PuLsEd TiG WeLdiNg

today we're gonna be taking a quick look at pulsed TIG welding here at this old toni studios in beautiful Las Vegas Nevada we like to mix things up something here for everyone as long as you like machining or welding oh there's something here for everyone and and we may have covered pulsing here in the past I don't quite remember don't you know it's not nice interrupting a babbling old man who's accidentally locked himself in a garage with a bunch of tools and internet connection and too much pride to call for help we probably won't be talking about the nitty-gritty like how to set it up which settings to use or that kind of stuff this is more big picture like when pulsing might help when you might want to turn it on we'll start off with some thin stainless that's sort of the poster child for pulse TIG and perhaps some other oddball situations where pulsing and help like TIG welding upside down some of you have been observant and kind enough to ask about my voice new audio plug-in I'm trying called sexy times got some kind of a cold coming on I don't know what it is kids bring home all sorts of stuff ask you to please bear with me till it passes in the meantime I'm welding plenty of galvanized steel and getting a lot of zinc in me pulsed TIG isn't complicated there's nothing particularly magic about it though it can be a lifesaver when you need it and of course you can most certainly get by without it rather execute a weld that would otherwise benefit from pulsing using different techniques but if you got it if you paid for it you might as well take advantage no yes maybe anyway before we get into pushing buttons or turning knobs let's set the stage it was the start of a beautiful autumn I couldn't have been more than 8 or 9 and I had the day off from school the scientists told us it wasn't my bad wrong story when it comes down to it and I mean when doesn't it when it comes down to it welding is all about heat control everything from machine settings to how you hold your torch to how you sit down if you're sitting down at all travel speed adding filler the sum total of all that stuff is heat and how its interacting with the thing that you're welding when you first start out that usually means the amp setting big stuff needs more amps because it needs more heat enough heat to melt through rather I should say get proper penetration not so much that you're cooking your part but enough that you're laying down a sound weld although your amp setting will still be the primary setting for the heat you're putting into the part you may have unconsciously picked up a couple of tricks you may have learned to compensate with your travel speed or if you're TIG welding how much or how often or how little filler you're adding as you're moving along perhaps with sticker with MIG you learn that a shallower angle makes welding thinner stuff a little bit easier things like that maybe you're getting the point for the same amp settings there are some subtle things you can do to give you a little bit more control of how that heat is interacting with your part but here we're talking TIG welding this may just be my bias speaking but I don't think any other welding process affords you the heat control that TIG does or a TIG Ken and sometimes depending on what your welding TIG might be your only option you want to weld cherry to that mahogany good luck doing that with MIG at times instead of welding with a steady constant current it could help to ease off on the amps ease off on the heat the traditional way to do that typically is with a foot controller ignore the button that's mounted on my torch it's probably confusing but with a foot controller you know like a gas pedal you can give it a little bit more when you need it and ease off when you don't you remember when you were a kid and your goofy dad might have bumped the gas while you were waiting at a light of course those were the good old days so you weren't strapped in in fact you were probably standing on the roof of your car waving hi to your friends driving by you consequently we're also standing on the roof of their cars or locked in the trunk with the dog bumping the gas would make everyone fall over and laugh until you that someone got hurt or mom intervened that's what welders do with the foot pedal that's usually called I guess manual pulsing and we'll be taking a look at both manual pulsing and machine pulsing but more specifically machine pulsing in fact let's take a look at what that looks like first here's constant amperage and this this is me being your dad with the gas pedal this is manual pulsing giving it more gas easing up giving it more gas easing up for the same exact settings on the machine some fancy footwork or playing with your travel speed can net you some different results this of course was with no filler adding some filler can blur the lines a bit but here we're talking about the behavior of the arc now instead of using the pedal to pulse let's just turn the Pulsar on on the machine let it do the fancy footwork for us miss one for comparison's sake I'm going to fuse weld with no pulse machine is set to 60 amps which if I did my math right should be the equivalent heat of 