- Welcome to Weld.com, I'm Bob Moffatt. Been teaching for a long time, long time. And in that time, I've
noticed a lot of people that come to us for boot
camps, for procedure work make some pretty common mistakes. Today we want to do a simple video on how to get into TIG welding. What these mistakes are, how to avoid them, how to correct them. So I'm going to put a TIG torch together, run some beads, make some mistakes, show you how to correct all that. Okay. Quite simply, this our TIG torch and I'm
going to put it all together, and explain a few things. This is a 17 air-cooled torch. 17 series. And it says FV on it. F means that it'll flex. I don't care about that right now, I'm just telling you the ability of this. What this means. F means flex, V means valve. We have this torch on this machine because we run multiple processes and procedures. We're doing all kinds of stuff, it just happened to be on here today. So don't worry about this, I'm just going to leave
it open all the time. So, first things first. We have 3/32 or 2.4
millimeter tungsten E3. I need to have a collet and a collet body that are sized to the tungsten. The collet has a slit down through here, and it works like this. This will slip through here easily until I put a little pressure on it. And now it's kind of stuck in there. So how this all works is, when I get everything in the torch, the back cap pushes on
the back shoulder of this, forcing it into a standard collet body. So by this being pushed
on the backside of this, I can't put enough pressure
on there with my fingernail, but I'll show you in a minute. This is what holds the tungsten in place. So the way all this goes together, the copper alloyed fine
threads, they're soft. You be careful with them. Same thing inside the torch. Be careful of cross threading. And there's no reason to
over-tighten anything. So I'm going to thread this
up here until I feel it bump, or shoulder up in there, now it's seated. Now, I didn't over-tighten it. I don't need to grab needle
nose or any kind of pliers, and crank down on this thing. Okay. Next thing is the back cap. Again, fine threads, soft threads. There is a surface back here that lines up with the back of the collet. So I'm going to insert this. Also notice if there's an o-ring on here, and that keeps your gas going through the torch, not out the back side. And I'm going to thread this on until I feel it touch or bump. Okay, I'm going to check this again. And then we can insert the tungsten up inside the collet
through the collet body. This is loose and I'm
going to turn this until I feel it touch or bump
and this is now snug, and that's all it really needs. That's all it ever really needs to happen. Here's what I notice as far as problems. I have students that
come to me and they say, "well my tungsten is loose, "and I can't get it to
stay in the collet." 99% of the time I already
know what's happened. What's happened was... And I'm going to back
this off a little bit, and I'm going to loosen this. And now I'm going to thread this down. When somebody was messing with the torch, or putting it together, they probably had this
threaded down all the way. Big mistake. They had this down snug, and then they threaded the
collet and collet body up there. Guess what? This is still loose. The first natural reaction is, well I'm going to crank down on this, and I'll tighten that thing
up, I'll get her to stay. It doesn't happen that way, okay. Or, they might take the cup, and thread it on harder
up into this insulator. You can tighten all this stuff, and this is still loose. It'll still move. So the key things are, back this off. You don't need to back it off all the way, but back it off substantially. Look how much I'm turning this. Turn and a half at least. And bump this up here, hand-tight. This is loose. And we thread this back on here until we just barely feel it
touch now it's snug again. Torch I operate at home, I have a demonstration machine. Any student can use it, I
don't have a problem with that. But since I use it all the time, I have a medium back cap, and I have a TIG torch on there. And I can use the same
components for years, and not replace them. 'Cause I don't over tighten anything. Next thing is the cup. Standard collet body, standard cup. There is a number on here. These are whole numbers. 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 10. The whole number indicates the ID. The opening here in sixteenths. So a number 7 cup would be 7/16 .43754 for you decimal hounds. And I'm going to to thread
this up in here gently 'til it touches, and
seats into the insulator. Now we have a seal for our gas. As gas is forced into the cup, it's not coming out the backside. Because we mentioned the O-ring, we're threaded in here and we're snug. I got to back that off and answer your next question which is, How far can I stick that
tungsten out of that cup? As a general rule, if you have a number 7 Cup on here, which we do, then you can stick it. You can extend the
tungsten out about 7/16, you have a window. I know that we do a lot of videos, and we'll stick it out there so that we can get a good camera
angle for you to see. That's what we're going to do today. So to review. We've inserted a collet and collet body. We've inserted the back cap. We've slid the tungsten up here. We have things properly seated. I'm snug. I turn that back a quarter of a turn. I'm loose. Turn that back at bump,
I'm touching again. I guess at this point, we
