Mig welding set up Part 1 Volts/power and wire speed Tips and Tricks #45

[Music] and welcome to my blog welcome to part one in the miniseries of MIG welding so I've been asked loads and loads of questions over the years and what I've done is I've compiled the repeated questions I was going to put them all into one video and I certainly realized this video is going to be absolutely massive and we know how upset people get when things go past the half hour mark so what I thought I'd do is to point into three so you've got three videos to look forward to watching I've practically shot it all so there'll be one after another there won't be any great big breaks in between and so part one this part is going to be all about power settings and wire feed settings part two is going to be about hands on welding more it's going to be more about doing plug welds and butt joints also going to discuss the difference between MIG and TIG and the advantages disadvantages in the third part going to talk about gas settings and I'm also going to talk about the confusion between the hole volts and amps thing that people have gotten themselves sort of got it all wrapped around a head I tried the mr. Foyle try my best obviously I'm not a world in expert and I just use welding in my job I'm not like a production line welder or anything are this is this e the the things that you're going to see in this video are gonna be things that are sort of you know I've come up with myself I'm gonna use a lot of analogies a lot of metaphors to try and get my point across so there's gonna be a few holes in what I say but hopefully you'll have a better understanding of what's going on rather than listening to a true expert that just baffles the hell out of you so let's get back to part 1 I said this video has been made off the back of all the questions I've been asked over the last couple of years so I'm going to assume that the viewer knows absolutely nothing about welding and we're going to start right the beginning right at the basics this welder it's also a stick welder or arc welder it's also got a spool gun attachment so that you can world aluminium I haven't got that so I can't show you that so let's just discount this side of the welder all we're really focusing on is these two dials here so we've got a voltage or power control so if you've already got a MIG welder and more than likely you've probably got a step switch on your welder because that's more common this is an inverter welder so this is variable so you'll probably out of a variable wire speed on a steps which if you haven't got an inverter welder now it's no different to this at all it works in the same way the welder works the technology behind it works differently but the actual world or a be similar characteristics so I can talk you through exactly like for like we won't get lost put basically to successfully MIG weld all you need to think about is this voltage stroke power control now if you're wearing something thin you need it quite low the thicker the material you keep winding the power up and it is as simple as that summer that's really thick you're going to use the higher power something that's really thin like car body stuff which is more what I'm sort of used to welding is going to be right down here somewhere and anything else in between Baca say as it gets thicker you just increase the power and that is really as simple as it is that's all as simple as it needs to be now all we need to do then is to match our wire speed to our power setting so it's no more complicated than that so you first dial in the voltage you want so you'll dial that in you'll think to yourself well this is quite thick stuff it's much thicker than what I've been welding so I'm just going to turn the power up so you all do that to start with see power up to where you think and then you adjust your wire speed to match the voltage and I'll show you how to do this so you keep just in the wire speed starting from a lower position I went first if you're not used to welding start from a load low position first and work your way up until the welder is welding is optimum now if you haven't got the penetration required so you can tell that you're not getting enough heat there because heat equals penetration then what you need to do is put more power on it's as simple as that put more power on and then adjust your wire speed to suit again and then assess where you are you know if you're blowing holes in things then you've got too much power on so you need to down the power down the wire speed and then set up the wire speed again and it really is as simple as that I got a bit of a test rig mocked up here got a piece of steel in it's only thin stuff song in a well this had quite a lower power setting because we don't want to be blowing holes in it straightaway now what this part of the video is is is all about matching the wire speed with the power setting we go basically just setting the wire speed up we're not going to be looking at weld quality we're not going to be looking at the penetration necessarily but what this is really all about it's all about showing you how I can start with no wire speed on keep turning it up until we get to the optimum wire speed and then keep turning our too high so that we show you what you don't want as well as what you do want [Music] [Music] so here's our finished weld I could have done with the powered just turned up a little bit more than I had but for the purposes of this demonstration it was pretty much perfect really so this is the start point of the world so when I was welding the world I was making this kind of noise [Music] now I refer to that noise as a stalling noise so I would say wire speed to slow and the weld stalling you can hear that it's sort of intermittently arcing out and not really doing a great deal and then as I increase the wire speed you can hear it making this kind of noise you can hear it