NEW! How to TIG Weld Aluminum

hey guys welcome to 5th Street Finn today's video where me dealing with outside corner aluminum and fill it welds on aluminum all right let's get do it so first step in cleaning these is these have been sheared so I got a take that edge see and I'm gonna hit it on the sander and then I'm going to run a file over it and knock down all the corners all right now they're all sanded just got a knock them down with the file now doing this is just for the ultimate clean for the best well that you you can get now like even my swelled fists I've never gone this far is usually just clean them up at the wire brush tap them together clean them again and then go to town and that's good enough but this I'm just showing you for the ultimate clean on aluminum now I'm gonna wipe them down with 70% isopropyl alcohol don't use that 90 it leaves a film on it so I'm just gonna wipe it down just basically where I'm gonna be wired brushing and this gets all the other stuff on the surface off so that when you're using a wire brush it doesn't embed the material down in there now I usually start up on edge like this and I'm going like a side by side most you kind of like I did with the file and you can watch and let's see if we can see and you can see the color difference here versus where I haven't got it and that's one way to tell that you've knocked off that oxide layer makes it real smooth when you're welding it so the more cleaning you do the smoother your weld is easier it is to weld the cleaner it lays it looks and smoother to once I've got that whole edge done then I turn it and you're gonna start and you're just putting light pressure on it and you'll feel it start to cut like it's digging and that means you've broken through that oxide layer you can also see the color difference and anywhere where you see the darker silver that's where it hasn't broken through yet so you can hit that from the side and it'll clean that up like that so then I just go through do the whole thing front and back especially if you're gonna weld on the back side one other thing this brush is only for use on aluminum it's a stainless steel wire brush I've only used it on aluminum all my small one for my aluminum ones so one other thing with aluminum when you're welding it the heat that it does it really sucks everything in so if you have something that's painted you really want to go back about an inch it's gonna burn up anyways right here but if it's like this close it's gonna suck it straight into the world now you can see the two spots where they've been cleaned both sides edge now I'm gonna clean those spots of alcohol before I put them together a lot of people use acetone but this stuff sticks on your hands it's nasty so I like alcohol because it cleans just as good for me and it dries super fast it's not on your hands for long [Music] normally when I'm putting pieces together I just hold them up to each other and tack it with a spool gun but I don't have spool gun and I don't have my big roller set up for a looming um right now since that's the case you're gonna hold everything together so I can get it with the TIG and you want this valley right here when you're welding especially aluminum because it uses all that to strengthen up the weld and then you don't have to use as much heat it can cut in there and it's not going to be as high humped if you have it like this you're not getting much strength and if you want full penetration it's going to need a lot of heat and that's going to have a really high crown on it [Music] and something this long you really need to put another tack here in the center especially on eighth inch now if you don't want any burn through a good idea is to keep a bar like this behind it when you weld it you clamp it down on both sides and that'll keep it at a perfect 90 so if you have C channel or something like that even if it's a thick thing of aluminum behind it it's not going to weld itself to it if it's something thin we're gonna wipe it down good measure and I cleaned off my filler before I started just wiped it through that I don't have anything to wipe it down any better than that [Music] I've got 200 amps machines maxed out it's on AC no pulsar my frequencies all the way at 200 just because I haven't really messed with it I'm always on 60 Hertz at work so I figured since I got this might as well use it I'm on about 40% AC balance my post was only about six seconds because I only need enough post flow on aluminum to wear my tungsten will stay nice and silver anything more than that you're wasting gas it's not like steel or aluminum I've got fifteen cfh when it's running and I'm just controlling the amperage with that little crappy pedal here's a quick tip if you're having trouble putting your tungsten back in a lot of times if it's too loose it won't go in so just tighten it down slightly until it'll go in then you're good so on this I'm gonna keep about a stick up somewhere around there quarter-inch or so number seven gasolines number seven gasolines 332nd tungsten is what I like to run for most things this is lanten ated and Syria it splits on you green tungsten bottles up way too much this is just about right for me all right so what I'll do is I like to run a ball on my tungsten so what I'm going to do is come over here find my balance crank it all the way down so some machines that will be opposite if you don't have AC balance control what you can do is either flip it - what is it DC positive I can't remember but basically you're gonna switch your ground with your ticket or CH swap them and then hit it and follow up your tungsten that way but since I have AC balance control I just turn it all the way down [Music] get a thick piece of material and I'm just gonna slowly work it with the foot pedal [Music] so there's the bar not quite the width a little smaller and when you have a machine that you can keep a sharper tip I like to have a smaller one like this if I'm running like the old sink relieves like at work I'll ball up the entire piece where it's wider than this one of the most important parts is being able to prop and hold steady the whole time so I'll stack whatever I have to a lot of times to get on to things if not and it's something awkward I'll just prop with my pinkie and do it I can and you can drag with your pinkie and still say stay really smooth but I try to get it to where my palm can rest right on there and then I can slide nice and smooth and I'll clamp these two parts to usually c-channel [Music] [Music] so here's what the finished bead looks like so each time I'm basically just waiting for it to fill all the way up adding my filler screw chin and I'm just doing to the edge of the puddle each time and that makes this real consistent bead so there's a lot of different ways you can hold your TIG torch when you're welcome so I always like to wrap it's on my opposite shoulder piece with shoulder and feeding filter with pressed it on that coming down over here and this is usually because I run a water-cooled torch and they're a lot heavier than this air-cooled one so anyways you can either hold it where this cord is wrapped around the outside it comes in like that