could talk about the tungsten. Today I'm using a 3/32 E3 tungsten, and I have sharpened this
to a 30-degree point. Just going to keep it real simple. I just want that taper,
that point on there. Yep, that's pretty sharp. So we want to demonstrate
how to hold the torch. I want to demonstrate some
problems that we can run into, with too long of an arc. Too much angle. We just want to keep it
simple and run some beads. Next thing we need to do
is set up our machine. So we need gas, post flow. Post flow is for this. When I get through welding
this tungsten is red hot. It needs time. It needs to be
protected from the atmosphere by an inert gas while the
tungsten is cooling down. So I need to give it several seconds. Otherwise it can become
oxidized by the atmosphere. I've had a lot of students say post flow cools your tungsten off. Really? I'm pretty sure that gas is superheated as it's been running through
a superheated tip here or torch. So think of post flow as protecting your tungsten as it's cooling off. You can also use post flow over material. Good habit to get into. When you terminate the arc, leave your post flow over your material. Not critical on carbon steel. It is critical on stainless
steel it helps out at bunch. So, let's set our machine
up and get to welding. We have our TIG torch put together, and now we need to get some gas behind it. Real simple, we're going to
put a regulator flow meter onto this cylinder. And here's the important thing. There is a ball in here that floats for your flow, your adjustable flow. We need to always turn this on slowly. You come over here, it doesn't matter if this is cranked down all the way with no flow. You come over here and
rip this cylinder open and it sends that ball
up inside this tube. And I've seen them crack before, and then you got to
send them in for repair. Or you got to replace this inner tube. So always come over here
and open this up slowly. See the ball just jumped on its own there. And then we're reading tank pressure at about 1200 something pounds. PSI, pounds per square inch. So if we just turn that on slow, then we're not going to
destroy our flow meter. Regardless of brand. Now, we need to turn the machine on, and go through some simple settings. And I will reach over, step over, and I will depress the
foot pedal to make sure that we have the proper flow. And we only need about... We're in a shop here with no wind blowing, we could get by with
15 cubic feet to hour. I'll probably set it at about 15 to 20. So let's turn the machine on. We'll step in here. On this particular machine, which is in Everlast Powertig 200Dv, I want to set a 125 amperage. 125 amps. We're on DC, direct current. I don't want any of the pulse, or any of the other features on there. I'm on 2T pedal I'm going to be operating off of the foot pedal. It's going to have a high-frequency start. The only other thing, I
don't want any pre-flow, all I want is about 7 to
8 seconds of post flow. We talked about post flow, and how we're protecting the
tungsten, as it cools off. So that it doesn't
oxidize to the atmosphere. Turning all this other stuff off, it's not even in the
circuit so real simple. DC 125 amps, high-frequency
start on the pedal, 7 to 8 seconds of post flow. That's all I want to do. Okay, let's get down to
the business end of this. How does all of this work? What are we doing? Gas tungsten arc welding. We're using the tungsten as a
heat source, that is the arc. We have inert gas, in this case argon, flowing through our nozzle to protect the weld pool
from the atmosphere. So when we weld, this is
always a forward process. It's always a forward process. With MIG welding and STICK welding, there's a drag angle, or a push angle. This is a push angle at all times. If you try to drag TIG
sometimes you'll get it's like a Venturi effect. You'll get an air pocket
that gets introduced in here and you create porosity. Porosity is bug holes in your weld. It's not fun. So this is always a forward angle. Now I have this lean forward. I want to say that's about
10 or 15 degrees or so. And I want to start here, and I want to weld in this direction. If I was going to do this right-handed, I would do this just the opposite, and I would lean it this
direction, and weld. I would lean it back over here, and do this in this direction right to left about 10-15 degrees. Does it have to be exact? No. You do have a window. You can go straight in. You can lean this forward
a little bit more. But here's what I've seen happen. I've had people come in, and they want me to get them going. And I'll demonstrate it. And I'll demonstrate just running beads, which is what we're
going to start out doing. No filler wire, we're just going
to run some straight beads. And I'll demonstrate it, I'll step away, and they'll go over to their booth, and they'll come back and they'll say, what'd I do wrong. And they'll have this hazy brown, we'll reproduce it I'm sure, we'll have this hazy brown looking weird oxide looking (bleep) on the plate. Here's what's happened. They've leaned this
torch way over like this. That's one of the things
that can cause it. They'll lean this torch
way over like this, and they'll try to weld like that. Or they get too long of an arc, too long of an arc. The weld pool is not really underneath the tungsten. It's all over the place. And you have more of a
chance of getting oxides in, because your gas shield, your weld pool is outside
of your gas shield. So we might be way up here, things are going everywhere. These folks may have gotten
