TIG Welding Basics for Beginners

hey welcome to the shop today i'm talking about tig welding basics now whether you're an absolute beginner or you've been at it for a while tig welding can be pretty intimidating there are several things that you need to do all at the same time lots of different gear lots of words and terminology it can get pretty confusing so i'm gonna break all of that down for you in this video so you can go out and approach tig welding with confidence let's get started okay i have a lot of stuff here i'm gonna walk through each of these items one by one so you know what you need in addition to your welding machine to get started after we talk about these we'll get into a little more detail about tig torches and welding machines in general okay so let's start off by talking about the most important piece of safety equipment and that is your welding hood now there are a wide variety of different types i have this one it's a miller a digital elite i've had it for quite a while and it works really well for me um whatever type you get though i would recommend getting one with an auto darkening feature and what this does is it makes it so the lens is a little bit lighter when you're getting set up and then when you light an arc it automatically darkens so that it protects your eyes from the light and that helps a lot because you can see your work when you're setting up and you can see right where you're going to start your arc so i definitely look for an auto darkening feature and there are plenty of options available next let's talk about gloves now gloves are really important i've tried a whole wide variety of different types and and everybody has kind of a different opinion maybe on them but i like these tillman gloves right here they're they're kind of a classic and traditional um i'll link them below in the description but they have a little bit uh thinner leather so i get a pretty good feel on the torch and i'm able to feed the filler wire um a little bit better with with these for uh for that reason so so i like them but whatever kind you get i'd get some that are made you know specifically for uh tig welding now when i was first starting out and sometimes if i have to feed a lot of wire since i weld with my right hand and the torch and i feed with my left hand i started out by using a mechanics glove on my left hand and that would give me a little bit better feel even for feeding the filler wire but you need to be careful with that you can see i have some burn marks here because they aren't as heat resistant as this type of glove so now i mostly just use these tig gloves now going along with that a fun little accessory this isn't a must-have but it's pretty nice it's called a tig finger and it's a little heat shield you can put over your pinky so that as you're welding and the material heats up if you're resting your pinky on there it keeps you from burning your finger and heating up that glove because when you heat up the leather gloves they'll kind of shrink and get hard and then that can get pretty frustrating and it'll also help to slide along a little easier so not a necessity but definitely really nice to have i use mine all the time the next thing i'll talk about is a welding jacket and unlike you know mig welding or stick welding where you may have some spatter or sparks coming out tig welding you're not really going to have anything jumping out of the weld pool to get you hopefully but it is very bright and a lot of clothes like t-shirts won't necessarily shield you from that bright light and that can give you a pretty bad sunburn as well as can lead to cancer and other things so i wear a welding jacket when i weld with tig the next thing i'll talk about is a gas cylinder and since when you're welding with tig you're using argon gas to keep the air and the oxygen in the air away from the weld pool you need a source for that to come from and there are different size cylinders there's a number of different kinds i started out i used this smaller one for quite a while and i still keep it around so that if i run out i can use this whole cylinder up and then i can hook up to this for a little bit until i'm able to get it filled and finish my job or if i need to go somewhere and take my machine with me i can take this cylinder along now the one thing that's interesting to know and you may not know if you haven't gotten welding cylinders before is that the price to fill um this smaller one at least for me where i go is almost the same as the price to fill this larger one that has about two and a half times the amount of gas because most of the cost for exchanging a bottle is in their handling and not in the gas itself and that's about the same for each so you know it's only a few dollars more to fill the big ones that being said you can weld for quite a while on a small one so if you're not going to be doing a ton of welding and your gas supplier isn't too far away you'll get by just fine on a smaller cylinder so something to look into next i'll talk for just a second about regulators and flow meters so you need some sort of gas regulator that will connect to your argon cylinder and then have a hose down to your welding machine or to your torch if you don't have a solenoid valve in your welding machine and you're using a valve that's integrated into the torch now there are a number of different kinds i prefer the type that has a ball that floats here on the flow meter and i think it gives a little bit more accurate reading however if your machine came with one like this that has the two gauges that'll work just fine especially when you're starting out so don't don't worry too much but not every welding machine is going to come with a gas regulator so you need to be aware that you might need to purchase one of those when you're getting set up if your machine doesn't come with it the next thing i'll talk about is your tungsten electrodes themselves now there are a wide variety of different types of electrodes and they have a color code that will tell you what the chemical composition of the electrode is so it's primarily tungsten but there will be a few elements that are added to give it different characteristics and maybe keep it sharp for longer without balling up like pure tungsten usually will i typically use the blue lanthanated tungstens now for a long time i used the orange seriated tungsten electrodes