Making A Stand! Why I Love TIG Welding

Oh [Music] [Applause] [Music] I know we've talked about TIG welding before on this channel but this time it's gonna be different this time it's going to be all fluff no no don't try adjusting your picture you heard me right TIG fluff will take a step back and talk bigger picture and just why exactly I love TIG welding so much I mean compared to other welding processes not compared to say Oreo ice cream or my wife I guess [Music] when it comes to welding there's just nothing as versatile as TIG if it's metal and it's weldable well this will do it the upfront costs are a little higher we'll talk about that in a minute but depending on what you think you're likely to weld they don't have to be a very basic DC rig can cover a heck of a lot of bases the reason I bring this up why it even dawned on me to talk big picture TIG we're an unusually high number of comments and one of my more recent TIG brazing videos comments that demonstrated I wasn't as clear as I could have been [Music] [Music] I like to fix stuff more precisely I like being able to fix stuff if I so choose which I try not to choose that often now not knowing how to fix or make something for that matter is a completely different topic but not being able to is a whole nother level of infuriating and right there my dear friends in one or two sentences is the psychosis that led me to spending a small fortune on all my tools [Music] TIG welds have always held a very special place in my heart that's literally speaking I think of it like the grandchild of oxy-acetylene Welding the grandchild that's really good at computers without having to endure the internal struggle of whether or not you should just use your lighter because the striker is too far away with TIG at the push of a button the pointy tungsten electrode spits a quietly terrifying blue fire of near silent wanton destruction oxy-acetylene is somewhere in the neighborhood of 4000 degrees Celsius a TIG arc is three times that easy and oxy-acetylene can do this to steal I'm getting off-topic TIG welding so gas stick big lasers plasma they all have their place and their pros and cons I prefer and have settled on TIG welding I don't think anything's ever come through my door that I haven't been able to TIG weld though full disclosure I keep my door closed from steel to aluminum from big heavy work to really small detail work it's really just a matter of changing my settings and grabbing the right filler rod [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] all TIG welders can also do stick welding just about all the TIG welders I know anyway so there's that added bonus both stick and take our constant current processes the power supply is more or less the same I do tend to stay away from stick when I can just because of all the smoke in the cleanup and chipping slag that sort of thing but I do use it for real heavy stuff when I need it for example I built my hydraulic press with stick welds now with this TIG welder I think I could probably pull that off with the TIG welder I had at the time I was kind of pushing it but big picture for heavy stuff like that steak or a TIG just makes more sense though again it depends how often you're doing that if you're gonna buy just one welder if you're making hydraulic presses everyday it might not be TIG but if you do this as a hobby or heck maybe even have a job shop and you don't know what you're gonna be welding what material how big how heavy the versatility of one of these is just hard to beat and that's what makes it so appealing to me today I'm wearing an HTP inverted ACDC machine that's what I always wear it's the only thing in my wardrobe as the name implies this does both AC and DC just push a button and like magic it goes from one to the other I guess I'm only really stopping to tell you this because someone will ask though I do really like it let's talk about what you can weld with just basic DC TIG no fancy machines or I guess no fancy functions for that matter you can do basic DC TIG with a fancy machine these are just pieces I have laying around my garage so I apologize for the low production quality of my samples the obvious place to start is steel I suppose any milder plain carbon steel anything with low carbon content or medium carbon content all the way up to high carbon content like a tool steel this happens to be d3 the higher the carbon content the more careful you need to be when welding it the trickier gets but certainly weldable we can put chromoly in with this too and cast iron if it's mostly steel or iron I suppose your basic DC TIG welder can weld it then there's stainless steel that chemically fits in the same list but people tend to call that out it's different so we'll do the same in that family you could perhaps also add nickel and nickel based alloys like ink though once you get into the weldable metals families you could well lead I suppose and I guess pure zinc if you're making fancy roof ornaments or I don't know old timey buckets I'll be careful with that stuff zinc I mean not old timey buckets and then titanium fits in here somewhere finally we have brass bronze and copper again I apologize for not having flat well be looking stock most of my exotic materials happen to be for the machining work rounds for the leave in this case I didn't do great in chemistry but I'm pretty sure shape doesn't have any significant impact on the metallurgy you can weld round copper just as poorly as you can weld flat copper again all of this is done in DC direct current so even the most basic TIG welder covers a pretty impressive range of materials on top of that even the cheapest TIG welders do DC just fine if it turns on and actually works it should weld in DC just fine on the cheapest machines it's never really a question of whether or not it'll well DC it's more of a guessing game on if it'll turn on or not when you need it however a few caveats first we're just talking here a couple of kids with nothing better to do although DC TIG welding is used to join titanium or inconel and all this stuff I don't want you to think it's necessarily easy where you're gonna build a Space Shuttle with just your Harbor Freight welder but hey don't ever let anyone tell you what you can and you can't second we're talking specifically about welding these metals to themselves steel to steel copper to copper so forth so on and etc if you want to start doing genetic experiments and crossbreeding these there are some combinations that work and some that don't some combinations require a lot of care and attention above and beyond the actual welding to keep them from cracking during physical therapy which brings us to 0.3 I think it was three anyway a lot of these need auxilary equipment or proper thermal treatment pre during and post weld titanium for example once a ton of shielding gas in fact unless it's just really small parts and short welds do it in a purge chamber or on the moon zinc fumes for example can kill you so sure you've welded zinc with