continuing on as I increase the wire speed more and more and more until in the end so much wires coming out that the welder starts to stutter what I would call stuttering and this is where the wire is coming out so fast there aren't enough amps there to melt the wire so what actually happens is the Warriors coming out of a torch and hitting the workpiece and if you'd have ever experienced this you'll actually feel the torch trembling in your hand and that trembling is the wire hitting the workpiece because of course when your MIG welding the initial contact to strike the arc is the only time the welder the world in wire should actually hit the workpiece once you've actually got an arc going then the wire is melting before it actually hits the workpiece and that's why you don't feel anything when you've got it set up correctly so this is what it's doing here it's stuttering out towards the end now I'll talk a little bit about well penetration now so as you can see this area I mean like I say looks a little bit thin and weedy the world to be quite honest but this kind of area from around about here to about here it looks pretty good if I flip it over you can see that it's a bit it's a little bit smoother it's a little bit more desirable from like an appearance look as well you can see that it's doing something so if we flip it over and keep them camera in roughly the same place we can see well penetration that's gone all the way through the steel popped out the other side this is the kind of thing we need to be looking for when we're talking about the strength because if the world isn't penetrating into the steel then you're not getting a strong Wells and that's what it's all about really it's all about making something look obviously make it look nice but also when it looks nice you know that it's kind of penetrated in so this is what setting up the wire speed is all about you keep speeding the wire speeder until you get to a point about there and what you can do is what I'm going to show you next it's just basically running beads across pieces of metal and then observe in what's going on behind to see what sort of penetration you're getting so that's what I'll show you next I've got some small sheets to your samples here and though these are one point two millimeter thickness and this was one point two millimeter thickness now the reason I've used one point two is because it resists blowing through far more than standard 0.9 millimeter which I would use for outer skin panels on cars and that's why I'm using this what I didn't want to do is I didn't want to get halfway down our test piece and then blow a great big hole in it which it probably would have done if I was using 0.9 so that's why I'm using this stuff so what I'm going to do as I might I may only use three or four of these I don't know yet but what I'm going to do is run a bead down the center of each one and try and show you the difference in penetration to wire speed so I'm going to set the voltage or the power at a certain point and I'm not going to what I'm going to do again is just increase the wire speed each time and then we can you know we can break it down and we can see the difference I'm going to put a lot more power on this time and I'm going to do that because there wasn't an appropriate mat apparel on the last test subject but on this one I want to show you the characteristics of what they're sort of well it looks like when you've got a bit more power and hopefully we'll see the weld absorbed into the steel more than just sat on the surface [Music] so I got three good samples that are fairly representative of what I was trying to show I couldn't actually get the world it's a world badly enough to show you the slow one to pick up the correct characteristics of normally well into slow which is a lot of heavy undercoat I've got a little bit of undercoat going around here but overall it's come out better than I sort of hoped it would really sounds a bit bizarre to say that but there you go so we're looking at the world it's a messy looking world and it's too flat too wide and it's got undercut and that is characteristics of Wilding with too little wire speed so removed to the best one next perfectly satisfactory weld not too wide and it's not stood up too high either just a real really nice well proportion wild I'd be very happy myself if I was doing a project and all my welds ended up like that check the bits so next to fast so what's happening here is of course the wires coming out so fast there isn't enough of pumps available to melt the warrior so the wires not arcing properly a lot of it's driving into the workpiece and then just sort of snapping off on impact you can see that the world is very very tall mostly sat on the surface so let's flip them over and let's see what I didn't like the other side this is the one that was too slow you got a little bit of penetration going on here but nothing too much to talk about and this is the best one of course and the best one you'd almost be forgiven that I'm turning the herb so let's look at the other side again it's almost like a nice tubular weld on a flat plane left it's like a tube sunk into a Lane it looks it looks the same both sides couldn't ask for any more really and the one that was too fast again very little penetration if I compare the one seat to slow then there's not really much difference between the two is there so no penetration when it's set too fast or slow excellent penetration when you get the wire speed set to just about right this is the Goldilocks zone here another repeat question I'll keep getting in the form of emails normally people sending me pictures of the panel work that they've welded together and they've ground the world off and you can see a line underneath where the world just doesn't penetrate it I honestly believe that this comes from being a little bit worried about the welder they've tried a world cement and