and they worked just about as well so i wouldn't get too hung up on this when you're just getting started but if you do need to buy some i'd recommend starting with these blue lanthanated electrodes to give you something to to go off of now they come in different sizes and for most of what i do i use three thirty seconds of an inch though sometimes if i'm doing something special i'll use one smaller but if you just need to buy some 330 seconds is a good place to start now let's talk about filler wire because with tig welding your electrode doesn't melt and add metal into the weld so you need to add it in some other way and the most common way and what you'll probably do is to use these pre-cut lengths of filler metal now i'd recommend getting a few different types to start out with the first one is for pretty much everybody to get some steel filler metal now this can be er70s2 or er70s6 either one will work just as well uh for you when you're starting out um and be just fine and this is just a general mild steel filler and you use it for most work on steel now for stainless steel uh use 308 l and this is the most common stainless rod that you'll use on different different types of stainless steel welds so i'd recommend getting some of that as well if you're looking at doing stainless steel and both the steel and stainless steel fillers the most common size that i use for the work that i do is 1 16 of an inch so i'd give that as a recommendation if you're not sure which size to buy to start out now for aluminum if you're going to be welding aluminum there are two different options for that er4043 or er 5350 now if you're welding 6061 aluminum or a lot of different types of aluminum either one will work if you have a critical application you need to make sure you're using the right filler metal for the job but if you're just starting out and on coupons and just general work either one will be fine one word of warning though if you are planning to make parts that you're going to set out to have anodized which is a coating that goes over the aluminum that's not going to work very well with 4043 so you'd probably pick the 53-56 filler metal if you have questions about the different filler metals go ahead and upload those in the comments below and i'll try to give you a response to give you a little guidance for your own situation now to store your filler metal if you buy it in the one pound tubes those work okay to store them but if you're buying them in bulk by the pound from the welding supply these tubes with the screw-on cap they have a little rubber seal on them here to keep them nice and sealed from the environment can be pretty nice to store your electrodes and you can get a few different kinds they come in different colors to keep track of what you have so i like to use those to store my filler metal and just keep it nice for me the next thing i'll talk about is some way to sharpen your tungsten now i have a dedicated tungsten grinder but these are pretty expensive especially when you're starting out so there's a few different ways that you can do it one you can use a bench grinder and when you're using a bench grinder i would recommend grinding so that the lines run up and down like i'm showing you here and the best practice is to have a dedicated wheel that you use only for grinding your tungsten electrodes now i know that's not going to make sense for a lot of people to do or isn't going to be practical so i wouldn't let that get in your way especially as you're learning and practicing if you're not welding anything that's too critical if you just use the regular grinding wheel you have it will probably be okay for you getting started but the best practice is to have its own wheel now if you want to get a dedicated diamond wheel like this i'll link this down below these are about ten dollars and we'll go on a four and a half inch angle grinder and you can use that to sharpen your electrodes with its own dedicated diamond grit there for you know right around ten to twenty dollars depending on the type that you get now another option would be to make your own portable tungsten grinder and i actually have one that i'm working on and i'll be uploading the video about that in a few weeks so look for that on my channel if this video has been out for a while or subscribe if you don't want to miss it coming up because i'll be building that for right around twenty dollars a dedicated tungsten grinder that i think will work pretty well the next thing that i'd bring up and this is the last one is to have some acetone on hand or some denatured alcohol because that can be really useful for getting the grease and oils off of your parts and i actually put mine in this little pump dispenser that you just put a rag on top and press down and it gives you just a little bit to be able to clean your parts without having to open and mess around with the bottle so that'll be really handy because when you're tig welding one of the most important things is having clean material that will make a very noticeable difference to you so these are some of the basic things that you're going to need when you get started and now let's go ahead and talk about the different types of tig torches let's talk next about the tig torch it's super important because you have to interact with it all the time that's what your hands holding on with that's how you get the job done now there are a bunch of different types and sizes but i'm going to show you this one and the reason is if you bought a welder and it came with a tig torch it's probably this kind the uh series number for this is a number 17 torch and it has the hose that goes up into here now the interesting thing about this is this has an electrical wire inside of the hose so it carries both the argon gas and electricity up through the handle to the torch now let's go ahead and take it apart and look at the different components so this right here is called a back cap and you see when i loosen that you can see the tungsten electrodes starting to slide out right and there's different lengths of back caps here and all it is is a cover for the electrode as well as a nut to hold the collet in place we'll look at the collet in a minute so the reason why you'd use a different length of back cap is really just to make it so you can fit a full length of tungsten electrode in see because if i used a shorter back cap here