or you can hold it like that where it's and it just depends about you or like that it depends I'm doing like a pipe okay we broke my hand I'll have it on the outside so that by the time I'm over here it's not messing with me a cut like this and I started coming in especially with the water flow line it's gonna be putting a lot of pressure right here and it's going to keep your torch away so before I start I'll just hold it up with [Music] and then I like if I'm doing aluminum I try and hold it as far back as I can especially on an air-cooled one because this will get super hot on an air-cooled on a water-cooled it'll stay perfectly fine but if you're this close your PM still on this far away from aluminum and you're usually running 200 250 amps and so that gets up there here like this this is how I love a minute you know I have or starts burning and they know where to take finger to a lot of time to rest on that like you're now that's the setup I have right now and I have probably I don't know maybe three eighths of an inch stick out on a number seven gas lens and I'm running fifteen cfh I don't run very much gas if you start running 20 and above it started to bring out your weld and it looks super frosty and also your article start dancing especially if you're only running like 60 Hertz so for this well basically all I'm doing is letting it puddle up and cool and once it soaks in top bottom and you can see it in the crack there's no horseshoe on it once it's in that crack I'll dab move forward and each time you're doing that you're wanted just on that edge of filling in so it fills in every time you move it but it's not like super hot I don't know you're just right on that verge and that'll leave it to where you don't really burn through on the other side but it's still in there nice and tight you can see if you look close that it's in there it's just right at the edge coming through and that's what you want if you're new put a piece of backing back there so you don't burn through but now I'll show you how to get full penetration on these ones around this so like when I'm doing fuel cells and stuff I want full penetration all the way through and basically all I'm going to be doing is I'm going to let it pull up go to just where I was saying you know it's starting to get in there nice and deep you can give it just a tiny bit more pedal than normal and just wait and that whole puddle will just drop through you'll see it just kind of like in the reflection you just go and kind of sink and that's when I know that I can start moving and dabbing and then the whole time I'm going to be keeping it to where I can see it drop when I move forward and then I add filler and it cools it pushes it back up if you start adding filler and it just stays sunken you're too hot you got to back off the pedal until it's right at that verge [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] so this is the one where I let it drop in and then started moving but I was making sure that it was pumping up as I was moving forward so this is the full penetration web and there's the penetration there's the non penetrated [Music] full penetration this is what I do for fuel cells or things that really are critical this is for things where it's like shelves and you can't get to the ends or you don't want the inside to be nasty or you need something to be able to sit up in there over on this beam and then my strength bead and when you're doing this one you can weld out like a full box like this and it won't overheat the Box very much but like this one when I do fuel cells or whatever after one pass I air it down with an air compressor before I do the next side otherwise it's going to start graying out and get too hot [Music] [Music] so I welded over that side where it wasn't full penetration just so you can see there's the kind of trade inside so I laid down and fill it well and this is what I do when both sides have to be nice as I'll weld the outside and then the inside so you can kind of see that that welder is pretty messed up from all this little weird bubbles it's just the cleaning actions just jumped on it anyways what I did is I got this tungsten nice and close and I just gave it enough juice to wear huddled together and basically if I left that there I could just flow straight down this joint and it would weld itself but it wasn't so much that it's burning through on the backside so you want to find that sweet spot just like I was saying on the open corner joint so you start it up get that puddle to where it'll flow and then you add some filler scooch forward and that whole puddle should run it with you it should I can't think of basically it should be nice and smooth up in that corner and that's how you know you have a tight enough arc with your tungsten to the workpiece and enough heat so if you're not getting that either move closer or a little more heat to it generally it's that you you're too far and you can listen and hear the difference it'll be real loud you know kind of whiny especially on 60 Hertz you can really tell and then when you get close it'll be nice and smooth and if you're too close it'll make this like noise like basically it's touching the material it's like in doing that so I'm doing the same thing I did on the open corner except on these I've found that if you dip wait just a second not even quite a second but after you dip instead of moving immediately like I do on the open corners on this I'll just sit there and then I'll scooch dip scooch dips couch dips couch dip scooch dip and it's kind of like that the whole time so add that filler wait a second move because if I don't wait a second it leaves out and which is fine it means it's penetrated in there but you don't get these pretty dimes basically you get it like a roll of V's almost and then at your stops always add a few extra drops of filler while you're slowly adding our letting off the pedal [Music] that wraps up today's video like I said this TIG welder is on its last leg it was really hard to get those welds to come out alright so it's probably gonna be the last video for a while until I get a new TIG to do any aluminum but if you do have questions leave them in the comments and I'll try to explain or get through as many as I can anyways like of this video helped you subscribe if you're not that way you can check out all of my welding videos and hit that Bell that way you get notified every time I upload one and check out some of the other ones that I already have all right you guys you have a good one

Channel: 5th Street Fab

Views: 456,765

Rating: 4.8462334 out of 5

Keywords: tig welding aluminum, how to weld aluminum, how to tig weld aluminum, tips for welding aluminum, aluminum tig welding, tig welding for beginners, best aluminum tig welding, how to tig weld aluminum for beginners, aluminum welding tutorial, tig welding aluminum tutorial, alphatig 200x aluminum settings, how to tig aluminum with alphatig, weldporn, aluminum weldporn, tig welding aluminum for beginners, aluminum tig welding for beginners, aluminum tig welding techniques

Id: UB-uXMly6fs

Length: 23min 12sec (1392 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 28 2018