How to TIG Weld 12, SS and Steel 16Ga Tube

hey everybody it's Mike with much fab today we're continuing our how to TIG weld series and today's topic is willing 16 gauge still tube and stainless still to these guys right here so this is accumulation of the drills that we've already been doing so in the first drill and the second drill we basically learn heat input and that was by controlling our arc across a of metal you know and adjusting the amps up or down and filling the metal and understand that that that is so key to be good at welding you have to understand heat control and understand how to control that art in the travel speed versus the heat input and if you don't get that part and you can't you know on a flat plate make a thin bead make a wide bead then you're gonna have trouble doing T so I know so I know a lot of people will just in on the same way so we'll just I don't want to practice I don't you know I don't have time for practice I don't have the patience for practice I just want to get to making stuff and that's fine and you can learn that way I did and the problem is you're going to pay for it so you're gonna pay great you're gonna pay to not practice and you're gonna pay by having issues with your welding and issues with with your heat control issues with how your welds look so if I could it follows that do it again I probably try to spend some time practicing more so this is just some food for thought as we go along here so our other drill we did was the same thing as we will have a flat plate so we did flat plate and we just made beats you know we just in the average up renowned and we change our travel speed and we tried to keep a consistent bead even as the temperature of the heat changed out of the smoothie that the heat and the metal changed as our amperage input changed as we change our speed of our move of our travel speed and what that did was kind of teach us that heat control and then we did the exact same thing on a tube right so we went in there on stainless steel too so we did this both aluminum we've already done these drills and you can go back there I'll put a link in the video below to this guy because it's pretty much rules that into it but it basically just talks about your your movement and how the how the kalam pushes you guys should have attacked and figured out because that was the last video so what we're gonna do will show you this real quick you see yeah I'll get on the picture mm-hmm so what we've done is we've made these a perfect plane so they but right up to each other and that's gonna make tacking easy and it's gonna make welding easy and that's what we want we want it to be nice flat and consistent all the way around so there's no gaps and we're gonna tack that so so the first thing we're going to do is we're going to go ahead and attack our metal where we want to have it welded up and then we're just going to run a bead around it so on the bead we know once we get our metal tacked up almost going to show a butt weld here when it's going to be the same thing it's just on an arc so you know we come in and we tack it and we're ready to weld so we'll come in and put our heat in what I generally do is after again after I attack it I don't rebuilt those tacks because sometimes they'll be tension on that metal and once you removed with Ted it's gonna pop so I'll start maybe inside and attack I'll puddle it and then all just do set a number where there was comfortable for you and that depends on the radius of the material you're welding and where you know where you're at how comfortable you are you have to limit yourself the biggest mistake I see when people to weld is they try to keep going and you can't keep going you gotta stop so we're just gonna pick a number when you say eight beads so we go one two three four five six seven eight okay and we stop we do our little you know Trillo off and stop now when I go to light back up again I'm gonna light up here and I'm gonna go back in maybe a bead and a half and I'm gonna remelt these beads and dab them and start moving forward again eight more four five six seven eight and stop trailing off stop so the important thing is that when I start again I go back a dab or two and remelt them so what that's going to do is just give me that nice kind of consistent pattern that everybody wants to see if you stop short and start sometimes you don't really remote and you know we joined the - this right here is awesome in a training you to spot it's going to give you that that freedom of stopping and you need that because what will happen is you'll go try to keep going and you just run out of you know the ability to feed filler wire or move your wrists or whatever and you know it's just kind of you get something to a jam and you're gonna have to stop and what you need to be able to do to make you know nice strong welds is to do the restart and do it correctly so that's how we're gonna do the restart and and all the stuff is covered in that last the last Tube video so go back there and check that out if you don't know what I'm talking about and I'm not going to beat you guys up too much on this stuff alright so here's the settings that I'm going to use so understand that every machine is different and like like the Lincoln the new week and I think it's called square kick or something something like that is it doesn't have necessarily all the settings that maybe the dynast you know the dynasty has or my my inverted from HTTP is a bit different than the dynasty it's you know maybe different than your Everlast or HP or whatever it is you're using so this is just how my machines laid out but the note pulse is the same so generally I'll set it for 65 amps for willing 16 gauge when I tap I'll probably be about about 50 percent higher you know just enough that I could get in there and really note the middle quickly and get it done the flow is going to be at 25 cfh filler wire I use for the no pulse is going to be 1/16 o the the tungsten is going to be 330 seconds I like Authority even when I do stay in lady stills and the cup is going to be in jail us Bab number 16 cup because it gives like a nice bit of coverage on those small