i'd have to cut this off to be able to fit and i might lose a little bit of a bit of tungsten now go ahead and take this off here it just unscrews out and then we'll have an o-ring and then this is the collet that will fall out right and the collet is basically a little sleeve that fits inside over the tungsten and has a split in it and a taper and so as you tighten and push this up it'll squeeze the collet down to hold your tungsten in place and this you have to change different sizes for the different types of welds that you have this right here is your cup and there are different size cups for different applications for most of what i do i will use either a number uh five or six cup on on a lot of aluminum jobs and then if i'm running like stainless steel i'll use a number 10 or 12. so it'll depend on what you're running but if your welder came with one i'd just use what it came with to get started because it's not going to make a massive difference when you're first learning this right here this part is called the call-up body and this is the other end that the collet will fit into all right so you can slide the collar down inside here and uh that's what squeezes together between the back cap to hold everything in place so those are the the basic pieces and how they go together into the torch body so here i've laid out a few of the different accessories that i have for tig torches and you can see there's a lot there are different types of heads to fit down inside you know really small places there are flexible necks that can bend that go on the air-cooled torches and a bunch of different types of collet bodies and cups however there are only a few that i use on a regular basis so don't feel like you need to get everything but there is a lot available if you have a specific need to get into a tight spot or if you're welding stainless steel and you need extra gas coverage then you can look for those things but there is one accessory that i'll show you here in a second that i'd definitely consider maybe not right at first but maybe not too far down the road okay so here's the torch that we've been looking at that number 17 and then here's the torch that i use on a regular basis now you can see there is quite a size difference between them i mean one two a little more than two of these long to make up this now one thing you'll notice here is this has three lines going to it it has a line for the argon gas and then it also has two lines for water that flows up through to keep this cool now that requires a pretty good size upgrade to change to that so you may not want to do it off the bat i didn't do it for many years anyway but one other difference besides the size of the torch is the size of this cup here right you can see that right there makes up quite a bit of length and the back cap like i showed you before you can just change that out for a shorter one if you trim your tungsten off so if you want to run the cap for one of these smaller water cooled torches on the air cooled there's a cool little kit to adapt that and it's called a stubby gas lens kit and i'll link it below you go ahead and take out one of these instead of that big long collet body that we had before just one of these short collet bodies that has a little diffuser for the gas to help it flow a little more evenly it's called a gas lens and that'll go on there and then you can put these smaller cups on like either this one that i have here which is one of my favorites or one of these just little pink ones so if i were to recommend one upgrade for your torch that comes with your machine it would be the stubby gas lens kit okay let's take a minute to talk about machines now the machine that i have is called the miller dynasty 200dx and when i purchased it it was really the only machine available that had all of the features that i need now over the last 10 years or so there have been a variety of players that have merged in the market that have similar features at a much lower price and rather than getting into the details of different brands and things like that i just want to talk about some of the general features that you should be aware of as you shop for a machine the first question to ask is whether you're going to weld aluminum or not so if you're welding just steel or stainless steel you can run with your torch always negative and your work piece positive and that's direct current and those machines are typically pretty low price compared to the ones that will run alternating current which means that the torch and the work piece trade off between positive and negative and that usually happens between about 60 and 200 times per second depending on how your machine is set up so be aware of that if you want to weld aluminum you need to be shopping for a machine that has ac as well as dc the next feature that i would look at in a machine is arc starting so the best way to start the arc with the tig welder is with a high frequency arc starter and that means that you will send a high frequency electrical signal at a high voltage and that ionizes the air so basically in simple terms it makes it so that you can start an arc without touching your electrode to your work piece at all so that's the ideal situation and i would look for a tig welder that has at least high frequency arc starting if i was shopping for one however it's not essential and there are other ways you can do it the next best way is called lift arc and the way this works is you go ahead and short your electrode down against your work piece and as you lift it up the welder will automatically increase the current to make your arc initiate coming off of there and that works pretty well depending on the machine though some are a little bit snappy and will start to wear out your electrode the uh probably least desirable though a lot of people have run a lot of good welds with this way to start an arc is with scratch start and with that your electrode is live all the time like stick welding and you have to either scratch the electrode against your work piece or you need to flick it with your filler rod to be able to start the arc and this can be pretty cumbersome especially when you're learning and can wear out the tungsten pretty fast so if at all possible i'd spring for the high frequency arc starting the next feature that i would consider is whether you have a variable amperage control like a foot