confused between here, and the filler wire being introduced low. So probably what happened was, if I was demonstrating this, this is dead 90° and I leaned
it over and said 15 degrees, and we may have been to the point where we were running filler wire, and I said always keep your
filler wire low down here. This is about 15 degrees from horizontal. This is about 15 degrees from vertical. Now, here's another thing that gets real sensitive. If you can't see, you're not
going to be able to weld. We need to maintain a short arc length, and when I say short arc length, this tungsten is right
on top of the plate. It's touching the plate. Our arc length needs to be
up here for optimum control. Let's say that it needs to
be an eighth of an inch, and we need to keep it right
in there about an eighth. So if you have a hard time seeing that, then you're going to have a hard time doing this welding process. And I've experienced that with a lot of people over the years. You know if you can't
get this good focal point right down in here, and keep your arc length about an eighth then you may have trouble. Obviously, if you touch the
tungsten into your weld pool, you're done. You need to stop. And you need to re sharpen, and clean this point on your tungsten. It's very important. I've seen a lot of people,
I still dip a tungsten. I do it all the time, it happens. But I've seen a lot of
people they'll dip and dab, and they'll get this tungsten
all manked up on the end. It looks like a Q-tip and
they trying to weld with it. Not good, we're going to
reproduce all these problems that can go on. One more thing as far as vision. If you don't have clean
lenses on your hood, if you are one of these that... This thing is all dusty, and it's had welding sparks
and stuff all over it. And it's brown and cobbled up. And the inside is all scratched up, then you might as well just smear some mud on your windshield, and go on a foggy day and
go drive the interstate. Because that's about
the same thing, really. If you can't see out of your hood, and you can't acquire clear vision, you're going to be in
trouble with this process, and with a lot of processes. You can't see the edge of the weld. The edges of the weld, the bead height, those are all critical things. So fresh lenses, take care of your equipment
it's vitally important, I think, for your success. So, let's get some gloves
on and we'll run some beads. And then we'll create some problems, we'll do some things wrong. Okay, we're ready to weld. Again, this is a forward process. I'm welding left-handed. I've got this set up where we can film it. We can zoom in close. The arc length needs to be
about this distance away. About an eighth of an inch away. I always need to keep the
tungsten off of the material. But I don't really want to
exceed this eighth of an inch. We will show you what happens
when you do, if you do. So just to run a couple of simple beads. I'm going to depress the foot pedal to initiate the arc by high-frequency. This machine, I don't need to touch the tungsten to initiate the arc. So when I depress the foot pedal, the gas is going to come on, the amperage will come up,
the arc's already initiated, amperage will come up. I'm just going to slowly
push it all the way down, I'm using 125 amps. Let's see what that looks like. I'm going to do that again. The width of my bead
is approximately 3/16. I'm going to do that again. It also felt like I was
pretty much straight-up. I'm going to lean this
toward me about that 15° we were talking about, and
just run a normal bead. When I terminated these two
beads, I came over here, and I just slowly, normally
lift off the foot pedal. It leaves a little bit of
a button glass right here, the silicon deposit or the
impurities from the material. Not that big a deal, they're clean. There is a couple of floaties in here, I'm not alarmed by it. One more time. That time I let off
the foot pedal, slower. You saw the arc tapper out a little bit. All these beads are about
the same width, here's why. My travel speed is fairly consistent. By-the-way I've got my wrist up here, and I'm sure with this cranked up high-power zoom lens that we've got, you can see every bit
of my shaking going on, and that's kind of normal. Sometimes when I get my wrist up here, I get to really going at it,
but I'm just trying to relax. I'm hanging on to this lightly. Your travel speed is your bead width to a certain extent. With this process, if I'm running along normal
like I have been here, and my bead width is about
3/16, if all of a sudden I increase my travel speed and speed up, my bead will get real narrow. Let's do one of those. I'll run about half of this normal. The second half, I'm
going to race forward, and show you what your
bead would look like if you increase travel speed. I'm blending these beads together, you may not be able to see that. Let me run that one more time
and away from these beads. So when I started out, I started
my normal speed, 125 amps. All of these beads are run at a 125 amps. I'm not doing anything to the amperage. I'm not doing anything
with a foot control. So this is pedal all the way down, 125, I started out at normal speed. When I got to about right in here, I increased the travel speed quite a bit. The width of my bead became narrow. Now, with this particular process with gas tungsten arc
welding or TIG welding, I'm going to do just the opposite. I'm going to start out