circles or the small radiuses the pole settings that I'll use I have this plugged in my machine I so this is I do the same thing everybody does I went over to you know Jody's willing tips and tricks and watched his pulse video and that 33.3 was a good baseline the ice is like the role of 33s or a little of thirds or something like that I bought the pulse up just a little bit 40 pulses per second the duration is 33 and the background is 40% and your machines might be laid out a little differently but generally that you know like Jodie says is 30 rule 33 will get you ballpark where you need to be and the filler so sometimes when I'm using pulse I'll use a little bit thinner filler like the O 45 just depends on how things are going that day I like the one sixteenth filler when doing thin wall tube because as you go it has a tendency to actually pull heat out of the joint and the thinner fillers will will not and what tends to happen is a little heat soak and then you might get more penetration than you really want like maybe all the way through penetrations so I find that using the sixteenth is a good alternative to it's almost like a pulse in itself as you dab it pulls the heat out and then dad and it pulls the heat out so that's what I do on my 16 gauge tubing I tend to back purge all of it so to uh to back purge this guy what I'll do is if you look up there you'll see that a little Dole regulator dole flow meter and you get that from I got that from HTP or weld usa.com I think it's called or welds usa.com but the same company sells HTTP and they're reasonably priced they have some stuff on eBay I saw it was like crazy cheap but I've never used it so anyway that lets me split up the flow so I can back purge and run argon what is that is that a shiny metal Cup let's tell you about that later all but what I'll do is I just use I use tin foil it really seems to work well for me they make all kinds of purging solutions that make all all types of different purging solutions but I usually find tent poles weren't really good and what I'll do is I have a hose that's just silicone hose so I have the silicone hose just run to my my flow rate regulator and this is nice because I'll just plug it right into my purge box and I'm welding like collectors but I also keep I keep different little different little pieces of copper tube you can buy a whole roll of copper 2e at like Lowe's or that's the other horrible place home and just cut a little pieces of it and it's really nice because it can hold it can take a lot of heat and and it's just kind of nice and work with so I'll just stick that on and I'll just stick it through what now what happens with the aluminum foil is once you punch a hole in it and just take like tungsten punch a hole in it and then it runs from brick real easy so I just use just use this blue painters tape and I just put on the front and back and that kind of keeps it from ripping so I can just stick it in there and it will hold it in place pretty well um so that kind of overcomes those problems a lot of times people will have trouble keeping these on which you themselves so generally I don't because I don't do a lot of you know welding on big things is usually all pretty small stuff but when I do have bigger things than sometimes it's a trouble if you have trouble with this stuff just wanting to kind of slide off on you there you can't tape it you can just take regular old painters tape and tape it it always turns on to there and then it's kind of a pain in the ass to clean up they do make a high temperature tape but it's really expensive one solution that you can do is you go to Harbor Freight pick up this like big clamp case and it wasn't terribly expensive maybe that means the cost of regular pipe and then you can kind of stick it on and just sit them down and that will hold your tin foil in place so it doesn't fall off and you know you got a you know a three dollar solution to your problem where it can cost a lot it can start going down different routes but that's what I do and yeah so it's just back through what we're gonna do is I'm not gonna back person when I'm talking okay so we're not this is only for turbo application only for car stuff and it doesn't matter if the tax sugar on the back of it I'm just gonna get a nice clean tack on these guys and then I'm gonna show you a few of my techniques that I use for it yep good yep good the 16-gauge mild steel okay so we're gonna attack these guys up with poles I usually don't do that I usually just use straight current attack in but sometimes you're hurry you know like hook it back and forth or whatever so I'm gonna use the exact same settings I showed you on the board except I just bump the amperage up to a hundred amps okay okay so you guys saw me attack these guys up I got two of the stainless steel I'm gonna show you one on straight current and one on the pulse and and then I got a mild steel so understand this is like complete cheating because this is just bench rolling there's nothing uncomfortable you know it's not like doing the headers where you you got tubes in your way you gotta get a bunch of stick out which these guys are really good for getting stick out all and you know kind of get the filler wire where you can't even really see very well so I understand that but this is what we got so this is what we're gonna go with but I want to show you guys it clear just like the fundamentals and you can take those fundamentals and apply them to you know your jammed up situation if you will one thing the you know it to make a good looking well do you really do need to have a cup that's got some gas coverage and applause people is always on the website um you know full disclosure I like them because I can drop them and they won't break which is kind of nice they are made out of Teflon so when they get hot they do sometimes this kind of disc this finger a little bit which is easy enough to just squishing it back you know while it's still hot and they'll be nice and round um but it does help to get that gas coverage to make that nice-looking colors in the world that most people want to see um so there's a few different ways to approach this