Tig butt welding thin sheet steel car bodywork getting started part 1 Tips and Tricks #38 R-tech

oh this is trip and welcome to my blog and I totally the most asked questions is should I invest in a TIG welder or a MIG welder what I can ask you perception slightly by saying that really the question should be should I invest in a MIG welder and a TIG welder and this is what I hope to clear up over the next few episodes for you I'm going to keep this one real short and sweet because I just want to give you that AHA experience that I had a couple of years ago when I first picked up the TIG welder after being a long-term MIG welder user and like I say over the next few episodes I hope to be showing you the best that I can show you I'm no expert at it welding but what I will do is I will show you how I get the excellent results on sheet metal work be it steel or aluminium so like I say this one I'm just going to keep this short and sweet this is all gonna be about simple butt welding without using any filler rod a few notes about setup I've just fitted a heavy-duty plug I've connected the gas pipe to the rear of the welder and up here is the main on on/off switch I have a 20 Lisa bottle of pure argan with an argan regulator a touch to it and a flow meter so we can trim the gas perfectly straight off the bar I just like to mention that the torch goes straight into the negative and the positive is for the earth not the other way around always make sure you get that right otherwise the welder won't work properly the world also comes with this accessory pack so you've got a few cups a few Tungsten's etc nice little set of spares just to get us going this is exactly what I'll be using to start with okay I've just turned the world run I've made sure all our controls are turned off so if everything turned off the stop switch here mmm a TIG that's four stick whirring we've got it in the tick position because we're going to TIG weld AC DC AC is run iminium DC is steel of course onto T I want to keep this absolutely as basic and are simple to start we're going to start right at the beginning so all we need is some base current so I'm going to set the face current 20 nice round figure four point nine millimeter steel or 20 swg as it's also referred to our post flow setting over here I'm going to set the post flow up I'm just going to give it a tiny little bit of post flow now what that'll do is that'll just ensure that when I release the trigger a tiny amount of gas will continue to come out and what that little bit of gas will do is that will stop the tungsten from overheating because if it's in a gaseous atmosphere and it's still red hot it will cook that tungsten and also it will pick up contaminants once act tungsten is contaminated then that will greatly affect the weld so like I say all well looking at is base current of 20 and a little bit of post flow we've got a bit of free flow already because it's setting the TIG mode so no need to worry about free flow on the gas vodka say everything else is completely off net just get started and let's keep everything as basic as possible we can build upon this and then we'll have a greater understanding how to use the welder put a nice sharp tip on tungsten let's hope the camera or zoom in on that now so you've got a nice sharp tip on the tungsten I don't know how many degrees that is and I've probably got more overhang all sticking out at the end of there then you probably used to see in on other videos but you can't get away with far more than other people say I'm going to set the flow meter to seven to start with and let's see let's do some welding all right make sure you wear your goggles of course when you're growing in when you're out and make sure you wear your visor have it well-ventilated always good to wear a respirator etc etc be safe guys let's turn the world on it's so high frequency but even with the earth clamp disconnected it's still work of course once we got the earth clamp connected then it will track down that high frequency spark and cause it to arc properly which means that you haven't got to do the old fashioned scratch start we'd have to actually drag the piece into the workpiece to get the arc to start let's do some welding so I'm gonna weld these two pieces of Steel together so I'm gonna hold the torch at this kind of angle just off the upright and pushing the world along what I'm going to do first is I'm just going to put a few tags along these two pieces of metal just to hold them together [Music] so I've ended up with a series of attacks all the way across the panel I've probably gone a little bit overboard I could have probably spaced those I every other one with a Howard it just as well so the only place I'm going to use a bit of filler rod now is on the ends because the heat absorption is far less on the very edge of the panel then is in the center of the panel because you've got all that mass of Steel soaking at the heat course as you travel towards the end you've got less and less less steel and what tends to happen is you just end up with a great big hole appear right on the edge where you least want it so what I've done is I've done a series of things I put copper behind like I did with a MIG but I haven't find this a successful a process although it does work with take but the easiest way I found is to get a piece of welding rod like that and connect it to the workpiece so now instantly that welding rod is the work piece because it's earth doped and then as soon as you offer the end of the TIG up to the very end of the welding rod then the welding rod instantly melt and starts shrinking back towards the panel so you'll have a nice molten bead then let straight in to the joint on the end you've got more of a build up of weld so the welds less prone to just below a great big section at the corner [Music] so we're all tacked into place very little distortion I'm just going to turn the amperage up very slightly I think I'm going to give it 22 amps I just feel like it could just use a tiny little bit more power but it's all going quite well it's all lovely and flush just make sure obviously when you do your bit wide and just make sure where everything's dead flush so now I'm going to fuse the two sections together I'm not going to use any welding rod tip slightly traveling in the direction of the world using very small circular motion let's see what [Music] okay all welded together I did it in two basic hits I should have done it in shorter runs I'm punished it in between we've got a little bit of heat distortion going on but nothing I'm concerned about at all I'll tuck this up very quickly the world doesn't look anything that's special I can appreciate that let's zoom in and get a closer look also had a