Learning how to TIG weld made easy

well hey guys it's mike festiva here welcome back in this video i'm going to actually take the mystery out tig welding if you're interested in tig welding or only practice a little bit and don't know everything you need to set up your machine and get pig welding i'm going to take all the mystery out of that for you so in about 20 minutes i can explain what you need to know after that it's just up to you to practice so let's get going on the video so i got two tig machines sick next to me they might look very similar but they're extremely different so this is yes welder's tig 250p and this is yes welders mig 205 ds this is a multi-process mig stick and tig but it's dc tig only we'll get to that in a moment this is yes welders ac dc tig this is much more advanced this has a lot of features and it can handle welding aluminum a lot of things like that we'll get into this a lot more in the next video i just want to not bog you guys down too much information we're going to go back to basics no foot pedal no nothing can weld steel in this video but once you learn that technique we'll move on to welding aluminum in the next so we're going to get this one out of here and we'll come back with this and go over the features of this thing and how to get you welding soon basic setup here this is just gonna get you in the ballpark for everything you need to just like start tig welding and you can play around with all these numbers later i'll put a little sheet on the side here so you guys can see what i'm covering throughout this whole part starting off with gas you want 100 pure argon gas and you want it to flow about 15 to 20 cubic feet per hour believe me you don't want 75 25 what you use on your mig that gas will not shield this right believe me i made that mistake in the beginning when i was learning a few years ago it turns out awful just take my word for it 100 pure argon you can use a gauge like this or you can use a little flow meter it doesn't matter but 15 to 20 cubic feet per hour is what you want your gas flow now tungsten i like blue and i like gray tungsten you can do a ton more research on these i highly recommend staying away from the red tungsten there's some bad stuff in there so you don't want that i'm going to go over in the end of this part here how to grind your tungsten and get it ready for welding you got your cups on the end of your torch here if you guys don't know this is a tig torch i hope you know this much by now i hope you did a little research to get your tungsten in and out you loosen this up here and loosens the arbor for your tungsten to slide in and out of you're gonna be grinding these a lot as soon as you dip your tungsten in your metal which is gonna happen numerous times don't keep welding just take it out grind it or put another one in you'll be better off that way once it gets dipped it's contaminated you need to clean it up so anyways you loosen that up you can slide it back in i like a stick out this is my personal preference between quarter inch and 5 16. it works pretty good for me everyone likes different things as you see this cup looks a little different sometimes you'll see longer versions of this pink one on the front of the tig whatever you have works for you try them out but i like the clear pyrex cups most of these parts and things i'm going to use will be links too for you can check them out on amazon whether you choose to buy them there for your own source it doesn't matter i'll just put links so you can see them so i prefer a little stubby gas lens kit you actually get better gas coverage on your part it helped me out a lot because the pyrex is clear you can see through it you can see what you're doing a lot easier this changed the learning curve big time for me was a stubby gas lens kit we're going to be using gray tungsten in here and i like to run 3 30 seconds you can get these packs on amazon i'll put a link to them like i said blue or gray works fine for me for steel or aluminum people might have their own preference i haven't really noticed a difference between the two but this pack has some 16th inch and three thirty seconds i like to run three thirty seconds for most of my welding so when i mentioned earlier the different colors it's actually represented the tip of the tungsten this is gray and this is blue if you wanna know more detail about the each of these and the properties of them you can look it up on your own time if we really get into all the technical terms with tig welding this video will drag on far over an hour so if you really need the technical side of things i highly recommend you seek a class in your area or do hours worth of research for yourself so just going to cover the basics here to get you tig welding because you probably want to learn and use your tig torch for a long time so i want you to give you the basics and not flood you with information i just want you to hit the ground running and be able to start practicing real quick about the cups here this is the pyrex i was talking about earlier this is a stubby porcelain sometimes they're longer than this this is a number five cup this is i think eight or ten you see the difference is for different coverage of gas and getting into tighter areas i do aluminum and steel welding with this pyrex i think it's eight or ten does everything i need they're fairly fragile if you drop them you'll break them but quite a few come in a kit just keep that in mind go over how the tig torch comes apart really quick this is a manual torch this is a gas valve you literally have to turn on to get gas coverage and when you're done well you turn it off the fancier machines you push a button or operate a pedal and it will turn it on with the gas solenoid inside the machine this one's simple but i like simplicity it's it's good so we're going to take this apart real quick so you know how to change your tungsten you can loosen this up right here and you can slide the tungsten in and out of the collet we're going to take the whole torch apart so you can see and if you're welding a tight area these kits all come with stubbier caps and there's even one that's