120 amp 40% pulsed that I did the other samples with I'm going to floor the foot pedal so it's consistent 60 all the way across the only wild card here will be my travel speed but I'll try to keep that similar I'll be judging by the melt front of the weld puddle let's see what happens [Laughter] these welds aren't much to write home about but let's take a look at the difference between the two perhaps you can see that for the same effective heat the pulse setting has a smaller heat affected zone than the non pulse setting getting closer at the camera again this side was pulse welded this was just straight DC I'm not sure exactly where to call that but let's say measure to the where that brown line is a darker outside halo hopefully you can see that the heat affected zone on the pulse side is I don't know probably half of that on the non pulse side looking at these welds under this kind of magnification you might almost make the argument that 60 amps was too hot if I had any more of this material it would have been fun to try this at 50 but my guess is the lower amperage would result in a much slower travel speed which would circle back around to the same cumulative heat input and since we're here these things look like they probably wanted a little bit more gas to that sounded like stating the obvious I apologize to anyone who's actually tried pulse welding it becomes very apparent very quickly that it's not as much heat input as straight welding in fact to get your pulse welding to weld at all you may usually find yourself bumping up the pulsed amperage to get enough heat on the hot shot on the peak of that pulse to properly fuse or create that little weld nugget a little weld bead in other words if your experience is anything like mine you'll turn on pulse welding you'll set it to I don't know what you think might work say a hundred amps you'll start a well then you'll discover that isn't enough and then you'll sneak it up to 110 or 120 or flip side of that you may increase the pulse on time when you get that balancing act right one shot of the pulse train again will melt a nice little weld bead little weld nugget just like what happened when I was tacking the ends up prepping these things for a full weld that is effectively just one pulse hot enough to melt and tack the material but not hot enough to blow a hole right through it and that's what's happening here just a lot of those pulses one after the other one potential downside to pulsing with a machine pulsar you can stumble on settings that look like you're getting a good fusion like they look like a nice weld not like these mind you but it'll look like a nice bead but you won't have any penetration it's just like you're melting the surface that I found tends not to happen with a foot pedal like if you're pulsing with the foot controller usually if your goal is to lay down a sound strong weld you probably will most likely because in that case you're not pulsing as fast you can see that the bead or the little nugget or whatever the weld pool isn't tying in as deep as it should before you move on a pulsar on a machine sometimes can hide that maybe especially on stainless but particularly when you're at higher pulses this happened to be at 15 and it was just right on the edge of hypnotizing me and knocking me out like watching that light pop on and off it's hard to keep track and see potentially a very small puddle but in this case this is thin stainless and you could check the penetration on the back full disclosure and maybe you can tell just by looking I don't use pulsed welding a lot I think where it might really shine is when you're doing a lot of one kind of part something you can fine-tune the settings for then write those down or like the HTTP has store those settings in memory the job comes up pull the program up again and you're off to the races though I do use it when really thin stuff comes around I'll instinctively turn on pulse almost as a matter of course then try to sneak up on the settings but it's got to be really thin otherwise I just default to the foot controller though quite a few folks have suggested trying the silicon brazing again with pulse settings and laying the wire in the joint maybe that's where I'll end up using it most who knows in any case it's nice to have options and know how to use them or know what they do at any rate you know what I just remembered something this is a little test piece I did when I first built the rotary weld table also thin stainless and if I'm not mistaken actually looking closely at it I'm almost certain this was pulsed DC welding in cases like this the perfect machine timing results in a weld I just frankly couldn't do by hand to mention there's a rotary table involved so that takes out a big part of the human element of course you're probably the best judge on whether pulsed TIG is worth it for you again it depends on what you think you want to do with your welder I personally like to have options speaking of which and this is going to be a heck of a tangent a long time ago back when TIG was called Healy our basic welder is used to be these giant refrigerator sized appliances on wheels I'm talking really ancient like from the turn of