and go normal speed, to about right in here. It should look just like this. And then I'm going to slow way, way down. But I don't think it's
going to matter a whole lot. I don't think of the bead
is going to get real wide, or do anything drastic. Not like this here. So let's experiment with that. So on this bead that we just ran, we started what we normally
did on all these other beads. We started out, and we ran our normal travel
speed to about right here. And then we slowed way, way
down and we ran along here. About all I'm doing. It got slightly bigger. What you really see is all
my little movements in here. Everywhere there's a little ripple in here is me moving and jerking around. When I got out here to the end, I just stopped and paused
left it on 125 amps. The bead didn't grow real big. That's the only thing I did was just pour a whole bunch of
heat into this is all. So, things to remember. If you want the normal travel speed you're going to get about the same width. And that's what you want. If you race forward or
you vary your travel speed between normal, fast, normal, you're going to see variations
in width of your bead. So one of the exercises that
we try to do with this process is to take a plate like this, and try to run straight line beads all the way across the same width. And just try to make them straight. Same width, make them
all exactly the same. As close as possible. It's a good exercise. Now, how about we do some problems? How about we create some things
that we talked about with too long of an arc? I'll even stub one into the material. We'll change the angle quite a bit, we'll change the angle, and
increase, and see what happens. First thing we need to do here, we're going to create some problems. So the first thing we
need to do is probably do too much torch angle. We've been saying that we need
to go about 10, 15 degrees in a leading angle and go this direction. So let's lean this rascal over, and go way over here and
just see what happens. Not much. I am probably a little amazed that it stayed together,
and didn't get porosity. The bead is narrower. I know I'm not directing this
arc down into the material. So let's try that again. One thing I did notice was the bead didn't have the
normal arc shape to it. It kind of started out and
laid in there at an angle, so let's try that again. I know I'm not directing
this into the plate as well, The bead is automatically narrower. I'm doing normal travel
speed, normal amperage. I did notice that I had
this thing laid down so far that I'm dragging the cup up in here. And as I'm dragging the cup, it's making it hard for me to move. So, I wouldn't learn how to do welding that way with this process. I wouldn't learn how to TIG by leaning it way over like that,
and keeping it clean. I still like this control-type thing where we're directing the
arc into the material. Now let's do this. Let's start out normal. Normal arc length. And I'll start increasing the arc length where it's way too long. We should see variations
in the width of the bead. We may see oxides, let's give it a go. Wow, that's extreme. Again, we have porosity. We have created porosity. But I didn't get that
brown nasty haze look. This series of bug holes in here, this one over here, we do have a slight variation in width. But again, this gas envelope must have been reacting to the point where it kind of protected it. But we have created porosity. We do have a color
differentiation here between. Nice and clean, we got dark and weird down here. But that's what I've seen. I've seen people that, I guess it's they just
see the bright light. They can't judge that critical distance because they can't see
the tip of the tungsten so they have no clue
where that arc length is. And that's how they get
that long arc on there. Now let's go through
a couple of scenarios. I need to show you how to
correctly add filler wire. I need to show you how to
incorrectly add filler wire. Probably need to go ahead
and stub the tungsten into the molten weld
pool, that's always fun. That will get me up to out of the chair, and over to the grind bench to redress the tungsten. Correct way to add filler wire. I'm leaning the tungsten
normal arc length. I want to introduce filler
wire on the leading edge. Leading edge of the weld pool. What I don't want to do is
melt the wire with the arc, and have it fall onto the material. It's not cool. Correct way to add wire, in my opinion. Dab, dab, dab, dab, dab, dab. Bead width was slightly
narrower than our normal runs over here without filler wire. And you'll see ridges in here. Every one of those ridges, is
when I was adding filler wire. It cools the pool. It's a mass going into
the molten weld pool, and that's what creates
that ridge in there. That term everybody
uses of stacking dimes, that's every time they
add filler wire in there. How much do you add? I personally like to think... Whatever, when I'm doing this process in this exercise, whatever
the filler wire diameter is, (bell rings) that's how much I'm kind of
pushing into the weld pool. Let me show you a different method, where I'm just barely touching the pool, and I'll do it multiple times quickly. Again, this is still clean. This is yet another method. And I don't personally
care for this method because I think it builds
bad habits when we get into advanced joint configurations,
but let me show it to you. Knowing how to do that is fine, but when we get into aluminum work, or we get into some stainless work, we need to be able to be accurate, and control that filler wire, and put it on the leading edge, and actually push a little bit in there. Especially when we get to
