How to stick weld 👨🏻‍🏭: Intro to Arc welding for beginners (Series Part 1.5)

morning guys this video is a second half of the first part so part one I call this part 1.5 it's just the second half of it I figured rather than uploading an hour long video I would just upload it in two parts that are around a half an hour a little bit over so if you haven't seen the first part go watch part one then come back and watch this it'll make a lot more sense thanks now if you noticed when I got to the end I held it at the end for a little bit then broke the ark you want to hold it at the end of your weld if you just break the arc at the end and just call it good the end of your weld is going to have uh either a crater or under fill you want to kind of try and fill that and again you there's no need to beat the Daylights out of this let's just watch this just by scraping that along look at that and this is 6013 very easy no need to beat the Daylights out of it trust me if you're in welding school your instructor will greatly appreciate you if you're not hammering on these so let's take a look now this bead overall pretty small like very thin it's a little bit roped up but we're only running at 90 amps so that's to be expected if you look at the start the start is a little bit higher a little bit more roped up that's to be expected if your machine has hot start on it enabling a hot start will get rid of the cold start this isn't as noticeable if I was actually welding test welds you would notice a start would really look like it's just sitting on top and then it would flatten out so hot starts a very I guess not it's not necessary but it's a great feature to have on your welder because it just helps on practical stuff like actual joints and then if you look at the end there's not really a flat crater or anything there that's looking pretty good so this is exactly what you should be aiming at for a 6013 weld now I'm going to do a couple more on here but before I do I want to talk a little bit about what I'm actually seeing since I don't have an art camera and I've tried taking Arc shots and my camera just simply can't even with a filter on it I won't have that but I can explain a lot of what I'm seeing and I think you guys will understand so as I'm welding with the 6013 Rod the 6013 kind of has a puddle it has a lot of like swirling it's not as defined as like a 7018 Rod 7018 is very easy to see the molten puddle okay 6013 not so much what you're really looking at as you're dragging that molten puddle along the molten puddle is a slightly brighter color and it's shaped like an eye that's the best way I could describe it to kind of illustrate this no expense spared with this your welding pool this is your weld you're depositing your molten puddle is going to look something like this and this may have like swirlies going on and you're going to have some swirlings in here like but this area is going to have a brighter appearance than this direct area behind it if you're running at 90 amps on quarter inch plate this is what it's going to look like if you're on much thicker plate or at lower amperage on thicker plate you may not see that brighter area and that's because your molten pool is essentially solidifying so fast and quenching that the difference between the molten pool and your actual actual weld is insignificant now if you're welding on super thin or thinner you're going to notice this molten pull the difference in light color may actually extend all the way back here and that's simply because the area is so hot and liquid for so long that it's going to be more noticeable but on quarter inch plate you're going to see it if your Rod comes in here will draw it like this and I'll just fill that in for the rod so you can differentiate it again no expense spared on these illustrations Your Rod comes in here your molten puddle is going to be approximately double the size of the rod somewhere between double or a little bit less and that brighter spot which you want to be shaped kind of like either egg shaped or like an eye again this is your rod this brighter spot is what you're staring at very easy to see with 70 18 60 13 there's so much going on that it's difficult to see which the other thing I'll mention really quick is as you're welding if you ever see this molten puddle all of a sudden go like this and it's swirling around in front of your rod that's a problem because now as you're depositing metal you're going to deposit the metal push this flux out and then you're going to entrave it and trap it as it turns to slag you don't want that so what you do is you lengthen your art Gap a little bit to kind of ride up over it and then set it back down to push that back this way that's you know as you get used to stick welding you're going to kind of do that automatically and I will at some point do some art shot videos I got to get a different camera so that'll help you a little bit better oh this is nice and toasty from sitting on this warm steel awesome but for right now that's the best I can do and I think you guys will understand it so now what I'm going to do is I'm going to start lapping beads where I'm going to weld right up tight to this weld do a pass and we're going to talk about it all right look at that I can't remember 6013 really doing slag peels for me last time I ran it but that's pretty awesome doesn't get much better than that oh yeah look at that that's your nutrients as a welder if you eat that it's better than Cheerios just kidding don't do that so no need to beat the Daylights out of this quick brushing it's all you need to do now when you look here you can see I pretty much almost welded on top of that other bead to the point that it's somewhat difficult for you to differentiate the two and I'll try and you can clearly see bead one bead two now the biggest mistake I made when I was learning the stick weld multiple paths was if you notice a distance between these two and let me let me zoom in for you guys okay you notice the distance between these two this is fine when you're trying to learn that you leave enough Gap because you're not going to be able to run as