ran them with too long of an arc here and there's a bunch of little holes in it and so you can be confident if you were to cut that up it'd be full of porosity like a sponge and it wouldn't be a solid weld this is with the arc to short and you can see right here where just burned out when I got the contact tip right up close to it right here the angle was way too far and that does a couple of things one it increases the arc length but also you know I've had quite a bit of spatter and it's just a little out of control this world right here is too fast so you can just see it's really small narrow right here's when I was moving too slow so it's a big old fat weld and he might burn right through your material if you're welding something relatively thin and you run too slow right here is where I made some little curlicues here's with a zigzag weave and either one of those techniques works pretty well okay so those are the three things to focus on and you can learn taking dry runs before you even light an ark and then get some scrap metal and just practice practice on the bench get things tuned in before you get on to your project and you can learn a lot faster just by running a be paying attention to one thing at a time mastering that distance the angle and then your movement so you can get started practice these things and you'll be running like a pro in no time if you like this make sure to subscribe below and we'll see you next time

Channel: TimWelds

Views: 210,289

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Id: NlOihxByeus

Length: 8min 29sec (509 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 15 2020