and one thing you can do so sometimes if you're holding wire and you can see I got this guys sticking over here and as I'm feeding it it's gonna get like this kind of resonance in it where it starts bouncing all over especially that first little bit and it's just kind of wagging and if you want to make a nice consistent bead you really need to fill that filler you need to feed that filler into very specific line as you go along so one thing you can do is it kind of sucks cuz you waste you know a bit of filler when you do this but you can cut it in half and that just like it totally changes the game so it's just you don't have that heft this you know three feet thirty-six inches now you have you know 18 inches like through the math right on that I think so and and there's a lot easier to handle and you don't have that weight out here bobbling that you're kind of fighting with your hand so it makes a little easier to kind of cut them cut them in half with that the bad side of that is you know once you get down to where you're you know feeding just a little bit at time you're gonna throw away twice the filler rod so use that how you will so a couple different techniques and it's a lot of times will be based on where just the circumstances will kind of dictate what what you're doing what I like to do is I kind of stick my tongue sand up a little bit in there so I don't have a lot of stick out and what I'll do is I'll just I'll get my pulse started I'll start on the other side of the tack and as soon as I get it started then I'll just kind of go and as I go I'll move forward dip and what I do is I keep the tungsten up high enough that I can clear the filler wire into it and I can get that filler wire right into that puddle and as I do that it chills the puddle so it kind of I wait for a second I watch the metal a and you're gonna see it kind of almost like melt through I'm gonna drop it in there and the same thing it'll just kind of go do you now how I feed this fire you know I can make it real comfortable I can come over here from the side this is kind of like my favorite if I'm doing something this needs to be aesthetic all feed from the side and it's just a little bit easier to kind of see what's going on if I do this but you know the circumstances were gonna dictate how you you know how this torch and how you have your filler wire get comfortable the set of pattern so we're only gonna do so many beads and we're gonna stop number one is this cup is only going to cover so much area and I want to have my beads covered I want to have a nice looking weld so we're going to keep them covered and what that's also going to do is this it's not gonna what's this guy once I get past a certain point it's not gonna be so this is this right here you know I can do this and pretty comfortable but now I can't see so I got to come down here and I'm gonna my angle is gonna get extreme and again I can't see so you don't want to out weld yourself you want to stay ABC always be comfortable just one two three four five six seven eight and stop and we're gonna reset so we're right back to where you were and we're gonna relight in front we're gonna back up remelt that first puddle puddle and a half and we're gonna start going again 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 stop and reset ok and that's very important so here we go on the actual welding part and you see just try to make a kind of a test run see how it fills and we're gonna light up and get going so what I'm going to do here is I've already tacked it up we just melt that that puddle and we start dipping it's just like I told you seven eight and done and we kind of trail off and just let it sit there and post flow as opposed for like 11 seconds on this guy we're gonna go ahead and get ready to restart so rotate our pipe so we're nice and comfortable in and I've added this little pitcher and pitcher here I'm a little scoop back and I'm more remelt the puddle that we were just in I want to go back and dab or two and remelt it so I have a good tie in and they were just sort of start moving forward and counting I put this here so well you see I hit the tungsten there when you do that and it happens to everybody just stop just stop because it's gonna mess up your hole how the tungsten diffuses heat into the metal is how it pinpoints the heat so just stop like I stopped change the tungsten and then you can kind of clean up the spot with a little wire brush a little wire brush and just reach our remote that puddle and go so I added the amps here I did a little pitcher and pitcher so you can actually see what's going on with my foot pedal so I know I said I said it at 65 however um the amps on the machine are saying differently it looks like I'll weld this at about 42 so I'll leave you be now all right good [Music] all right again with the pitcher and pitcher so you can kind of see what my foots doing a few things I'd like to you know just talk about was I noticed a lot of times either people hold their Tungsten's too high or they hold them too low and you can see my shaky hand here my tendency is always to be too close with the art too close to the metal and that's why I tend to hit my tungsten with the filler or actually dip it into the puddle but it happens another thing is like my foot so in my mind I always think like when I'm willing this I only feel like maybe about 50% of the pedal but actually seeing it for the first time because you you know I don't get to look at my foot obviously it's it's actually going quite a bit more but um it's just it finds that balance you saw with the amps on the digital readout that it you know just visually and watching this puddle as I go along I'm just trying to look for the width of it the consistency of it and I'm using the speed which is kind of a constant I try to always kind of move the same speed on things and then I'll find my amps to control the consistency of the beads so just a couple of things to keep in mind when watching this video here yep there this recording for ya it doesn't participate the miles still doesn't dissipate the heat as fast so if you want it to like be shining you got a post flow the hell