the sixteenth century and the Pulsar was the person behind the wheel if you wanted to take advantage of alternating the heat you had to do it yourself in time add-on modules started to become available to expand the capabilities of what we're already pretty high-tech machines for the time you could for example get a separate high frequency start add-on you still can by the way that was installed between your welder and your cables that well added the ability for high frequency arc starts before that it was only scratch start maybe lift take I'm not sure I mean frankly I don't know why I didn't think about it back then but on modern machines they just add another button to the control panel to turn that on and off in hindsight seems like a no-brainer huh you can also get what they called a sequencer or a slope controller maybe it was yet another add-on that would add the ability for soft starts pre gas ramp up ramp down times post gas that sort of thing I'm not exactly sure because that was before my time I never used one but the graph you see on the front of modern TIG welders are still called sequencers well by me anyway they represent the same programmable cycle from button push to button release and finally there were pulsers again I think you might still be able to buy an add-on pulsar but it was another box you'd wire somewhere into that now thousand-pound fire hazard that had become your TIG welding rig a long will as you've probably noticed it didn't take long for all of those features to be built into one single piece of equipment all those features got very popular so today along with the comparable ease of doing it digitally it's all built right into the machine high frequency start pulsing sequencing etc though in this day and age it's probably getting harder and harder to even find a TIG welder without pulse feature in it how many of those features you actually get depends of course on which machine you buy what I think pulse TIG was probably really developed for was maybe robot welding but according to my statistics robots make up only a small percentage of my subscriber base so we won't get into that sidebar to a sidebar if you're just starting out I think pulse is also a great learning tool use it to develop a consistent torch and filler motion it's sort of a clock you can work to set it down low somewhere around 1 or less pulses per second and just use the machines clock to time your welding you can't really add too much or too little filler when you have the welder cracking the whip so consistently psychologically it probably also helps to keep your travel speed more uniform that was a pull setting of 0.5 or a pulse every 2 seconds that's probably a little bit slow 1 pulse per second feels a little more natural to me but you know tune it down as low as you feel comfortable add filler on the high pulse scootch ahead a little bit on the low pulse you could also take advantage of some of the arced down time to reposition your hand a bit but that slow rhythmic pulsing you know you could use it as a learning aid the more you do that the more you might develop the muscle memory to weld without the Pulsar last thing I'd like to try emphasis on try is to take advantage of pulse welding to weld out of position specifically upside down attack the piece of tubing up on my bench and I've got the coupon tacked to that welds only about three inches long but it's upside down completely horizontal if anybody's ever tried this say up on the ladder under a car you may know that it's just a matter of time before one of those weld beads ends up sizzling in your ear with the right pulse settings and any luck the weld bead solidifies fast enough to keep gravity from having it introduce you to your ear or the inside of your shoe up a sleeve places you'd really prefer it not to be I think I need more gas or I should have cleaned that better let's try another one [Laughter] what can I say it's been a while I did notice the first one was running a little bit cold I bumped it up about 510 more amps I should have gone a little bit slower that bead is a bit sunken maybe you can make that out add it a little bit too much on the ends or maybe didn't get out of there fast enough they started to drip but yeah let's not talk about this ever again all right I always feels good ending these things on a high note anyway I think that's all I got in me for a pulse welding if you've got it on your machine and you've never tried it take it for a spin it's another tool in the toolbox use it if you think it'll help maybe use it to work on your timing hopefully somewhere in all that banter you found something that you liked thanks for watching know check out what you showed up these things are so tiny next time or sometime at any rate we'll chat about a different kind of pulsing until then

Channel: This Old Tony

Views: 409,801

Rating: 4.9562802 out of 5

Keywords: pulsed tig, tig welding, HTP221, out of position welding, tig timing, pulse, fusion welds, stainless steel

Id: HOL1bMC-UJQ

Length: 16min 28sec (988 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 31 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/inertialfall]

I fucking love the cameos he throws in.