TFS: Learn to Weave with TIG

so weld metals online sent out this new stuff called the weave trainers which is I got the stainless versions of it to test out here so as soon as they showed up I copped a squat here right on the students chair where we teach the classes here and I just I was like you know what these things are too freakin awesome already weld on one side let's just break out the cameras so sorry it's a little bit raw here you're seeing all of this in action which normally I keep behind but let's talk about some weaves how to do them what I'm looking for and maybe if you guys get a hold of some of these things you'll see exactly what it takes to make your own weaves and to learn how to do them because they're pretty useful so let's just do that today that's what I'm feeling like doing season five so this particular piece is called the stitch it's four dabs wide and I'm kind of really having to concentrate on this just because it's a little off of the normal pattern that I run I think it's a little stretched out I usually run them a little bit tighter but I see a lot of reasons why this is extremely good and if you guys stick around till a little bit later or if you're just an impatient and check the comments or the description you'll find a discount code 12 levels online courtesy of them and TFS but here's essentially what I'm doing we'll get into the theory and all the rest that stuff later but right now I'm taking that leading edge of that weld pool and keeping it along with that line so I can see it every time a line intersects or it change the direction like I hit a corner a torch changes direction to all I'm really paying attention to is the actual size of the weld pool the consistency of it how it looks how it solidifies every single time I move that torch now my foot is basically connected to the weld pool alright my foot controls everything so the more I depress the pedal the more amperage I get the larger my weld pool is the less I depress it the more my petal is going to solidify I want to keep that fluidity okay I got that just a teeny tiny bit hot maybe the machine is currently set to about 75 amps and I'm just kind of working that you know as I need it like I mentioned before that we're you know the pedal when we need more we need less wherever it is we don't have like an exact number where the machine is set at where it's gonna run all I'm doing is connecting my eyes with my foot which controls the torch right haida is weird as that sounds but that's all we're really doing what we see in front of us is what we use for our well now that's the four dab wide that they call the stitch we also have some other ones here we have the the zipper which is two tabs wide and we have the braid which is three dabs wide I gotta try and remember all these names but we're gonna get rid of those too a little bit of theory why do we leave well it's not like it's uh we need to weave for any particular reason typically a weave or at least the to dab wide weave is is the direct result of walking the cup so when you go back and forth on the cup and you do that pattern and all the rest of stuff that we've or that zipper look is typically what we get when we're walking the cup so a lot of people for good exercise or control or training or anything else like that will typically just dab in their own weaves and stuff like that it's also good for a material buildup so if you wanted to go over something three different times or if you wanted to go over at once with three dabs wide or something like that that's why we use weaves but aside from that they're fantastic for training I absolutely love using them for training we use them here in the classes and everything else like that but let's dig into a different one here let's try it let's try the 3d abs wide and you know we'll go backwards I guess you could say pull these out here these are stainless they're also available in carbon steel but uh I got stainless just because I like this stuff so let's see how this one runs typically the first part is the most difficult this is stainless steel so you want to get moving on relatively quick and of course this pattern is what they call the braid it is three dabs wide basically a zigzag with a dab in the middle of it once I've established my weld pool the size of it every single time I move this torch which is pretty much nothing more than my fingertips I'm making sure the puddle or the weld pool moves with the torch if I get a little bit too hot you'll notice that it kind of hangs out behind I haven't got it too hot yet but if I keep it too hot it's gonna hang behind what I wanted to do is follow with the torch every time I move it I want to see everything else behind it solidify a good sign or a solid indication that you've got that or you got the temperature just right aside from having it move with you is you'll typically see little ripples what we usually call freeze lines those freeze lines are basically that puddle solidifying perfectly like literally just right every time you move it as far as adding filler is concerned I'm not adding a bunch I'm just letting it kind of wick off right at that edge of that weld pool and again I'm keeping the edge of the weld pool itself nice and tight right up to the edge of the lines that are etched into the coupons on the weave trainers I want to be able to see those I'm also kind of feeding it with my hand little by little just a tiny tiny bit now I know if my puddle runs away from me I'm getting way too hot if it you know if I add in a dab and it doesn't quite work out the way that I want to it comes in kind of clumpy I need to add a little bit more amperage which is basically step on the pedal a little bit more my information is all coming from what I can see what's in front of me is what I use as long as I got that nice clean weld pool that follows along with the torch I got my freeze lines I got my ripples