straight as welds as this or as clean so when you first start out it's okay to leave a gap just so that you can kind of see what's going on when your pad bead on plate you need to be able to weld one pass right on top almost of another when you have a gap this big that's no good because when you do multiple pass fillet welds you need to stack them in there you don't need a gap and not to mention if I just weld to where the toe of say one weld just touches the other and then you have that Peak and Valley you don't want the valley the valley isn't any good because again on multiple pass welds as you go over you now have to fill that Valley in which gives a great place to entrap slag or to have a lack of fusion issue so the flatter you can get it the better now that second pass went pretty good here but I'm noticing if you look at the stop see how the toe that's wetted out pretty good and then it kind of humps up here if I had been running a little bit more amperage that would have not been like that and again this is really splitting hairs here but the reason that happened is that if you look at the profile of this Steel as soon as that weld got to the where there's enough reinforcement behind it behind the steel to where it could pull heat out it essentially pulled the heat out and then the weld turned colder and that's also why I like the starts on this are a little bit on the colder side a little bit harder to get it to go so what I'll do I'll do a bunch of passes and we're going to look at I don't know I'll run three rods through it the faster I go the more you're going to see the weld's going to flatten out likely because of the heat input foreign so let's talk about what we got here I ran a bunch of passes on this now got a little squirrely at the end here I ran it left-handed which I don't normally weld left hand with stick which you can tell which my travel speed slowed way down and that combined with the preheated plate you can see how much wider that weld is and I'll bring it up again a little bit better so you can see much wider welding and not only that I got off track also and I saw this happening in real time boy this is pretty hot if you look here see that little hole there right there right above my thumb that is not porosity what that is a slag entrapment so I saw that happening in real time when I started the arc over here and started moving the flux with the 6013 started to bubble in front of the rod and it just kind of looked a little squirrely well that's what you have happen and 6013 in my opinion is pretty notorious for having uh slag entrapment like that on the toes very common if I would have upped the amperage the increase in Arc force would have kept that slag and that flux more towards the molten puddle and less trying to get in front of the rod so your amperage does play a role in that as well as if I would have sat down the rod angle a little bit would help prevent that but again this is typical of what you're going to see when you pad beads on plate if you notice here fairly flat that's a real good angle other than here you can tell the travel speed slowed way down and look at how much higher that is that's simply because I was depositing more metal for my travel speed as I picked up it flattened out a little bit because I wasn't depositing as much metal but when you notice here when you look overall that's pretty flat there isn't really like a peak in Valley that's what you want to shoot for if your welds look more like what this looks like where you got a peak in a valley or even worse like between here that much of a valley you're going to have issues the purpose of this exercise patting beads on plate is really to perfect overlapping them enough because if you try and do say a three or six or eight pass fillet weld or something like that and you can't stack the beads in this close you're going to have issues it's going to be a lot harder than what it should be so when you pad beads on plate keep them stacked and to further help you with that because I didn't understand this when I was learning stick I used to think that as I was welding if I wanted to stack it on here I would put the weld right here well if you're welding this far away from the toe all that's going to happen is the deposited weld is going to be up close to this but not overlapping and I'm going to run one right now just to prove that point it's going to be interesting welding around the camera here but I'm going to position it in the wrong place now I want you to look at that see how it's just touching the toes like barely and I'll even shoot a side shot you got that peak in value you don't want that I'm going to move it a little bit closer but still not where it should be and let's look at it [Applause] foreign I moved the bead closer like there's no question that's further away that's closer but look at how inconsistent that is let's see if I can get a real good angle on this yeah you can still see there's a valley between those two foreign but that's it wetted out sort of there but then if your welds are looking like this let me bring it up see how inconsistent that is if you're running too low of amperage you'll get that as well but I already proved that the amperage will run an app you can overlap them nice this is a direct result of just not holding the rod in a correct place so the correct place the first pass here I was welding it like literally like right here okay this pass I tried to maintain the rod about right here now you notice that Rod tip where is it let me pick this up and I'll show you look where the rod is okay Center your weld let me grab another pair of gloves and suckers hot all right oh let's set this up here there we go that should work where's your Rod here look how far away this Rod is from here look at this okay see that gap between the rod in there what you need to do is put the rod right here okay if it's here this is where you're aiming you want your art and your rod right on that toe use the toe as a line and you see how this is leaned back a little bit that's going to push the metal slightly up to there so that's the most important thing if