only about that long really short so we'll take this thing apart here this comes off the back there's your tungsten you can slide it out either way this is your collet that tightens down on it go over that a little more in a moment here's your stubby gas lens that's just held on with an o-ring so there's your lens it's a little stainless steel mesh in here this provides a lot better gas flow if you get a stubby gas lens kit so there's the torch body there this is your collet it goes into here and this is your end cap when you tighten this down it actually pushes that collet there and squeezes it down the tungsten so it can't slide that's how you adjust your distance on your stick out on your tungsten now let's take this thing out and i'll show you guys what you're going to shoot for for grinding these things and we'll fire up the torch and start welding all right get into the grinding section so here is the tungsten on the right of course is the sharpened one it's maybe a little under quarter inch probably like more like three sixteenths and this is three thirty seconds tungsten the one on the right of course is ground the one on the left is a blunt one that's brand new so we're gonna get the grind in here we'll go over to the grinder i'll show you what you're looking for all right now to grind i'm gonna tell you what you don't want to do first and then we'll get in the technique what you want to do i know naturally it seems like you'd have the grinding stone running and you just spiral it like this and of course you're going to have a similar taper like that what you're going to have also is grinding lines that are circular around the tungsten and that's no good you want lines going down it so basically if you have spiral lines going down the tungsten from granite like this it's actually going to cause your arc to be very irregular and just be moving around it's not going to be very pinpoint so what you're going to want to do is you're going to want to hold it steady like this put it up at a steep angle and rotate your tungsten slowly while you're grinding it this way all the lines will be going down towards the tip of the tungsten it gets a much steadier arc another thing people mentioned you want to have a dedicated stone for grinding your tungsten this one has a pretty good groove for me mostly grinding here but i grind other things on here too in a perfect world you'd have one stone for tungsten in a real word you're just going to use a bench grinder that you got we're almost ready to start an arc with this little tig torch but first we gotta hook up the ground clamp for the work lead and the torch we got our ground clamp or work lead we got a positive negative terminal on here which lead is this going to hook on to the positive negative that's where it takes a little tricky this work clamp or ground is going to hook to the positive terminal yes the positive and we're going to hook our tig torch to the negative side after that all we need to do is hook up our gas from the lead right to the regulator here set our gas flow 15 to 20 cubic feet per hour and we're good to go make sure to open your gas valve all the way and close it all the way not just halfway open you want to make sure to open it all the way or not at all because there's another seal in here and if you don't have it open all the way you can lose a little gas around that seal to set your torch gas flow you're going to open up your torch and you're going to adjust it up until we get to that's 20 we're going to go back to about 15 cubic feet per hour should be good to go the gas doesn't go through this machine at all it comes right out of the regulator right through the lead and right to the torch and like i said earlier this is a manual gas valve you are the pre and post while you determine that so you open the valve before you start your weld you weld and when you're done you lift it away break the arc hold your gas over it for a little while once you're done shielding it you close it off we'll go into just a little bit of up close shots about the tig talk about the difference between scratch start lift and high frequency this machine is not high frequency that's going to be covered more in the second part for welding aluminum this is a lift machine fortunately which is good uh no pedals used at all whatsoever this machine you can't run a pedal and some people think that's a real big downside it isn't on dc you weld stainless steel and steel you really don't have to adjust your amperage other than dialing in on the front of the panel kind of like your stick weld and you set your amperage right you're good to go you don't really need to vary the pedal unless you're welding aluminum on an ac dc machine this is a dc only i just moved the machine off the table in a ways way it's still off keep in mind where the louvers are on the side because just actually having the fan blowing across your work table from the welder can be enough to blow your shielding gas away from your work if it blows your shield and gas away from your work you'll have a really nasty looking like brown city welds that's bad gas coverage or sparks you don't want sparks with tig it's really not like that it's not like make or stick with sparks flying everywhere it's very quiet very clean it's a really neat process time consuming but pretty neat we're going to go into metal clean up in a moment but first i want to talk about lift and scratch machines this is actually a lift machine which is a little nicer than the scratch this machine's off granted that's why i can touch the tungsten without it arcing uh scratch machine is you just scratch the tungsten across a really quick but barely lift it up to initiate the arc sometimes the tungsten gets stuck which isn't good you gotta clean the tungsten again those are your basic crude basically a stick machine like an old ac buzz box if you hook the tig torch to it this is a lift machine which is a lot cleaner basically you touch the tungsten down as soon as you lift it off to the height you want to tig weld it initiates an arc a lot nicer to break it you just kind of roll it back and pull it away for a moment and bring