I got everything I need I'm good to go so I get a little out of position a little bit uncomfortable I'm just gonna stop but this one I made it all the way through let that post flow run and we're good to go I mean you almost can't screw this up I mean I know how to do a three dab wide weave and I play with weaves all the time and like I mentioned before in our stainless class we actually teach the weaves we don't use these but I'm about ready to consider doing exactly that but we teach the weaves when we're actually doing this because it's a fantastic control exercise so what we're basically looking to do is connect our eyes with our foot so if we see that the weld pool is a little bit too wide or a little bit too narrow or it's a little bit too clumpy we know that if our eyes see the weld pool looking like that we either need more average less amperage maybe a little bit more travel speed maybe a little bit less but our travel speed is limited to how fast you can accurately add your filler rod and that's another one of those things that needs to connect just right in order to get it so control of the torch positioning torch height everything else like that that's a really important thing so since this one went so flawless let's blow up the other side because I've got to weave patterns on this side here so let's kind of screw this one up and see what happens when we just totally wasted right that's that's what we should do I'm gonna get some more filler right here this is 308 filler rod and it's oh four five diameter I like the smaller stuff because you can always add more to your weld pool to get that definition of your bead but you can't always live less with a larger diameter and since we're running a little bit less on the amperage to try not build up so much heat we're using much smaller stuff so let's totally waste this one here let's just totally like cook it okay first things first we're gonna set this up correctly right and I'm just gonna make my dabs just coming here just like normal watching very carefully the consistency of the weld pool it's solidifying as I move everything's good all right but let's just say that my torch height wasn't good you get to the end of this one we'll just pick it up here I just kind of lost the control of my weld pool and back way off of my amps here but I don't have a lot of definition on that weld pool it kind of wants to wander away and that's I'm starting to lose the lines here now all the classes that I've taught and all the people that I've instructed we've had about 300 or so here at TFS and it comes from all over the world and torch height is usually the number one problem we see with people when they're first starting out and it's definitely a killer Here I am completely losing these lines let me sink this back down here see if I can get this back into shape I can feel a ton of heat coming off of here onto my glove right now I'm pretty sure this coupon is red-hot now let's really mess this up here you'll get a lot of angle if you look carefully my torch is angled so far that my weld pool is blowing forward more like into the filler wire so I have like an oblong or an oval-shaped weld pool and my foot is all over the place right now trying to control this it's this isn't working too well for me here and my fingers are just roasting right now let me fix this real quick so the fact of the matter on this one if you're still paying it's engineer the closer the torch is the less resistance and the smaller the cone that comes off of it ergo the more control you have over your weld pool it stays cooler the closer you are to it to close is touching too close is making contact so you want to keep it as tight as possible without touching it and you want to keep your torch as perpendicular to your work as possible that means no more than about 10 to 15 degrees of a forward angle forward meaning the direction that you're traveling and that's usually kind of tricky because normally you're traveling into your filler wire on this one we are as technically adding our filler wire to the side of that weld pool because we're traveling back and forth in a zigzag but technically even though we're making a zigzag left and right we're still traveling this way which this would be forward so tricky as it may seem but there's kind of a couple of things one watch your torch height your torch height if it's like sky high like Burj Kalifa world's tallest building you're gonna have some issues with he probably saw that it was kind of blowing out getting all crazy if you have an angle then we're definitely gonna have some issues there and then when you have an angle with like a large cup like this for example you're cutting off the gas coverage behind it which means it's not very effective when it's just blowing it all out forward where you haven't even welded yet so make sure that you keep it as perpendicular as possible as close as possible to close is touching to closest contact so you wanted you know everybody says I'll keep it about this far away or that far away but try to get it closer than that get it as close as possible without touching it will stay cooler it will stay more in control this coupon is wasted on that side like that's a lot of color let's move on to the two dabs you know I can seriously burn these things all day long because they're ridiculously fun but I'm not gonna take up a video burning like this many coupons I'm less able for myself so this one is - dabs why'd we go zigzag that's all we do pretty simple really no line down the middle no nothing like that this would be the easiest one to do but what I really want to show you guys on this one is my foot and how I control everything so another piece of filler wire and let's run this one okay so step one establishing my weld pool right now the coupon is cold so I'm a little bit full throttle and I'm actually moving relatively quick but you can kind