you have this peak and Valley issue stop look at where your weld is compare the rod to it look how far away shift it up this is where you should be aiming ideally the overlap is to where the peak of the weld is on the peak of the weld so you're really you're almost it might feel like you're welding over this I assure you you're likely not aim for this point all right so I'm just going to finish this well by tying it in properly so further foreign see again you can see the different stages look where that wound up and then look how it tied in real nice I could have even pushed it a little bit more but the difference is such a minute amount in how close you hold the rod it really is like when you look at it here the center of this Rod is literally on that toe and that's how you deposit a weld properly overlapping use that as a guide so now that that's all completed I'm gonna move on to running on AC because I know a lot of you guys don't have DC boxes like you if you're running on a Lincoln Tombstone welder you only have AC so I'm going to do a couple passes with AC everything here for the most part applies to you guys the difference is is your weld is going to look different than what I have here on AC I find on AC the weld tends to be more peaked or kind of comes to a point so we're going to do a couple passes just so I don't leave you guys in the dark because you're going to be a little bit confused on this because your welds simply aren't going to look like this so I'm running 90 amps same setting as before on AC which AC with stick welding is 50 dcen 50 dcep and let's run a pass foreign gotta turn it on first let's see here not sure why but this had a hand control switch which I don't know why you would use hand control to start the arc but the output's on now so we are in business now that probably sounded a little bit different than your Tombstone this is an inverter welder I'm welding it up with my Dynasty 210 so your old buzz box likely uh sounded more like a buzzing noise less high-pitched this pretty much sounded like an AC Arc for TIG welding [Music] all right let's clean that up again very easy slag removal and when we look at that weld it kind of looks like the other welds like over here if you look somewhat to our first pass but it's narrower and when you look at it from a side profile see how it's humped up more now on AC I find you can run a little bit more amperage and it will flatten it out but after a certain point to me at least AC stick welding seems to be just a more peaked bead like that's just how it is now welding on AC has a couple advantages and a couple disadvantages let's talk about the advantages the primary advantage to AC is you don't get what's known as art blow I didn't really have any on this as I was welding but what art blow is I'll grab a rod here as you're minding your own business and you're just welding all of a sudden it's like a damn Gremlin just chewed away at part of the flux and in the arc rather than going where it was blows out the side of the rod and it's like Arc wandering like you'll watch that Arc go where it's not supposed to and then you have a very difficult time reigning it in to put it where you want it you often see big spatter like you'll see big chunks of metal pop out of it because of the shielding gases and they're protecting it so art blow he really don't like like you don't want it well when you weld on AC you're not gonna get it and normally art below tends to come at the end of welds as the rod heats up as the metal heats up if this whole plate was hot and you're welding near the end the path to ground becomes questionable in it and then that's typically when your Arc blows gonna happen the arc's going to wander to wherever it can make a ground and it's often in not a direction you want it to be so you just lose control of the arc well long story short AC welding with stick prevents art blow because your ground path is essentially changing constantly so that will work great to prevent that the other benefit you have on AC and this is my opinion this isn't I don't think in science it does seem to weld on really scabby material I don't want to say better but in some cases I find that I can make more solid welds with AC when it comes to welding through rust and stuff again it's very situation dependent and maybe that has something to do with the control of art blow but some cases I find it works pretty good for that I generally don't use it now besides that AC does have some disadvantages one being the more peaked bead shape to you're very limited to what rods you can run so 7018 generally you want to use AC spec rods but you can't use 6010 there's a lot of like I don't know 80 10 90 or 110 10 all of the like pipe welding rods those don't run on AC or structural steel rods generally don't run on AC so you're more limited but again sort of a benefit to AC more of the benefit categories of machines that weld AC only for sticker generally pretty cheap so it's very affordable for you to get into it so if all you got is AC you can do pretty good it's not going to be the best but you can see not too much different than DC but you're better off with DC honestly so let me run a couple more beads on here and let's just look at it and compare foreign so you saw me run a bunch of passes on AC and we got slag peeled just like on DC mmm tasty so you can see the welds aren't too much uh different I guess than DC it's very subtle and but when you look down it they're a little bit more peaked I guess it's again it's very very subtle hopefully you guys can see that but you're gonna just have a tendency to have a more peaked weld on AC the tie-in being that this was plenty hot went a lot better tight end you can see I got a little bit of a peek in a valley I could have ran my art Gap or excuse me my uh rod angle arc angle a little bit over you probably saw it as I was welding this and I'll grab this Rod here to really give a better example you want to watch it when you get down to welding real close to the end of the rod what's going to end up happening is your natural rod angle is going to start pointing this direction towards