Stainless Steel Welding Tips - TIG Welding

hey Jovi here with welding tips and tricks' calm I'm take welding a stainless steel part today it's a cooling manifold that will go in a local blow mold factory you know it's of water in large inlet and a bunch of smaller threaded nipples going to who knows where that's about all I know about the part I know it's stainless steel and I know I want to keep it stainless steel that's the theme of today's video keep stainless stainless I should be a t-shirt and I say that because stainless steel but the perception is well stainless steel doesn't rust yeah you can make it rust you can screw up the stainless properties while you're welding it so we'll get right into the welding right now but at the end of the video I'm gonna list some bullet points on how to keep stainless stainless how to maintain the stainless properties not screw them up let's do it ideally we'd be using a piece of stainless steel square tubing here but this is what I've got to work with it's been cut on a plasma cam all the holes were popped in there with the plasma cam it's been sanded but it still needs good acetone wipe all right sometimes all you need is an acetone wipe other times you might have to get out of buffing wheel or something like that but it needs to be clean before you willed it and so that was pretty nasty I'm using aluminum angle for backing as well as for chill bars today you know sometimes parts require a high purity purge other times aluminum or copper backing is sufficient to just provide enough enough protection on that back side to not cause any degradation of the stainless properties so we need a good fit up with no gap I like my corner joints to be a lot about like this corner to corner we're about to get some tacks on this thing I'm using this this little seek a world wide Mt 200 today I'm going to be using straight DC current today and I'll do a few videos and get into some aluminum and pulse and things like that this is the torch that came with it a nice little super flex cable this is the hardware kit that came with it nice little kit I just don't use these style collet bodies much anymore at all I have pretty much switched over solely to using a stubby gas lens kit for a whole lot of years I use a setup just like this with a standard Cup and an end cap a short button end cap for pie welding for getting in tight spots but even with a setup like this you can't get in as tight a spot as you can with the stubby gas lens and I just like it better it shrinks the overall size of the torch I got used to welding with small water-cooled torches and I don't like to always use a water cooler these days so a lot of times I'll use my air-cooled 17 but with the stubby gas lens kit and it goes together something like this and the main benefit is better shielding I can stick my electrode out a lot farther and it's just a nice feel nice small torch with good shielding all right I'm gonna set the machine nope no pulse today we'll do pulse in part two I'm gonna set it to 200 amps and get some really quick quick burst tacks on this thing I'm using filler rod because of its eighth of an inch thick today but if this was like half this thickness I probably would get really quick bursts tax without filler at all just a really quick blast and try to make the tack nice and small and clean it's a really quick way to tack together some joints like this and I'll have my tacks about every every three inches or so sometimes closer if there's a slight gap and I want to shrink the gap up I'll put more tax so I'm putting together two halves and I'm using that angle backing to pull heat out as well as to hold it straight and once I got the two halves together I'm gonna weld it all up using backing after I get it tacked and then I'm also going to add chill bars it takes a lot of clamps to do this a little bit of effort but it's very much worth while I'm a little concerned on you know distortion with this much welding on stainless steel so I'm going to really spend some time making sure that all these all these corner joints are backed up with an angle on the inside and good fit and all that now I've got three pieces of this angle one shorter than the other is the other two pieces are long enough to reach the whole distance and all I can leave those in there this one short one I'm gonna have to move around a little bit I'll weld a little bit over halfway then I'll unclamp it shift it over and move it the other and it just takes a minute and honestly it's probably helps and just slowing me down a little bit keeping me from getting in too big a hurry and overheating anything but this is going to pull a lot of heat out of that stainless steel it's worth the effort definitely see how close I've got the chill bars clamped up there if this was thinner I'd have them maybe even a little closer all right I'm gonna adjust the amperage now and stainless requires only about 2/3 the amps typically that carbon steel does at least for a joint like this so I'm gonna I'm gonna settle in at a hundred amps and that wound up being just about right I was full pedal for most of this job after I after I set this up which made me think I actually could have used a finger switch on it if I wanted to but machine comes with a pedal and I use the pedal you want to keep your travel speed as fast as you can not to the point that you're out of control but to avoid heat from building up that the the chill bars are really pulling a lot of heat out so I could could actually go slower than this and still not have any problems at all but just as a general practice you want to light up get a puddle going and get moving within about probably I'm gonna say two seconds a seconds even better because without the chill bars heat will build up quickly and you need to light up get a puddle going and get moving to avoid heat buildup and avoid distortion and everything so it's doing its job here's a quick look at the foot pedal you know a major manufacturer did a survey years ago on the favorite foot pedal of welders and this was the winner the old-school big metal sheet metal block pedal with the heel hook on the back and so that's what they decided to go with here and it's pretty nice I'm using 1/16 diameter ER 308 al filler for this job the job is 304 stainless steel and it's typically welded with 308 filler if this was carbon steel I might very well use a 332 diameter two point four millimeter filler wire just to keep from feeding so much but this worked this worked pretty good a general rule of thumb is one size smaller filler wire really helps on a job like this on stainless steel because the amperage is lower if you use a larger filler wire it just really draws heat out of the puddle kind of can slow you down so if this was carbon-steel job I might very well have used a 3/32 wire just to dab dab dab and move out really fast but the 1/16 wire seemed to work out pretty good all right let's talk about some tips for keeping stainless steel stainless shield the backside now sometimes aluminum or copper backing is sufficient shielding other times like for food grade sanitary tubing a high purity argon purged is the way to go use a dedicated stainless steel wire brush dedicated means one that has only been used on stainless steel a gas lin setup not always needed but never hurts use as large a cup size as is practical along with chill bars whenever possible to pull that heat out that helps with discoloration as well as distortion stainless stainless is less thermally conductive than carbon steel it heats up quickly heat builds up quickly and only two-thirds the amps are needed as compared to carbon steel in most cases using one size smaller filler wire than you would on carbon steel is helpful and remember the three C's clean clean clean sometimes an acetone wipe is enough other times more cleaning is needed I hope this video helps just a reminder I support these videos with sales from my online store it's at well monger com I've got several oversized cups for sale over there Furyk cups the number 8 the number 12 the bbw I'm adding products to the store all the time got take fingers take torches now the DVDs of all the YouTube videos that I've done over the past several years and I'm adding products all the time so I appreciate if you go check out weld monger calm I'll remember stay tuned for part two of this video I'm going to weld those uh I'm gonna weld the nipples and end caps on let me show us some more features of this machine with the pulse tag capability and also then I'll talk about purging because those end caps there's no way I can get backing on those when I see all the thing up before I sign off today let me just show you just a handful of the products that are on the store at well monger com here's the stubby gas lens kit that you saw in this video I also have a TIG finger bundle with a regular TIG finger and a TIG finger XL for a good savings and I bundled them together with the stubby gas lens kit also for even more savings I've got several several different styles of Pyrex tile Furyk cups like this number eight which is a really sweet cup appreciate you watching we'll see you next time you

Channel: weldingtipsandtricks

Views: 760,018

Rating: 4.9038162 out of 5

Keywords: stainless steel welding, tig welding stainless, how to tig weld stainless, tips for welding stainless steel, tig welding tips, tig welding, gtaw, gas tungsten arc welding

Id: rZxtAjutLYQ

Length: 9min 17sec (557 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 03 2017