blown a great big hole on what they found is they've turned up the wire speed which stops it from blowing into a hole but now they haven't got the penetration so I'm going to do is try try and weld this badly enough to kind of demonstrate what happens when you weld with a wire speed set far too high it's an observation I think on my last video I mentioned it's an observation a lot of guys that I've worked with that come to me and said oh the world is not wild in very well and I kind of leaned across and just notice the worse be down a bit and often things improve no end it's not always as obvious as it seems but like I say it's just an observation of mine so I'm going to weld this with no low power low voltage and wire speed that's too high I don't kind of show you the scenario that a lot of people run into this is fairly typical of what I would have seen somebody has sent me a picture of something they've wired it out it looked kind of like this and it could actually be welded in all honesty it could be wild it up okay but from this outside perspective you can't really see what's going on under the surface so I this very low power very high wire speed we're growing this off and then I'll show you what's going on under the surface with the world ground off flush it looks to all intents and purposes not too bad you can't really see a line there or anything and it's quite flush watch what happens when I start points and moving into the panel I'm going to do exactly as I showed you earlier I'm just going to knock the wire speed all the way down and then I'm going to match the wire speed with the voltage to get the optimum penetration and weld that panel across I'm going to use a kind of pulsing type well that a lot of people use ie have done lots of videos with a gap but I'm not going to do that this time just for the purposes of this video just to show you the penetration or use exactly the same two pieces of metal again so the world now that's completely different to what it did before when I wanted it before and we're welding exactly the same power setting just a lot lower wire speed I flip it over see we've got excellent penetration on the back and of course I wouldn't weld a joint like this with a MIG welder on a car because I'm going to absolutely distort the hair like the panel I have their videos in the past I'll show you can do a cheap sway by putting a gap across and then welding into the gap to get excellent penetration through the other side but I'm not this isn't what this video is all about you could get away with this on a very short joint and probably get no heat distortion but anything much wider than this you're going to be running into all sorts of trouble if one of the frustrations you're having with welding very very thin steel and all car bodywork with your MIG welder is that let's just say for argument's sake you've got the transformer type Wilder with a seven or a six position chickenhead power switch on the welder that power or voltage same thing and say let's just say for argument's sake let's just say that it okay on power number two so you said it to number two but you're just not getting the penetration you could just do with a little bit more power you could just do with a little bit more heat a little bit more penetration so you turn your switch up to number three and then just blow a great big hole in the panel this is an extremely common problem that people have so I've done a graph here to try and explain what's going on and I've worked out a solution to this problem and it's fairly straightforward so we've got on the graph we've got wire speed here so this is wire speed from one to ten so obviously the dial is all the way down at zero and then you just turn it up and it goes all the way to number ten on this side here we've got well penetration so this is our well penetration this side well penetration we've got good so this red line here is where the well penetration is acceptable and it goes all the way along and anything above this line or on this line is perfectly okay us would be deemed as a great weld you know we're getting good penetration and we're producing a nice strong weld there anything below the line isn't isn't penetrating enough so let's just say for argument's sake we're on power setting number two so it's this would be power set number two if we were on power setting number three this line here the gap between there and there would be very slightly longer and the whole thing would be moved slightly to the right but basically it would look like this it wouldn't look much different to this one now let's say you're on power setting number two wherever you set your wire speed you just not get in enough penetration you can't really work out what to do next so you think I know I'll put on number three so you clock it onto number three and instantly you blowing holes in everything so you're sort of trapped in this situation where you've got one setting it isn't enough and another setting it's too much well the good news is there's a solution to this so if we follow the graph so we go from no penetration of course we follow the graph all the way up now as we're following the graph of course what we're doing is we're turning the wire speed up so as we turn the wire speed up the graphs following along so we'll get to a position where we'll turn the wire speed up so we are getting good penetration as I showed you in the world in test earlier you know kept turning the dial up and then we suddenly start getting good penetration and it gets better and better and better and then it starts dropping off so it's slopes back down anywhere in this place here is absolutely falling like I said any anything above this line is perfectly acceptable so what it'll do is is you keep increasing it you'll find that the penetration or drop off and on a low power setting this gap is shorter than it is on a higher power setting I'll show