bit of a mishap here because I got the doors open trying create as much ventilation as possible without turning my extractor on so if I turn in structural and you won't hear a thing it was working well but I'd a gust of wind blow through the door actually blew the flame the arc flame and almost blew a hole so not very good in windy conditions so looking from the rear of the panel now and this is the penetration we've got on the other side which I think's pretty good actually it's pretty well sealed very much a self sealing world if you get something that's as tight as this the gap then it almost welds itself together now that this is at five minutes to cool down of course it's straighten itself out hugely so just give it a tapper because it's TIG weld it's beautifully soft compared to MIG weld there's no hardness to the world bar nothing in comparison anyway see I've just flattened that well right on the end that's flying out no problem at all seen the other side because there's no weld bead there because actually this will be undercut I'll clean it and show you what it looks like but this will be very slightly in the cut but not as bad as you would probably assume so let's clean it up and I'm quite happy very flat this is now that's lovely and flat now and you can see how little distortion it has I didn't take that long either did it really [Music] okay all cleaner this is the end result after cleaning up when I tack welded the joint all the way along I cleaned up half of the joint and this top section is where I cleaned it up in this lower section isn't where I wasn't now the welding scale actually created contamination within the world and that's why there's these little craters so there's always worth really really clean in anything up if you've tacked it just clean all that weld scale that I should have cleaned up the two joints before I even started because of course there would have been light oil and dirt contamination on the steel but I just went for it but this is the top side we can see the craters worse here there's also a crater right at the top and that's where the wind gusted in through the door and blew the arc flame so a lot of the old hand-built cars many many years ago would have been gas welded together using no filler rod and when I bear back to the original bodywork and in these old cars you can see there's plenty of undercut to all the welds they haven't used any filler rod I think we've just got much more sort of fussy in our expectations these days of trying to get things absolutely perfect incidentally a lot of people will say that you have to use filler rod to bring the temperature of the weld down otherwise the world gets porous as far as I'm concerned this is a bit of a myth because I think what people are basically talking about is when you're welding something there's five millimeters thick then of course you have to input far more heat into it we're normally talking about oxygen acetylene welding again stuff in the past of course so they would have used loads and those are Heat and of course it would have overheated the metal they needed that heat for the penetration so by putting the filler rod in it actually bought the temperature of the world down but that's not what we're doing here what we're doing is we're keeping the temperature a nice steady temperature or not overheating anything because it's so thin we instantly get the penetration we're after so anyway let's perform a stroke test see how it stands up well thanks very much for watching I really hope you got something out about and I hope you had your aha moment the same as I did a couple years ago after being a long-term MIG welder something that I did forget to mention in the video was this auto darkening helmet that are used now we use the 20 paying jobs that you can buy off eBay and they're perfectly acceptable the same as this mask perfectly acceptable you can see when you're welding very well but what this mask has over the ones at work which really caught me off guard was the ones at work we've got skylights that like the workshop hurt really well so you got sent like beaming through now if that sunlight casts across the visor front you cannot see anything and I'm not suggesting for one moment that it's actually activating the auto darkening because it isn't but just the sunlight on it stops you from seeing anything if you stood near a doorway and their Sun coming through the doorway you cannot see anything if you get up underneath the wheel arch or under a car you cannot see anything now when I was welding using this mask I could leave the mast down all the time it doesn't matter if I walk out into my garden or anywhere it's absolutely crystal clear I can see the whole time and I haven't got to keep lifting that mask up to see where I am very very useful thing to know because when you're on a position to weld you really really need to see where your position it and sometimes I have even fired up the welder just so it creates an arc so then I can then readjust my position which isn't ideal you really need to be able to see what you're doing all the time and that mask this helped me with that so anyway all the products that you've seen are from our tech and they are put a link in the video description so you can go check the mag this has been in no way a paid promotion I'd just like to tell you that anyway this they just literally helped me out with this equipment anyway let's give away a cup from a couple of videos ago so one of them Bob Bob Hogg well Bob Hague I don't quite know how you pronounce it but Bob you are the winner my friend all you have to do to claim the prize you send me your address in the video description to this video there is my email address just simply let me know what your address is and I'll post this off to you at my own expense of course how am I going to wrap this video up I just like to say that our tech did a piece on me called meet the welder I will put a link in the video description to that if you'd like to see a bit of a preview of the van because there's a lot of pictures on there showing the van in its for almost finished splendor so if you'd like to check that out just click on the link and you can go and see that anyway I'm off for now what am I going to do next time round well in the next few videos I'm going to show you more bells and more whistles and more techniques and more fine examples of great TIG welding I hope so see bite the knife [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music]

Channel: Trev's Blog

Views: 86,843

Rating: 4.916162 out of 5

Keywords: Tig, welding, car, bodywork, panel, beating, fabrication

Id: HGnjolz5s_Y

Length: 18min 21sec (1101 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 30 2019