The FIRST 3 things to learn tig welding.

are you just getting into tig welding one of my favorite things to do is help beginners so they can get good results and have fun while learning the only problem is is people need to start learning smart taking on the wrong things when you're first beginning can lead to bad habits that can cause someone to get frustrated overwhelmed and unfortunately never getting to the point where they're getting good results and discovering how much fun this is to do today i've got three of the most important things i usually always start my students with when they're first beginning to learn i'm not sure which of these three things is most important so make sure you stick around and catch all three but this first one is a doozy and that is perfecting your starts okay so when i say that this one is important i cannot stress this enough working on learning proper starts is something that's going to make learning more difficult and challenging stuff a little later down the line much easier whether i'm just practicing for fun with somebody or taking an actual tig welding test in a difficult position being able to start up and establish a proper start will set the stage for everything else that's going to follow take a look at this photo here here we see a pass which obviously doesn't quite look the way we want it to the most important thing that we take a look at here is the start we can see that this one has had a bit of a grumpy start poor little guy the filler material has not really established cleanly and once we began welding things never really recovered enough and took the proper shape as the pass was advanced down the joint from the start now let's take a look at this other example here sure obviously the entire thing looks much better but let's take a look at the most important thing we're talking about here look at the start i talk about this all the time on my channel this is absolutely the most important and crucial part of every weld look at how thoroughly the filler material has blended into the base material we can see that even as we move away from the first step everything was exactly the way it needed to be we have a perfect shape we have great weld reinforcement and the heat input has blended into the base material perfectly now looking at this start here we can see i am absolutely in no rush to move away from the start yet look at how much time i'm taking to work the filler material into the base material now what's the saying i always say on my channel that's right fill and chill don't worry t-shirts are coming but again take a look at how much time i took to make sure everything was perfect and established properly before i moved on whether this is just a practice joint or something that we're doing more advanced work on is always going to be the same approach we want good heat we want good filler material and we want to fully establish everything before i start moving every single student i have worked with in my online tig welding program knows how vitally important this is we learn this right away in the program and it always makes the exercises we do later in the program much easier the main theory that we always work on together is that once we begin finally moving we have little to no work left to do at this point when you establish everything perfectly at the start all we have to do once we begin moving is just babysit and maintain the details start with learning simple passes on flat stuff make sure that the first step of every single weld you do is the exact size and profile you want you have to be patient if you rush anything you're just gonna leave more details you have to adjust on the fly and it's gonna make more things that you have to focus on when you're welding we have enough stuff to pay attention to let's take care of all this stuff at the beginning of the past and we can have a weld which runs much nicer we have less to pay attention to now that point was extremely important but this next one is something that most people get stuck on when they first start learning how to tig weld we need to make sure that we get this one figured out as quickly as possible and that is learning to feed the filler material properly when people think of tig welding they usually assume a lot of the tricky work is done with your torch hand while this is absolutely true in a sense what we actually really want to worry about is having perfect technique with our filler material it is extremely important that we put the filler material into the weld puddle at a proper angle and at a particular spot if we miss this spot or if we have a bad angle most commonly someone's going to see the end of the filler material being blown off like this this is super annoying to have to deal with so let's get this detail sorted out right now the area we want to hit on our puddle is this sweet spot right here it will be approximately halfway from the center of your puddle directly underneath your tungsten and the leading edge of your puddle right in between these two points here is the sweet spot where the filler material is going to break off cleanly and most easiest easiest most easily not hard at all keep it nice and tight with your tungsten with the filler material hit this spot as cleanly as you can and you'll get great results with adding filler material to the weld pool as easiest not hard at all also another tip that might help you out with getting filler material into this sweet spot cleanly as possible is you want to keep your filler material approximately 90 degrees to your travel angle as you can see here they're approximately 90 degrees to one another this is always going to help to get the filler material into the weld pool much cleaner now there's another really important thing we need to learn here common mistake is somebody's going to hold the filler material in a comfortable position at the start and then once they begin to advance through their pass your filler rod hand is going to start to creep towards the welding area this is going to lead to a couple