pedal so i really like a foot pedal there are also finger controls both buttons that you can press at different uh with different pressures to be able to vary the amperage or rollers that you slide or little sliding switches and i've tried a few different types of those i really like the foot pedal but this will let you change how much heat your welding torch is putting out while you're actually welding and this just gives you an extra level of control and it can also help you be more efficient because you can crank your machine up a little higher and then you can push your pedal way down when you're starting out you need to feed a lot of heat into the material then when you get 12 closer to the end you can back it off a little bit so that you maintain a nice bead right up to the end so that is a nice feature to keep in mind if that's available in the machine that you're looking at next i would consider the size of machine that you're getting now mine will output 200 amps and that's good enough for me to weld quarter inch aluminum without too much of an issue but when i get thicker than that i've welded some half inch before i really need to focus on preheat or some other tricks that you can do by changing your shielding gas or other things to be able to get through that thicker material so if you're going to be welding thick material pretty often you might want to look for something that has a little bit higher amperage around 250 or 300 amps that can help you out quite a bit now the last feature that i'll just mention but i won't go into detail is pulsing and what pulsing will do is it will change your amperage high and low as you weld along and it's definitely not essential probably the least important of any of these features but it can be pretty nice down the road as you get the hang of welding and you want to do a few more advanced things you might want that pulse feature so if that's available without adding a whole lot of cost definitely something i'd recommend considering okay so we got our gear we got our machine we're set up here at the station let's talk about getting set up and then we'll get into welding technique so when you're setting up the first thing to do is make sure you have clean materials so i'll go ahead and grind off any mill scale if i have it on steel and then take a rag soak it with acetone and then wipe any residue off of there i'll also take and wrap that rag around my filler metal and uh pull it across to make sure it's nice and clean because that'll give you a much better result now once your material is clean you want to make sure and set up your torch and we went over how those uh go together but to you know in general you want to grind your electrode with a nice point on it and i wouldn't worry too much about the angle on the point as you get started you know there's a there's a little bit of a difference between different angles and how big your cone gets but i won't worry about that at this point so go ahead and put it in your torch and if you're using a regular uh cup or a gas lens like this i'd have it protrude out stick out about a quarter of an inch i'm going to be using a little bit larger cup with a gas lens just to make it easier for you to see for this demonstration so i'll let mine stick out just a little bit further than that now as far as machine settings go we're going to be doing these first exercises on 1 8 inch thick steel plate and a good rule of thumb for welding is to use one amp per 1000 of an inch thick and this this works fairly well to get you in the ballpark so i'm going to go ahead and set my machine to 130 amps which is a little bit higher since i have a foot pedal now if you don't have a foot pedal i'd set the machine to about 110 amps if you're working on uh 1 8 of an inch thick coupons to do these drills that we're going to go over here for learning and then you might turn it up a little bit when you're actually welding joints and practicing that so the first thing that you need to pay attention to when you're welding is the arkling and as i walk you through these things i'm going to point out one by one some baby steps that you can be aware of and just focus on one thing at a time to learn welding and i know it may seem a little tedious at first but i'm confident that this will get you up and welding faster than if you try to focus on everything all at once so just focus on one thing at a time until you master that and then move on to the next step so the first step is focusing on your arc length now before you even turn the machine on go ahead and get comfortable holding your torch right make sure your shoulders aren't shrugged up and you're you know tense there try to get as comfortable as you can hold that torch and then take and try to just maintain about a 1 8 of an inch gap away from your material and take some dry runs and try to just move that along in a straight line and as you do that you know you'll probably notice that it's kind of hard right it's like playing the game operation you're trying to just be real precise here so just just do that and then once you're feeling okay about that go ahead and turn on the machine here and i'll just demonstrate uh what what it's like here so i'm going to start off just by playing with the arc length here right so go ahead and and start an arc and then you know make it long and short and move it in and out a little bit and see what that looks like so you're familiar because as you go through these steps what you're going to do is you're going to get a vocabulary so instead of coming back and saying oh man my welds look terrible this is garbage you'll be able to say oh you know what my arc was a little too long there or my angle was a little off and then that gives you something that you can work on and do so start off with that arc length and work with it until you get consistent and then try to move along in a line and just weld straight lines with that arc right there and once you're feeling pretty good about that arc length then we'll move on to our next step and this is your angle now your angle in general uh you know when you're welding a joint like if you have a you're welding a fillet joint inside here you'd want to be 45 degrees in and out of there and then in the direction of welding you'll tip about 10 degrees forward so you're pushing it along now there's a little bit of leeway you don't have to be exactly