Stick Welding Aluminum

welcome to weld dot-com we have been asked to do one of the viewers asked can you stick weld aluminum the answer is yes I'm gonna be real honest we is one of my this is one of my least favorite things to do it's you can do it I'm pretty proficient with TIG and wire I like those two processes they're clean I'd like to run into spool gun this you can you can do some portable repairs aluminum stick is DC reverse polarity electrode positive what I have noticed in the past with it depends on the type of weld you're gonna make we're gonna try to do a couple of fill it welds here front and back I'm gonna I'm gonna guess and say the second one might go a little better than the first one but this is quarter-inch material and I need to preheat it if we just went into this cold I don't think we'd have a very good result I think we'd need to run a little bit and get this material warmed up before this actually flowed in this process is real gummy this this flux on here is kind of a heavy salt I don't know how to describe it it's just real spatter II turns into kind of a grey muck looking stuff on it and it's a little a little strange if you've never done it there's a lot of maintenance alloys out there and some obviously run better than others it's just like stainless electrodes and low hydrogen electrodes some of them run extremely well some of them are a little bit rough and that's the that's the nature of the flux and flux composition so our attempt here is I'm going to get some gear on here in a little bit and I want to I'm going to preheat this with an oxy acetylene torch and I want to show a little trick here I've got a I've got a temp stick I couldn't find my my temp stick that goes to 350 I've got one that says 250 on it here but I want to show a little trick that I learned from a metallurgy the work from for mesh aggression mg company maintenance alloys there's a trick you can do with the torch here and it's purposely putting soot on this piece of aluminum with a carburizing flame and then I'm going to back off and change to a neutral flame and I'm going to keep heating this thing up when that soot disappears you're right around 400 degrees that's kind of nice when you don't have this stuff it's just you know we're trying to get some saturate this with a little bit of heat we don't want to get too extreme with it but we really need that heat in there to get this to flow pretty good so I'm gonna get some gear on I'll be right back okay honey - honey - preheat our piece of aluminum quarter-inch we're gonna do a try to do a fill it weld again this is just gonna be a little rough I already know that so what I want to do here is I want to light this flame and make it purposely a carburizing type flame excess unburnt acetylene or fuel and I want to put it over here and and and make this black I think I turned that back a little bit more just just to get some immediate soot on there so now I'm going to change some more of a neutral flame and I'm going to get back away from it and I'm going to start preheating this I am going to use this 250 degree temps dick and we're not quite to 250 and now we are aluminum dissipates heat four times faster than carbon steel it also has a oxide layer on it and I have pre clean this with wire brushes stainless wire brushes which is one of the best ways I've a lot of people I see will take abrasives they'll just take a regular old grinding wheel that they've been using on stainless steel or carbon steel rather and they'll just stick it on there and grind away or they'll take a high-speed wire wheel bead brush and they'll they'll use it on the on the aluminum and actually what that's doing is just folding the oxide layer into the material it's not it's not cool file you can use light sanding pressure chemical etch hand wire brushes are the best ways I am using a 3/32 electrode I'm going to run about 85 amps DC electrode positive or reverse polarity I've protect this with gas tungsten arc welding if you think that low hydrogen electrodes are kind of rough to start sometimes because they got the flux on the end of them these are three times worse I'm gonna make sure I have some bare electrode so the technical specs for this it calls for pretty much a straight end angle fast travel speed I can agree with that this weld pool to me it's it's got so much going on around it and it's really active and it's gonna spatter quite a bit so you know this is my first attempt in a long time I use this occasionally but I use it more out to repair something like a handrail or a piece of broken equipment on a out in the field somewhere away from the shop so let's let's see how this goes but also the technical specs call for a real short arse and it's to me it feels like I'm just cramming this in there all the time I had a I had a rough start you know that's just the nature of this rod so I'm gonna let that kind of cool a little bit and then I'm going to go after the backside here and do the do the other side with another rod I make my step over and knock the flux off the end of it with my needle nose or something because that wasn't fun at all you'll notice that I think it was somewhere about half two-thirds the way through