it back in for a little bit of gas coverage once you have enough gas coverage and it cooled down you turn off the torch so one of the final things i want to talk about before you actually start an arc is clean clean clean i always heard a bunch about oh aluminum has to be spotless to weld yeah it should be clean but almost feels a little more forgiving to me than steel granted both aluminum and steel both need to be clean clean clean so on steel i'm going to take a flat wheel here we're going to grind all the mill slag off you don't want paint you don't want rust you want mill slag you don't want any of that on there because it's going to create little sparks if you're seeing sparks you probably got mill slag and then after that we got a little acetone we'll wipe down our welding filler rod and we'll wipe down our work area we're going to be welding especially key for aluminum we're going to do it all the same on here because clean clean clean is important so let's clean this up real quick clean up our filler rod here we're not gonna use this filler rod right off the bat we're gonna use in a moment but it's kind of good practice this is three thirty seconds filler rod you're gonna cut it in half the reason is it's super long it's going to be bouncing around out here you don't need long filler rod for especially when you learn it's just going to complicate things we're not going to touch the filler rod first we're going to leave it over here we're going to work on this piece i'm going to show you how to start an arc how to hold the torch and how to move across the metal real quick note about personal protection here's some thin tig gloves they work really well of course they're very thin so if you touch hot metal you're gonna get burned through them just don't touch hot stuff i commonly use these for mig and tig welding they're just kind of a mid thickness general work glove get an auto dim helmet they're extremely important for tig welding especially if you're learning because you can see what you're actually doing not a hundred percent necessary but it's gonna make it a lot easier if you have one i usually weld around shade 11 for this stuff i try to run the shade on the darker side if i can you figure out what's safe and what works well for you welding respirators are always advised i'm not going to be wearing this one so i can actually talk while i'm welding i also have an overhead fan exhaust fan that goes out if you're welding aluminum and stainless please get a welding respirator and wear it because they put off some pretty nasty gas so just nasty stuff on that so stainless steel and aluminum especially get a respirator all right we'll go over how to hold the torch get comfortable and we'll start an arc we do not have the welder on yet this is only for demonstration purposes right now that's why i can touch on the metal without getting arc in my face so basically comfortable that's very important just be comfortable put on some symphony music some hip-hop whatever you like just relax maybe not too loud just hang out some people throw the lead over their shoulder that feels awkward to me i've never liked that i just let it dangle on the floor make sure it's not too heavy make sure it's not coiled up a bunch on the floor or around your foot or around the chair you just want to feel kind of light in your hand i'm right-handed so i'm holding my right hand we're not going to get in the feeding rod at this moment but if you were you would hold the rod in your left hand lean it over about 15 to 20 degree angle and then you would feed the rod with your left hand and move towards the rod so i'll be traveling this way and feeding the rod i can get into that just yet basically here's the torch you're gonna touch on the metal but i'm gonna bring it over like this and travel about a 15 degree angle down the middle so basically we're going to turn on the gas like that if this machine was on i had a helmet on you touch it on here you'd start an arc you keep it off about 3 16 of an inch you would travel it down after it becomes liquid you can see a little pool liquefy travel it down an inch or two and when we're ready to break the the arc we're going to lift off really quick at an angle and then we're going to bring it back in do not touch the tungsten it'll start another arc and we're gonna keep that shielding gas on until it cools down for about five to eight seconds and then we're gonna shut off the shielding gas i'll bring you guys in for a close-up we're gonna try to film this so we're gonna set the machine over to tick lift and we're gonna turn it up to about 120 amps is pretty good for eighth inch this is probably quarter inch it doesn't really matter we're just mostly working on technique you want to rest your wrist on the table i might sound kind of funny after this i'm going to lower my hood but here we go we're going to turn on the gas valve you're going to drop the tungsten onto the metal and lift off there it starts to initiate your arc you're going to wait till it pulls a little bit and we're going to follow it down the metal at about a 15 degree angle keeping it off about 3 16 of an inch now we're going to tilt the torch back and we're going to break the arc by pulling away really quick then bring that tungsten down do not touch it back to the metal and once the metal cools off a little bit six seconds or so we're going to turn off the torque valve all right one more time with the filter in place turn on your gas touch off wait until it starts to pull and then move forward maintaining about 3 16 gap lean back break your ark [Music] bring it back in do you see how long that arc traveled there because i did it really slow i didn't break away quick gas coverage now turn off the gas i'll show one other thing here here's what happens when you vary your arc turn on your gas come in really close if you come in too close you're going to dip your tungsten in the metal wick right up and you have to grind it clean if you bring it out too far you see how far the arc gets it makes your puddle really wide but you end up not having a stable of an arc and you can risk getting bad shield and gas coverage