you and if you can imagine as you're welding here it's going to push that molten metal this way and separate it from tying in which is why you always want to try and keep a push angle up towards where you want the metal to lay and then of course while maintaining your drag angle obviously that's the hardest part about stick once you get good at your starts and stops it's it is extremely difficult and not impossible but your arc length and your rod angle and everything is constantly changing because your Rod is changing length that's where I equate it to like stick welding to riding a bike and that's welding in general when you got on a bike did you just fall off of it and then give up riding forever I mean if you did I feel bad for you go back and try again trust me anyone can do it well welding's the same way especially with stick you're going to make mistakes you're probably thinking like oh man this is easy and you saw me do it and then you go and do it and then yours don't look anything like this and then you feel discouraged and you quit don't quit it's just like riding a bike put in a more than a few hours burn up 20 30 pounds of rods you're gonna easily get results like what I have here it's just a practice thing you know everyone teaches themselves how to weld you're no different like all the instruction this video reading about it that's all great you're going to have to build the muscle memory to be able to be consistent like this and you didn't see me do it but if you need to draw straight lines on your plate to get a straight line of weld that's perfectly fine do it I happen to be able to get a fairly straight line without uh a fairly straight beat without a line if you can't draw lines there's a couple other things I just want to cover quick so art Gap wise this is very difficult to explain but I'm going to try and do my best the Gap in which you want to maintain the rod off of the plate is very minimal with this particular Rod I can literally drag the edge of it down the toe okay toward this edge of this flux is actually actively touching the plate and it will still weld not all rods are like that you may stick a rod but with this 6013 that's about how close you want the art Gap when I'm welding my bead down this it's very common for me to just touch that flux a little bit and then raise up I'm talking a 30 second of an inch a hair's width so unlike welding I'm welding bring it up to where I can feel the rod is no longer touching and then I tap it a little bit bring it up tap it and I'm kind of alternating between slightly tapping that flux and having an art Gap okay that works really good with this particular rod you like I said you want to be careful though because with some rods if you tap the rod like this the flux isn't down that far off of the rod and what will end up happening is you'll stick that Rod you don't want that but you can see how far that Rod is back in that flux that's your art Gap so even when you're holding this tight you still have an arc Gap okay only when you push this in so far that the flux melts off that the rod can touch do you close the circuit and then you stick your Rod so the other thing I want to mention because I love talking a lot is travel speed now a bunch of the welds I showed in real time so you can get a better idea how fast I'm moving and then of course some I fast forwarded just for the sake of the length of the video I am not traveling this fast forward I am going about like this okay the most common mistake someone makes when trying to weld beads on plate they're simply moving too fast so odds are if your weld starts necking down and humping up and it's not like equal width as this like you see how consistent the width is overall if it necks down and it's just squiggly your amperage probably isn't as high as it should be and then your travel speed is too high so if you set your machine at 90 amps and you grab a 6013 barring your machine's uh settings aren't way off your weld should look like this and the only thing separating your weld from mine is how consistent you are and how consistent your travel speed is and that's really people just tend and I did it too I'm not you know I'm I'm not impervious when I was learning the stick weld I just traveled way too fast and it's very easy to do that so if you're having trouble likely you're going too fast slow your roll slow it down a little bit all right I think that's covered enough to get you started go out uh grab your welder knock the dust off of it get it hooked up make sure it works grab yourself a box of 60 13s from the store uh eighth inch or if you have access to 332 and you rather do that that's fine I think you'll find on quarter inch steel eighth inch is a lot easier to learn on for Rod size but yeah grab yourself set a 20 pounds 30 40 pounds bunch of 60 13s and burn them all up on flat plate and I guarantee you if you can get to where you can overlap them like you saw I did and you got your starts and stops down and it's looking real good everything else is going to be easier if you don't Master the simple then the heart is going to be so much harder so with that said thanks for sticking around for this video I hope you watched other videos that are going to be coming out in soon I'm going to be covering everything from Rod selection to machine selection talking about Advanced features Arc Force like I'm going to be trying to go in depth as much as I possibly can to help you guys out because I want to see you making good welds and building stuff because too many people out there sitting around and they're afraid of starting a new hobby like welding or they don't know how to weld and they want to build stuff and you have that in you to build stuff but you don't know where to start well this is where you start Master the simple the heart becomes easy if you don't Master the simple the heart is very hard thanks for sticking around until next time

Channel: Making mistakes with Greg

Views: 59,603

Keywords: How to weld, Stick welding, welding for beginners

Id: GeeV0Sr3RCM

Length: 38min 16sec (2296 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 25 2022