problems we have to deal with remember if you get set up for being comfortable at the beginning of your pass you need to make sure that you're comfortable at the end of it as well if you're welding along and all of a sudden you have your filler hand getting in the way or if you're fumbling around because you're not comfortable holding it you're gonna lose focus on what you should be paying attention to and obviously if this happens you're gonna have a bad time everyone holds their grip on the filler material slightly differently to one another i prefer to hold it like this i find over time this has the least amount of fatigue for my wrist but most importantly i can feed it comfortably like so when i'm doing it like this my hand is not going to creep any closer to the weld area and whatever grip you end up choosing make sure you keep your hand in a stationary position and make sure that it works well for the end of your pass as well plan ahead as you begin to move just make sure that this hand stays stationary feed the filler material through your fingers and you'll be able to maintain a good sight line so we can see clearly so when you're welding you won't have any curveballs to deal with getting the filler material into the weld pool as well as a proper grip and hand position leads us perfectly to our third point here this one we go over in the program and every single exercise is really important and that is getting comfortable and seeing clearly we've talked about this one probably a bunch before but we can definitely stand to go deeper on it here right now holding our filler material properly is only one part of this equation everybody when they're learning to weld is going to be comfortable a little bit differently to one another that's completely fine so think closely on how you want to be set up when you're practicing personally i prefer to stand for most of my exercises however i have many students in the program who prefer to sit down get most comfortable that way either way it's all good but we need to make sure that however you position yourself you are comfortable we've already talked about one hand and how important that is what about the rest of each arm a lot of people sit down and get ready to weld all scrunched up like this and this is always something that comes back to bite them later on when we're welding we want to have the best range of motion we can a lot of the time people will anchor their hand to the table like this and in doing so that's going to cause a couple things to happen either they're gonna have a short or restricted range of movement or what can happen is when they reach the point of becoming uncomfortable they will be forced to slide their hand now hear me out on this one there are many people out there who are fine with sliding their hand but i personally cannot do it i find no matter how much time i take to plan and get set up comfortably how smooth the edge of my table is i can never rely on my hands sliding consistently and smoothly while i'm welding something either gets in the way of my hand traveling or my hand gets caught on something stupid or i just slip completely and lose my consistency pretty much all the students in my program usually end up learning to position themselves like this instead what we're gonna do is learn to position ourselves with the mid forearm anchoring ourselves to the table like this now when we move look at how much more of a range of motion we have i have done tig welding tests and i've done all kinds of stuff where i have to continue welding without stopping if i have my hand anchored to the table top or table edge like this i'm going to reach a point where my hand is uncomfortable very quickly or sometimes the event will happen that i have to start sliding also taking into account with longer stuff your hand is going to start to become extremely hot so i personally prefer to teach my students to get comfortable moving like this instead and when we do so we remove these things completely no more uncomfortable or restricted movement and as things get a little bit spicy after we're welding for a little bit our hand is not gonna get burned so we have both of our hands figured out now right right and now we need to make sure we have the third piece of the puzzle positioned perfectly as well that was a lot of peas and that third thing is our head when we're welding we need to see as clearly as possible as our torch hand is moving and as we are closing the distance towards our filler rod hand we need to make sure that our head is in the right spot so we don't have to make any adjustments as we are welding i personally find as our hand starts to move across the work piece having my head positioned like so this is gonna allow me to see past my filler rod hand and as i'm welding i can keep a close eye on everything as we move with our hand the last thing we want to have to do is make any adjustments to our head as well remember when setting up all of our work should be done at the beginning when we do so it's the less we have to do while we're welding and the more we can focus on the stuff we need to filler materials going where it needs to be we're having starts that are properly established and we are super comfortable once we begin moving these are the best things to start with there are a lot of things that need to be learned when you're first starting out with tig welding and i'm sure you know there are a million different variables that can hold you up while learning this episode goes over the one detail i take probably the most time to teach all of my students in my program having this one under your belt at the start can save you a ton of time practicing as well as saving yourself some materials do a random act of kindness for a stranger today for pacific ark tig welding my name is dusty bill and chill we'll talk soon peace

Channel: Pacific Arc Tig Welding

Views: 351,669

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Id: 48kNktW0VYQ

Length: 10min 22sec (622 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 09 2022