getting too far out there you can bend bring this way out you'll see the arc when you want to travel and break the arc you know we're pulled off like really far here see that bubbling the metal coming out there because it's getting a bunch of contamination there so you go so you want to bring that in close we're getting a ton of contamination there because we brought it too far away bringing it back in now a lot closer and much tighter arc okay we're going to break the arc really quick here see that and bring it back over that and cool it down so you guys got to see when you bring this thing too far away you get a big arc just unstable and you start introducing oxygen to your well did a bunch of bubbling and we left the crater there so i want you guys to practice that technique for a while before you even try to incorporate filler rod to it because you want to get a routine of turning on the torch before you start to initiate the arc you're going to make that mistake sooner or later and you're going to realize really quick without gas coverage it's going to splatter the metal it's going to get up on the tungsten that happens don't try push on it's a lost cost just pull out the tungsten clean it with the grinder and come back and start over again work on keeping your height the same off the metal that's key and being comfortable you don't want to be all nervous when you're going to start the arc and break it you just want to be comfortable and relax you're going to get it once you get that figured out move on we got the welder still set at about 120 amps got some eighth inch i got a bunch of slots cut in it with the little band saw this kind of mimics like you're joining two pieces of metal together without actually having to tack weld a bunch of pieces of metal together so basically we're gonna add filler rod i'll bring you guys close in one more round of how to add the filler rod and then we're going to do a few pieces here and then wrap up the video okay we got our eighth inch steel here i got the little slots cut in it we got everything cleaned up with the flat wheel you can see around the edges this is some mill slag and rust contamination you don't want that anywhere near your weld or if you do have that close by you'll get splatter you'll get contamination on your tungsten and it's just no good so make sure everything's clean clean clean like we said before so a few things before we get going on this you don't want to be bringing your filler rod in and out of the weld area you want to keep it close in front of the tungsten because this area right down here is where all your shielding gas is if you bring it in and out a bunch you're going to introduce oxygen to the weld it's going to be porosity and contamination so when you get going on it of course the welder's off right now this is just for demonstration you're going to want to turn on your gas valve you want to touch off right at the beginning of your weld you're going to want to hold it there for a few seconds until you see a nice little liquid pool of metal right there and once you see that you're going to want to add your filler rod keep in mind every time you add your filler rod your little weld puddle is going to cool down a little bit because you're introducing cold metal to it you're going to kind of want to keep adding that you're not going to want to hop your torch with your filler rod that is not good you want to keep your torch a steady height just add your filler rod until you get to the end of your weld and once you get there pull out your filler rod tilt it back kick it away for a moment break your arc bring it back in and hold the shielding gas on it for about six to eight seconds turn off your torch and you're good to go here we go we got the welder set to about 120 amps gonna start the gas valve here and get going [Music] feels like it's a little on the hot side we'll probably turn it down to about 110 keep that area cooled down with that tungsten you want to get that tungsten shielded and the weld puddle shielded there so we're about a little hot so we're gonna bring it down to about 110 amps from 120. this is just stuff you can keep practicing on until you get the technique figured out turn on your gas start your weld wait for that puddle which happened pretty quick here start dabbing your filler rod [Music] break the arc pulled away cool down the tungsten and cool down the area with the gas blow and cut down on porosity in the weld so all right one of the last things i want to leave for you guys a little tip is don't ever forget to turn off your argon gas make sure when you're done turn it off even double check it the worst thing is to have a full tank of argon when you're done practicing come back a day or two later and have the smallest little leak and your bottle is empty all right you guys hope you enjoyed the video like i said this is like about 20 minutes or so video just the basics on the tig welding i don't claim to be a professional i taught myself how to take weld about two years ago it's been a great technique for me for welding up certain things like evolving the 16th inch hydraulic tank for my articulating dump truck you can do really thin metals with tig detail work and the aluminum welding aspect with an ac machine is nice and at some point down the road i'll do an ac video on aluminum welding specifically and setting up my acm machine if you enjoyed the video give it a thumbs up leave a comment down below and consider subscribing alright until next time guys take care bye

Channel: Mike festiva

Views: 418,917

Rating: 4.951632 out of 5

Keywords: TIG welder, welding aluminum, how to weld aluminum, fabrication, tig welding aluminum, what welder do you need to weld aluminum, tips on welding aluminum, how to tig weld, what gas do you use to tig weld, stubby gas lenses, 4x4 tractor build, mud mower, welding motorcycle parts, tips on welding, how to weld, Yes Welder, affordable welder, welder review, multi process welder, how do i tig weld, what do i need to tig weld, how to set up a tig welder

Id: 0enRXbhzW6U

Length: 21min 9sec (1269 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 04 2021