the pond to the weld pool just kind of exploded you know there's not a whole lot you're going to do about that we've got some spatter on here I'm putting a heavy block on here just to hold the material you saw me pecking on this a minute ago well let's let's hope we get a better start here I think if I have a better start then I can just go feed this in again you know if you're making a repair you would be using some Sanders the flapper wheels with light pressure to grind and blend this back you can do multiple passes again another rough start I wish that wouldn't happen but it does kind of hard to tell to me it just looks like it's definitely washed out here in the crater and I tried to come in here and pull this back a little bit I don't know that I got it filled up let me go let me go cool this off and I wanna I'm gonna have to work this and chip this quite a bit what I don't want to do is grab a wire wheel and knock the flux off because I think the aluminum is so soft that I'll just rearrange the whole ripple pattern so I'm going to take a little bit of time I'm going to I'm going to quench it and take my slag hammer and trolly lightly try to pick this stuff off of here I don't think it'll come off that's pretty aggressive so let me go cool this off and I'll go to work on it and see if we can't bring out a bead here that you can see be right back I'm back I clean this all up I told you this is gonna be a little rough and it was a little rough you can see that I've used my pliers I was trying to knock some of this stuff around I use my chipping hammer I'll show you them both they've got this heavy salt looking revered residue on here and that's just the nature of that flux this was the this was the first side we this was the first side we did and I had this rough start right here and it was a little cold you can see that I kind of missed this right here I'll tell you when I struck the arc I really couldn't see where the pool was at the very beginning now after the electrode became active and the arc force was making the flux go kind of behind the rod then it was a little easier and a couple of things to note here you know the spatter I think I mentioned that about two-thirds the way down the weld pool kind of popped and exploded I pause to recover but it left a big ol blob of aluminum out here you know we can clean that up with Sanders and files so you know we've get an acceptable profile somewhat of an aluminum weld here you know it's not those of us that weld aluminum with with TIG and and spray wire feeding on the spool gun or even pull spray you know you got to admit wow that's that's way rougher than what we're used to seeing but you know is it welded together sure can we make repairs with it in the field sure I'm sure if I use this more than what I do I haven't done this in probably four or five years but a viewer asked and we want to satisfy the viewers so I'm hoping this helps out so and then this was the second side again a since everything was preheated I did stumble a little bit on my start but it blended in way better and I'm not sure why this came about another little I thought I was doing better down here and then right down at the very end this is interesting because I like to I don't one thing I just despise doing and I sees a lot of people doing it they come out here to the very edge of something and they stop now I want to ask you a question how many of you have seen beautiful aluminum welds like on trailers and they're cracked right down through the middle of them and it's it's from this exact same thing right here when we terminate a weld on aluminum we need to fill this crater in and this is a classic crater with a little star hole in it right here well if you think about a trailer it's under vibration all the time but once that little crack starts in that little crater crack that little star feature it just propagates right through the center of a beautiful weld and it does it every time pretty much so we need to need to make sure that you fill these in I'm sure that if I had to blend this if this was a critical somewhat critical repair I would clean this all up and attempt to go back in and fill that in I wouldn't leave it like that I don't think but again the whole demonstration was can you stick weld aluminum and the answer is yes you know I don't particularly like doing it that way but it's doable you know so again thanks for watching make sure you subscribe to the videos new videos have come out every every week thanks for watching and welcome I'm Bob Moffett with Callie College

Channel: Weld.com

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Keywords: welding, Stick welding Aluminum, how to stick weld aluminum, can you stick weld aluminum, welding for beginners, welding tips and tricks, welding projects, welding machine, welding aluminum, welding table, welding cast iron, welding stainless steel, welding ideas, welding rig, welding videos, welding school, welding aluminum with mig welder, welding for begginers, welding tips adn tricks, welding maching, welding marching, welding matching, Welding stainlees steel

Id: _g-IWPYNIeI

Length: 12min 58sec (778 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 19 2016