right there but if you get carried away it'll mess things up pretty fast so if you're welding flat on a table on a flat coupon just stick it straight in and out and then tip it a little bit towards the direction you're gonna go so in and out towards there and move along now here to demonstrate if you notice as i'm welding along here maybe what you were doing this as you were focusing on that arc length as you're welding along you start to tip and the torch gets more and more angle and you can see right there you're getting that uh arc extending out long and you're not going to have a consistent puddle so now focus on that as you move along and just weld some lines along where you're focused on instead of that arc length because you've got that pretty much down what that looks like and feels like maintaining that angle and just keeping it consistent all the way across okay so once you're feeling pretty good about that the next thing to focus on is your movement and so go ahead and just keep an eye on moving at a consistent speed all the way along and watching that puddle and the width of that puddle and as you do so you'll see that you can maintain you know a steady width of the puddle by moving at a pretty steady rate and just make a few more lines as you move along here and let me just show you this plate that i've done as i've worked through these three fundamental techniques before we even got anywhere near filler metal when you look at the plate here at the top i've got a bunch of kind of mess as i was playing with it and then towards the bottom we have some pretty consistent lines and once you get to that point you may not do it in one plate probably you won't you'll probably dunk your tungsten and you'll have to go sharpen it and if you're just dipping it again and again i won't stop and sharpen every time until you're getting to the point that you're not um just by the way but uh anyway once you're you're getting pretty good at keeping your electrode out of the puddle i'd go ahead and keep it sharp and just fix it up when you dunk it and then weld along here and once you have some consistent lines like this then we're ready to talk about filler metal now the reason i focused on these fundamentals is because those things will affect pretty much everything about your weld right usually it's one of those things going wrong so let's start by adding a little bit of filler metal so just to show you what that should look like is you're welding along here and you just dab that filler metal right into the leading edge of the puddle there and that works pretty well but here's what you're probably going to see or at least something i experienced the most people that i've taught have experienced is you can see the end of that filler metal is balling up and then just flopping in as liquid into the puddle now you don't want that and the interesting thing about this is this has more to do with what i'm doing with the torch then with the filler metal because if you look now i'm holding a long arc and i'll show this again i'm holding a long arc here and then you know a little bit too much torch angle and then i put my filler metal down it's melting before i get it down into that puddle right and so if i'm keeping that nice tight arc and my ankle right then it's pretty easy to just get your filler metal right in the right spot now the important thing to pay attention to here is you have to have a puddle before you add filler metal right you don't want to add it until you wait for your material to heat up now when you're watching this here on the screen it looks pretty quick but when you're actually under the hood it feels like a long time especially as a beginner it's going to feel you know like you're waiting forever for this puddle to form before you add filler metal to it be patient wait for it to form you'll see kind of that shiny appearance and once it forms go ahead and add that filler metal and move along and keep adding it as you move along and so that's really uh those are the basics and that's what applies to everything and you know i'll just about guarantee if something isn't going right you probably are off on your distance your arc length your angle or your movement one of those things is probably causing your problem um there are other issues with the you know a whole ton of things that can go wrong but those are the main things so you get those down everything else will go a lot better on your journey learning tig welding now let's just take a minute and talk about welding aluminum because i know that's something that a lot of people are interested in you know that's the reason that i really like tig welding is to put a nice stack of dimes on an aluminum corner joint that's pretty fun um there are just a few differences so i'll set my machine to alternating current in order to weld aluminum because the aluminum has a stable oxide layer on and by switching between your torch negative like it is when you're welding steel to positive and having that switch back and forth it'll actually clean the metal and you can see as i strike an arc here you can see there's kind of a fuzzy zone around the arc and that's where that material is being etched and cleaned off that oxide layer is being removed and then you'll get a nice pool going there now just a note on settings you're going to have a whole bunch of them when you start welding aluminum so a good starting place would be to set your ac balance at 70 percent and your amperage again at one amp per uh thousandth of an inch should put you pretty close to the ballpark and you should be in in pretty good shape with those to get started okay so i hope you picked up some good tips here to help you out as you get started in your tig welding journey and if you want to learn more about welding and fabrication check out the other videos on my channel and subscribe i have quite a few uh tig welding videos that i will have coming out going into more detail on uh some of these things such as machine settings or welding aluminum or whatnot and if you have specific questions post them down in the comments below and i'll do my best to get to answering them and we'll see you next time

Channel: TimWelds

Views: 66,595

Rating: 4.9399805 out of 5

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Id: 2od_jRAAQ6w

Length: 31min 43sec (1903 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 24 2020