of see I feel like I'm feathering it in between it's kind of hitting a little bit heavy when I want the filler wire to go in back off just a little bit here so you're going to find that sweet spot now I don't pause when I'm doing this I just kind of roll with it oh it really cares that I concentrate on where the edge of that weld pool needs to be and it's little tiny tiny movements that have more than enough amperage on the machine but obviously I don't want like all 220 amps that it delivers I just want enough so I got it set to about seventy five amps I think right now I'm running on the HDP inverted 221 just because that's a very common machine we use here in the shop during training following these lines making sure my weld pool solidifies and stays right on point every single time I do not want my filler wire to get stuck getting stuck would indicate that it's way too cold and there I just touched oh well it's kind of hard to concentrate do weaves and explain all this at the same time but come up to the end of it here I know my foots been kind of running a little bit wild oh I slipped yeah you know ideally I wanted to make it through this just make this beautiful weave or whatever but you can definitely tell that we have some serious concentration that we need to maintain while we do this but anyway you can see that it takes quite a bit of movement in your foot pedal right where again we're connecting our eyes with our foot to control that weld pool and that weld pool if the result is it is freezing solidifying as you're moving and everything else like that then it's just right yeah you don't want your filler rod to get stuck in there you don't want to be really tense you want to be nice and loose you want to have your hand move nice and free everything just nice clean smooth whatever all we're doing is just tracing those lines out so I'm gonna have to redeem myself on this one swap out my tungsten here because we still have some sharp one sitting right here we usually have piles of these out there ought to do it I'm gonna flip this coupon around and I'm gonna try this one again alright this time I'm gonna try and really pay attention to what I'm doing here and I can see you know it's a pretty good time to talk about two things I didn't reposition the cameras so now you have the look behind and the look of my hand while I'm feeding I'll just tell you straight up there is nothing in the rule books that says you have to feed or advance your filler absolutely nothing this is something that comes over the course of time so if you hold a long enough or a steady enough grip to where you have enough filler to make let's say 20 30 40 dabs or so then use it stop do a restart and try again the evolution of feeding is actually pretty unique it's not something that I suggested everybody forces the other thing we're going to talk about here is color a lot of people want color in their stainless beads you know they want to see like the you know unicorn farts and the rainbow puke and stuff like that forget about the color what we're trying to do is gain control I'm not worried about what it looks like if it's got you know decorative rainbows and all kinds of other stuff on it I mean forget about that that comes over the course of time that comes after you gain control that apps that comes after you gain experience and it's one of those things that you know it's gratifying it's nice to say that you can do that but at the same time it doesn't make or break a world now the welds that I've been laying down here on this video yeah they're great they're nice but I mean that's the second time on this coupon that I just tipped it and it happens it takes practice so you know even though I even though I touched it there I mean whoopee to do you know that's that's not a bad little coupon right there and it's really cool I mean these things are just flat-out awesome I love the fact that you have something to actually use right now like that you have something that you can you can follow along with and you can you can trained with I mean this is just absolutely phenomenal the control that you can get out of this now these weave trainers these are available in like I mentioned before three different styles here you got two dabs which is the the zipper you got three dabs which is the braid and then you got the four dabs wide which is the stitch and this one is really difficult this one is like semi mild this one is relatively easy but you got all these different ones to choose from in stainless and carbon steel I mean this is phenomenal like you're not gonna find this anywhere else this kind of control this kind of good exercise especially for cheap so you know I hope this kind of helps you out with your weave game maybe maybe it does maybe it doesn't you can do it without of course but I mean but to start out this is this is pretty good so I would definitely give these a serious thumbs up and if you guys want to try out some stainless steel or carbon steel or regular mild steel weave trainers from weld metals online make sure you go over well mills online comm put in the discount code TFS ten all capital letters TFS one zero for ten percent off your order across the entire website courtesy of weld metals online ntfs because that's the way that we hook it up here so you know I hope this helps you out if you got any questions or comments go ahead and drop them down with comments box below thank you guys for watching I'll catch you all on the next episode

Channel: The Fabrication Series

Views: 138,482

Rating: 4.9101844 out of 5

Keywords: weave trainers, how to TIG weave, how to weave a weld, welding weave, weave patterns for TIG, TIG weave patterns, Weld Metals Online, TIG welding training, learn to TIG, TIG practice, TFS, The Fabricator, Season 5, Weld Training

Id: Po0avbYVv6w

Length: 20min 15sec (1215 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 10 2019