you another graph in a minute of a higher power setting but just stick with this for now so what you can do is looking at the graph if you change your Wilder from power setting number two to number three so as I said you turn it to number three nor instantly glow in holes what you then need to do is to turn the wire speed up so we fight we follow this graph because it's going to be a very similar graph on power set and number three as it is number two so what we do is you be say there let's just say for argument's sake you were there so you were at the maximum part of the graph that's giving you the most amount of penetration and that's where you are when you turn it out to number three or right there on the peak and you're blowing holes if you turn the wire speed up so you keep turning it up you'll see that this line starts dropping down so the higher you turn it the less penetration you will get until you come into the realms of it being unacceptable so if you're on power number three and you're blowing holes you know that if you turn the wire speed up you're going to follow this graph until the penetration drops off and you will get to a position somewhere between there and there where you've got a perfect world going on perfect penetration and you've stepped it up a power setting and you've got then the perfect situation where you're putting in more wire speed to get less penetration now the confusing thing about this is a lot of forums and a lot of manufacturers specs say as a general rule because they make a lot of blanket statements they will say something like the more wire speed so the more you turn at the wire speed the more penetration you get and that's not really true when we're talking about Wilding at much lower power settings it may be true for much much larger units for something that's producing lots and lots of power but for just small mig welders then i would have said that this this graph I've made I mean this is something I've created hopefully that's a good tip for you and hopefully that'll help the people out they've contacted me they're having these problems now you might just think to yourself as I was saying that well the graph drops off as well the line drops off this side so we're getting less penetration that way see you may be thinking to yourself well I could turn the wire speed down and get a similar result but if we remember the three plate tests I did where we didn't have an F or a speed on you'll note that the world sinks into the steel you get poor penetration you also get a heck of a lot of in the cook so you're far better off in it higher than you are lower because as you go higher you're actually increasing the chances of getting a better world of getting better penetration and a stronger world if you go down this slope then you're going to be heading into the realms of still blowing holes and also having a lot of undercuts of the wilds so this is another chart I've done just to try and show the difference of what's going on so say we were at power setting number six we were welding something much much thicker so we're nearly running the world of flat oh then the graph is going to look more like this where we've got no penetration right at the start we've got the wire speed turn right down and we're just not getting any penetration and as we as we raise the wire speed we get acceptable penetration here and then we've got our really really really long arc all that way keep just keep sort of rising and rising and rising he'll either rise when we when you're on a highest power sitting alive arise and just keep going up or it may just start to tail off slightly at the end like I said it depends what while you've got what thickness were in video number three I'm going to try and help people out that are confused with the whole volts and amps situation because there are a lot of very very confusing videos and a lot of very confusing kind of online forum type things where people endlessly get lost and confused and in number three I'm going to attempt to give you a few analogies to try and get your head around that but I mean all we really need to know is like I said right to start the video you set your power first so set your power first to the thickness that you want to weld and then set your wire speed after which to match and these two graphs of hopefully giving you an insight into what's actually going on having an inverter mig welder our bodywork is certainly an advantage over having in a transformer type because you've got a variable voltage control you haven't got any step switch so that it means that if you've got slightly too much voltage on slightly too much power on you can actually just nudge it down slightly rather than having to play with a wire speed to compensate for the step between the power settings well thanks very much for watching I hope you enjoyed it I hope you got something out of it don't worry if what you wanted to know about wasn't answered in this video because there's another two parts to come so part two I'm going to show you some plug welding some butt welding welding diff similar thickness thicknesses together so two different thicknesses being well together don't do a lot of that but I keep getting asked about it a lot so I'll do my best to answer it if you know I'm saying I'm also going to show you how to clean welds up nicely I'm also going to discuss the differences between TIG welding and MIG welding on car bodywork and the advantages and disadvantages hopefully but what I do anyway what you do isn't solidly up to you isn't it so I'll see you in part two bye for now [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] you [Music] [Applause] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] here's Johnny [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Trev's Blog

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Length: 31min 41sec (1901 seconds)

Published: Wed May 06 2020