just DC TIG but now you're dead if you've got people waiting for you and you got work to get out the door you might want to save all your zinc welding for last brass is tricky also has a lot of zinc in it I think maybe lead in fact there are different flavors of these copper a stylist some that well better than others bottom line there's more in welding than just the right welder but the right welder of course goes a long way the point of this is to show you what you can do is just DC tick I'm sure there's metals that I've completely left out you can I think TIG weld gold and silver but unfortunately I don't have any of that bar stock on hand while we're on the topic this is where a TIG brazing fits in brazing is not welding it's a way of joining two pieces using a go-between metal chemically speaking that in-between metal is used to join the dissimilar metals metals that otherwise would be impossible or too finicky to actually weld this is a part I think we did back in the brazing video and it uses a copper alloy to join these two dissimilar metals it wets to both metals but the process doesn't technically fuse the two together think of it like really strong glue glue that works with a DC TIG welder and lastly for me anyway we have aluminum and magnesium but here now we're talking AC tick not DC reactive metals like aluminum and magnesium require AC and that more often than not means a more expensive welder apples-to-apples that is for example for the price of a DC only safe erroneous brand TIG welder you can buy almost three of the import AC TIG welders so sentences are complicated generally speaking though a DC TIG welder will cost less than a comparable quality AC TIG welder this is getting off topic a bit talking about machine selection but it's probably worth noting that there are other complicating factors above and beyond just AC vers DC such as amperage and duty cycle a smaller hundred amp TIG welder usually costs less than a larger 300 amp TIG welder and a machine with a lower duty cycle or how much time it can weld before melting its own brains out will cost less than a machine with a higher duty cycle why yes thank you I am pretty good at stating the obvious that is all to say buying your first TIG welder or any TIG welder always takes a bit of homework but probably the single largest deciding factor is whether you want DC or AC and DC capabilities which nicely brings us full circle to my lineup here a DC welder gets you all of this and the added cost of AC practically speaking really only Nets you the addition of aluminum and magnesium though depending on what you do those two can be real Biggie's you [Music] I might have made this too tall well I'll be I didn't really expect it to be that sturdy I didn't have any good place in my garage for this little leaf constantly moving it from my bench to the floor to the living room and back again was really getting old and I had the brilliant idea to add it onto my CNC router long term I plan to C&C this thing and I'd still be using the same computer monitor etc so I know I wanted to keep it close this also gives me a place to work on it without taking up precious bench space I plan to tie this frame in more add some shelving that sort of thing first I wanted to make sure I'm not interfering with the router it's like it should do for now but we'll see if there's any surprises I reverted to the original gears and installed the Chuck shield all of that will change but for now my kids have expressed interest in learning to use it so I thought I'd button it up as best I could and add the shield my boys not gonna be happy with the solid top slide I suspect his endgame is taper turning for that yet unobtainable perfectly pointy stick but we'll see how it goes I'm glad this thing's found a home and I can slowly start noodling away at it a couple of updates I thought I'd throw in here that didn't really fit in the rest of the video you may have noticed I didn't send the tick button back it's really started growing on me since last we saw it it was nice not having to drag the foot controller across the shop to add the lathe frame to the router for example again it does take some getting used to I'm not quite there yet still feels like I have more control with my foot but I imagine it's just a matter of more time with it second and perhaps a little anticlimactic these little wedge Kaulitz are really nice classic TIG collet the ones I've always used looked something like this they're split down their length and when you tighten the back cap they flex and tighten down on the electrode these are solid they just have sort of a eccentric conical tip we get you in closer here's a smaller one of comparable size to the wedge collet time to throw that one away probably these split collets traditional collet so I call them just because that's what I've always used tend to wear out lose their springiness you can see that gap is almost closed there and they get all twisted I guess from the heat pressure of screwing on the back cap sooner or later they get all deformed and just throw them away and put in a new one this wedge call it on the other hand doesn't show any signs of slowing down with these when you tighten the back cap that eccentric cone on the tip sends them all sideways and wedge the electrode in place what I really come to like about them though might sound a bit silly is they have less trouble with the paint on the back of the tungsten electrode slide right in right out on the older ones the traditional ones there are times when the paint build ups a little too much and they snag and you can't extract the electrode I've never really tried ripping these out pulling them too hard I mean the parts are relatively small sometimes usually on smaller electrodes usually when welding aluminum the tip might fall up too much or you might crash the point not me mind you and you end up with a ball at one end and paint on the other effectively trapping your electrode in the collet and you have to break the whole torch down and sharpen the electrode while it's still in the collar I don't know maybe it's just me it's a coincidence I happen to not crash the electrode as often as I used to so the new collet seemed better or I've been using the old call it's long past their expiration date should have been swapping them out more often whatever the case I think I'm gonna stick to buying these wedge style collets I just wish I would have gotten turned on to them sooner and on that embarrassing note it's probably good place any to stop thanks for watching

Channel: This Old Tony

Views: 1,438,727

Keywords: TIG welding, DC TIG, AC/DC TIG, wedge collets, tig collets, TIG BUTTON, amp control, titanium, inconel, aluminum, magnesium, copper, brass, bronze, mini lathe, mini-lathe, minilathe, fabrication

Id: aGsFdudG7Ho

Length: 16min 36sec (996 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 23 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/YOUREABOT]

You underestimate my power, I can weld any shape badly!