how to tig weld around curves PROPERLY

okay so how are we going to take one of my favorite welding joints to do make it more challenging and get even better results with how it looks this is the lap joint this is my favorite joint to weld I spent years studying and trying to perfect this joint and learn how to do it consistently and over the years I've learned a ton of sneaky tricks with this joint to get me better looking results and do things more consistently now this is what's typical for welding around a corner we see a straight line heading towards the corner it stops and then continues on this is super straightforward but if you have the opportunity to throw some Style on it instead we are going to do it differently and do it around a radius corner now on my YouTube channel here I've done a ton of episodes about welding properly around corners but of Corners that I've taught people how to weld around are usually just boring Corners like this here over the years of me being in production TIG welding I've had the opportunity to throw some detail on something like this and make them look a little more flashy instead of cutting your Corners to be nice and sharp and square we can prepare and detail your parts with a little bit of radius like this here all right so take a look at this joint here this is 1 8 or 3.2 millimeter material and I want to put my weld perfectly around the shape of this corner so we give it some great looking flow the first thing that's really important to know how to do aside from obviously making sure that everything is clean is we need to make sure we know how to properly tack this joint together now I teach this subject in depth in my online TIG welding program when my students do the final project in that program but let's go over the really important fundamentals here right now if we put one single tack in the wrong place it's going to give us something really stupid and annoying that we have to weld over later this can make the consistency of your weld look super crappy you might have to do a stop start somewhere that we don't exactly want to so let's really think this one through before committing to anything putting this joint together so thinking about it here we are going to be heading in a straight line towards the corner like this obviously we have another straight shot around the corner on this side side so it's the corner we really need to think carefully about so the way I'm thinking about this one is like this I'm going to start with a straight shot towards the corner and I'm going to finish right here this is going to set me up nicely to go around the corner nice and consistently so aside from putting attack at the beginning here this is where I'm going to be putting my tack on the corner as I go around the corner from this one I'm going to terminate here so this is where my second tack is going to go here and this leaves me with my final pass right here I'm going to set up a nice tack right at the Finish Line at the end here this is going to provide me with a bit of filler material that's going to act like a heat catch towards the end now by laying things out as carefully as we have here this is a way that we can strategically plan our start stops and this is going to help us to get great consistency with the final product okay I'm firing up my Cana well 281 pulse machine this machine is crazy I love it let's blaze so starting out with my tack here I want to make sure that I am doing it with the exact profile and placement of the weld that is going to go over it later for example if I do a tack that is too big or too placed stupidly to play stupidly or is placed in a way that it is too high or too low on the joint even if I have the most perfect weld going over this area later one of these things being out of Step a little bit is gonna mess up my consistency later so you can see that I'm doing each one with the exact placement that I will be doing later for the Full Pass and the amount of filler material is a little bit light I want to make sure I don't overfill my tacks that way when I go to do my stop start on each one of these I should be able to add filler material with no problems and no stress and not worry about overfilling taking the time for each one of these to do them perfectly exactly is the way we're looking at here this is going to give me the best confidence to be able to weld it later with nothing to worry about on the fly when puts on together it is all about the preparation now double checking that everything is clean and 100 ready to go let's party so leaving right here from the first tack at the beginning you can see that I am matching the size and profile of it exactly I'm leaving the start with the perfect consistency I need now one cool thing about having each tack relatively close together is I can see what is coming towards me if I need to make any adjustments with profile I can do that ahead of time it's a great way to keep accountability to the size and profile that I want as I'm welding now you can see finishing this one everything looks great as far as the restart into the second pass here now going around the corner or the radius of this this is a little bit of a trick here's something that somebody told me a long time ago what you can do is you can basically run a small scribe line around the profile of the curve of whatever you're going to weld around as we do this we now have a perfect shape of the profile that we want to follow this is going to help you to get some crazy consistency to going around something like this you can see that as I'm welding I'm basically just following the outline here and as you can see the only thing I have to worry about is using the perfect amount of filler material and finishing up on the tack here I'm completely in line for the profile and shape I want to have at the start now for the final pass this one's going to be really simple I just have to basically keep up the consist decency of what I've got so far make sure I don't overheat near the end again just watch your edges as you approach the end of a joint make sure nothing is getting too wide or too spicy as you are approaching the end properly terminating and we are done all right let's take a look you can see that overall the consistency looks pretty good the overall profile of the top plate that I was going to travel around translated really well you can definitely now see how fun it is to go around a curved corner like this looking at the consistency of the bottom Edge on everything you can see that this one turned out pretty much exactly how I wanted right from the beginning now taking everything that you have learned from this exercise that we just went over here you can now apply another level of challenge to it what you can do is do the first half of the joint with your normal Comfort just like we went over here and then what you can do is you can flip the piece so it's facing the opposite direction and you can weld the second half in the opposite direction in an overhand grip once it's finished you can literally compare the differences from side to side on this one you can actually measure the consistency of your stepping it's a great way to really Challenge and build the consistency of your welding I demonstrated how to do this in really close detail in this episode here doing things one half in your normal comfort zone and then doing things in the off direction is definitely a great way to make things a little more challenging it's definitely going to be a great way that you can level up and get some much better consistency so watch that episode next do a random act of kindness for a stranger today my name is Dusty Bill and chill we will talk soon peace

Channel: Pacific Arc Tig Welding

Views: 150,503

Keywords: how to tig weld, how to tig weld aluminum, how to tig weld stainless steel, how to tig weld mild steel, how to tig weld stainless steel for beginners, how to tig weld exhaust pipe, how to tig weld aluminum for beginners, how to tig weld aluminum part 1

Id: eFrh2Hu1b74

Length: 6min 37sec (397 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 16 2023