the aluminum part of it. Thin low-crowned aluminum
welds, in my opinion, are weak. We need to kind of push
some material in there so it'll sink and that's where
you get that dime effect. That stacking effect. Okay, we need to run some more wrong here with a filler wire. When I said we don't want to
melt the wire with the arc, we want to put it in the pool, let's see what that looks like real quick. I'm going to run over some of these clean beads over here to begin with. Long arc and melting
the wire with the arc. I've got two things going on. I've got a couple of things going on here. I'm not in control of
my weld pool, per se. Yeah I'm making one, but
I'm also making turds, and they're falling on the plate. Turds are coming off the
end of the wire here. There's one of them. Nice little turd. Okay, so I'm forcing
myself to weld bad here. And you can see the results. That's long arc and I'm
not directing the arc down into the plate to create the pool. I'm kind of long arcing and
I'm making the wire melt off with the arc and then it's falling. Hopefully it falls in the right spot. Let's go for the old tungsten dip here. I should be real good at this exercise. I'm going to create a weld
pool, weld for a little bit, accidentally stab my tungsten
into the molten weld pool, and see if I can keep going. Okay, I'm going to stop right there. And I'm also going to hold
it right there, for a reason. And I've seen this happen many times. Remember when I said
everything is soft copper and brass alloys? Fine threads and stuff? Plus your torch is heated up. If I go jerking around on this thing and trying to break this tungsten off, what do you think I'm actually doing? I'm kind of tearing up
that collet body thing. Cool thing to do, if
you're cool, is remember. Come up here and loosen this and extract the torch off of the tungsten. That's the cool thing to do. Also, while we're on that subject, tungsten is extremely brittle. So I'm going to try to recover this. And I reach down here and broke it off. So, I no longer have the
integrity of my sharpened point. So now I'm going to start welding without a clean sharpened point, and we'll see what happens. Well this is pretty amazing. Here I'm trying to mess everything up, and it's welding just fine. You know, I really thought that
was going to get all tore up. And I've got a crappy end on here, and it welded kind of good. So now, I want to stab the filler wire into the tungsten while I'm welding. See if I can do that. So now I've accidentally, well I didn't accidentally, I actually put the filler
wire onto the tungsten with a normal arc length
and created a Q-tip. I've done this a lot teaching myself how to do backfeeding on
open root piping and stuff. Stop, let it cool off, break that end, and redress it completely. But we're going to weld
with it to see what happens. This is where I think
that we might produce the weird brown, orangey looking haze. The nasty contamination stuff. So let's go over one of
these beads over here and see if we can get it. Alright well, some of
you know me well enough, some of you are just coming on and seeing this for the first time. But I'm doing everything
that kind of mess up, and it's actually doing better
than what I thought it would. I've labored to produce a Q-tip on the end of this rascal here. And I thought when I'd start out, that's the last bead here. I didn't get that orange color. I didn't get that weird
stuff that I thought I would. One thing that we didn't do was weld on mill scale. All of these plates are
cleaned of mill scale. Mill scale is you may
get brand new material, it could have this pickling. But this light gray on
here versus this shiny. You need to clean all
this off before you weld. Welding over the top of
mill scale will produce some discoloration of your
beads and it'll look pretty bad. Could cause some porosity as well. Maybe that's where some of
that brown orangey stuff comes from. Been awhile since I've
been able to produce it. Some of this just looks gray and weird, but I wasn't able to get nasty colors I'm talking about and
I apologize for that. So to close all this out,
to dress this tungsten, snap that rascal off, take it over and regrind the tip on it and everything. To close all this out we
put a TIG torch together. We talked about angles,
arc lengths, clear vision, being able to see, running straight lines. We ran beads with filler wire. Too long of an arc length, too much angle. There's all these combinations. Just keep it real simple
and follow the rules of 8th inch to start out with. 8th inch arc length, 10 to 15 degree lead angle in the direction that you're traveling. Get used to running
multiple straight lines. Add your filler wire. Bring it in low. 15, 20 degrees. Put it on the leading edge of the pool. If you have any problems
and we can help you, make sure you get a hold of us. Really appreciate you watching weld.com. Thanks for supporting us. Checks us out on Facebook and Instagram. Hit that subscribe button down there, and hit all those buttons down there. Hit that bell thing so you
can get get notification of when good stuff like this comes out. Thanks a lot. (man laughing) Killing me! Shootin 'n filmin', we're
on location makin' movies. Camera guy, you are killing me here today! - [Camera guy] Yeah, we're rolling. Yeah, yeah, yeah I want
to know what you did with my filler wire. (bell dings) Are you serious about that?