out of it which it always kind of dumb anyway because it's mild still it's just gonna rust they have to paint it anyway but I'll just post full that extra long right there so you can see the color difference in the two get my head finger yes sir yep so this one here we're doing on the pulse and I've already showed you the settings on the whiteboard what I'm saying is that I like to use the o45 filler when I'm using the pulse it seems as though it kind of doesn't need um it almost is like the 1/16 pulls out too much heat when you're using the pulse cuz it's already the pulse kind of limits the heat input of the of the of the arc of the amps anyway so I use a thinner rod just manat cool it as much I want to have good penetration and this has a fan this did a fantastic job of penetration now I also want to say that at while I pedaled the other two tubes the mild still and the stainless still using straight current on this guy I'm just flat out I just dropped the pedal all the way down at those settings that I showed you and it was like set for 74 amps and I was able to just motor along like that so yeah that's what we do here the movement [Music] this into going with the found without a faster fork movement in 15 I've never noticed but there would be was feedback back [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] you we could move [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] here's the results and I'll just you know I I hope you guys you know we're able to take away what I was doing I got some footage of like the actual foot pedal and the actual amps on the machine so you kind of get an idea when I say I said it to a certain number like also it 65 on you know for both mild steel and stainless still I'm completely using my foot pedal in my mind I'm not using it that much I've looked at video footage and is actually more than I thought so I put a camera on the machine so hopefully can kind of sort it all out I like to have a little more than what I need some people just like to be where they need to be and stomp on it if you're the kind of person that just doesn't want to try to use the foot pedal then one way to do it is to turn the thing down until you're obviously too cold you can't even puddle and then start bumping it up by maybe 5 amps until you're you're too hot and then you can kind of zero in on what you like you do that some test pieces and that way you can just put your foot down what that does it means that your your adjustments made of your travel speed and your torch angle a little bit if that I'd rather have the adjustments being made in my foot and that's just what I've got you used to and the more you do that I think the better only easier will be for you all so this is come on up set you down here and yeah so those goes this way so this is the B profile for using the 1/16 filler and whatever amps I was that I said the Machine is 65 I suspect I was probably around 40 and it is not too terribly shabby relatively consistent I'm not the best roller guy out there but but it's okay and here is the mild steel and you know kind of the same kind of look I used in the what I was using the 1/16 on this guy too and just regular amps pretty consistent they both got pretty good penetration on and this is the pulse I kind of think this is a better look than everybody you know the look of a weld is so subjective to the individual looking at it and how they like it but this was set used this was done using the pulse settings that I told you guys back about I used the o45 filler wire just because I think the 1/16 tends to cool it down too much when using the pulse settings and so I like to use the Oh 45 stead of the 1/16 on this and this is just matted so I had at 74 and I matted it and there was a couple places where I had to move a little bit faster and noticed that you know hey I probably could have got off fit with the foot pedal but I figured I'd just give it a go with just paint interested to travel speed and penetration on that was really good to do so let's cut these guys [Music] but ahead we're good yep alright so we went ahead and just cut these off so you can take a look at inside the well and and we'll see this is the one we did with just straight current and the 1/16 filler wire and it's got full penetration most the way around there's some spots I could have probably tied in a little bit better this looks like the B get this is the end so we kind of trailed off as we came back around then and went on top of the old ball and I probably should have stayed in a little bit longer but you can also see where the the tacks were made so it's got like the little sugaring booger right there means there's one probably right here there is and one right there but overall pretty good not a bad weld so it's not no Instagram stunner welds like my friends that are actually really really good on Instagram but it's not bad you see this is mild still and the inside of the mild still is pretty nice when you back purged it and I just personally feel like that's a pretty good way to have the backside of your weld look so why not do it if you're not paying a terrible a lot of money for argon and this is the pulsed one and the penetration on this guy is pretty good too so not teach other bad maybe even better than the straight amps it might be my my new go-to setting on earth now but anyway justyou're okay so the main takeaway from this is is don't weld outside of your comfort zone and be sure you tie those welds back in to each other before you start going and just practice practice makes perfect so I hope you do this at home give it a go if you got questions drop them down below and I'll do my best to answer them for you and I always appreciate if you go too much fat garage it's much fab gurage comm check out all my willing supplies I have to offer or fabrication goodies and whatnot and until next time this is Mike much fat signing out

Channel: Monkey Fabrication Garage

Views: 51,353

Rating: 4.8373384 out of 5

Keywords: how to weld tube, how to weld pipe, tig, tig welding, monkey fab

Id: bFAbpj5QtOs

Length: 48min 18sec (2898 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 12 2018