TIG Welding Basics - SIMPLE Tips & Tricks How to Get Started

what's up everybody welcome back to make it custom I'm Carl Fisher and today's video is something that I've been asked about a bunch of times it is uh going to be a TIG welding video we're going to do a little bit of 10 gauge plate I'm going to demystify and simplify getting started with TIG welding I'm not going to go into crazy detail on a bunch of parameters that you don't need to use we're going to talk about amperage gas flow technique and just simply how can you get started in TIG welding right now and start doing it so don't forget to like click subscribe hit notifications let's get into it [Music] [Music] so the first thing we're going to go over is the machine it doesn't matter what machine that you have you could have a really old one you could have a new one it is not gonna matter today we're going to go over TIG welding steel so we're going to be using DC TIG welding with a high frequency start now the difference between high frequency and not high frequency I'm just going to cover it and probably not going to need to know it scratch start tag is something that some of the less expensive welders would have or an older welder where you can actually use almost like a stick welder to start TIG welding so we're not really going to be doing that because most welders that you purchase even the cheap ones off of Ever or Amazon are going to have high frequency start which just means that you can just start TIG welding without having to scratch the tungsten or do any weird stuff there so my machine is an imported machine this is not you know a name brand thing this is a this is an inexpensive one from overseas and when I turn it on oops let's plug it in first [Music] this is a 200 amp machine I can go up to 200 amps the rule of thumb I like to use when I'm choosing the amperage that I'm going to be welding at is approximately one amp per thou okay so think about that for a second if you've got sheet metal and you've seen me do TIG welding on thin sheet metal on car bodies I'm using this machine and I'm at about 55 amps 60 amps that sort of thing which is pretty relatable to how thickness in thousandths of an inch that auto body sheet metal is 18 gauge 19 gauge that sort of deal so if you're thinking perhaps we're going to do some welding on 10 gauge material or 1 8 that's about 120 thou thick so approximately a good place to start with your welding machine is to be at about 120 thousands or 120 amps part of me because it correlates to the thickness now when we're talking about uh gas flow it's not crazy crucial okay this is not something where you have to have 17 or 20 or you know whatever it's it's basically you need enough to cover your weld as you're welding that's what you're looking for you don't want porosity you don't want any kind of um contamination by having oxygen get to your weld so a way to do that um to see where you're at without even looking at the gauge is just to turn your gas up to more than you need and you can just kind of keep turning it down until it messes up your Weld and then you just want to be a little bit more than that different environments different situations different airflow in your shop could affect those things but other than that it's not a super crucial number to think about as far as what type of gas use pure argon and that's that's just what I use I use it for everything there might be certain scenarios where you could use a different gas but I've never not used pure argon aluminum welding stainless welding you know um steel welding I just use pure argon so that's all you need to know about the gas now when we're talking and I'm trying to give you guys the basics I'm not going to go into crazy detail I want you guys to get as much information in a short video that gets you started so this is a very basic take torch it does not have water cooler um right now I've got a fupa Cup this is called a gas lens you see these they are a little bit larger and allows you to actually run your tungsten out even further like we would probably have enough gas coverage to run that far out and the reason why you see a lot of people in Industry switching to this is for that reason gas coverage as well as you know if you're welding into a roll cage or doing any tight scenarios you have a little bit of extra um you know visibility and room and reach to get into those spots now the traditional cups look more like this nothing wrong with them I've used them for years actually Elio who's behind the cameras the one that put me onto these and I think it's great there's another great thing about these is that the amount of gas and the way that it's dispersed through this gas lens which you can see is like a little wire lens in there has a really even gas flow and allows you to use more gas to help with cooling as well so there's a couple advantages to going this route but by all means if you have a machine and it came with these nothing wrong with it you just won't have as much stick out on your tungsten today we're going to be welding with a 3 32nd tungsten I'm going to be at about 120 amps because we're going to be welding 1 8 inch material so about 120 thou that's that's the rule of thumb so I'm saying it again so that it sinks in for you guys as far as the stick out goes for your tungsten when you're using a large fupa cup like this you can stick it out quite far um like if it's say an inch here I've got maybe an inch and a quarter of stick out now if I'm going to use one of these pink ones because they're a little bit smaller basically the rule of thumb as Elio was just filling me in is that you don't want it to stick out any more than the distance of the radius of the cup so for this one you you really couldn't stick it out much more than that maybe 3 8 of an inch or so that's one of the advantages to going with these gas lens type situations okay and then as far as tungsten's go I use the red tungsten for doing things like steel that's if you have an older machine that you use a two percent thoriated tungsten that's usually the one that has a little bit of red on the end now the newer machines that are all inverter technology if you have a newer machine this is likely the type of machine you have they like to use two percent lanthiated which is a Tungsten that has a little bit of blue on it and it's kind of good for everything so those are your choices you know Green is a pure tungsten that you can use for stainless steel aluminum as well we are going to focus today on just welding mild steel because if you're working on cars doing things like I'm doing that's the most common thing that you're doing so I think what we're going to do to get started is um actually before we do that let's just let's just take this apart and have a look at the parts okay so I might not even tell you exactly what they're called but let's just have a look at how they're assembled so this cap they make all sorts of different sizes of these if you need to get into smaller spots you can cut your tungsten smaller and you can use smaller ones of those this is obviously the cup and the gas lens that piece right there and then this is actually what holds on to your tungsten so this um ferc brand has this type of a collet is that a collet this is a collet okay this is a wedge collar that when it gets tightened it basically gets pushed on by this on this side it pushes on it and Rams the wedged end into what is this called yellow songs this is not a gas lens is it yeah is that not a gas lens what's the ones this is the cup that's the gas lines it's a good thing we got Elio here I don't even know what these things are called okay so gas lens uh nice quote this is that you can use the same 332 for 1 16 and 332 you just change your collet so basically this goes inside there and when these are threaded it pushes on the collet and tightens on to the tungsten that's how it works okay so there's that and then your gas comes out this lens and through the cup and I think this is also a lens is a knot yeah this is a lens as well so that's how they are assembled in your torch now if you're just getting started in TIG welding I suggest that you just use the pedal and amperage and you just start by steadily creating an arc onto a piece of metal and you can just see how the art grows you can watch the puddle you can learn a lot just from doing that you know how to hold your tungsten or how to hold your torch in a comfortable way where you are steady and you're able to be accurate with being steady now we're holding our tungsten very close to the metal a lot of the times and and you'll have to re-grind your tungsten because you might touch the metal you might touch your filler so these are all things that you can practice by being really steady and just arcing onto a piece of metal so we're going to start with that right now I'm just going to set the machine up at 120 amps and we're just going to roll onto the pedal we're going to create an arc and build a puddle and then we're going to stop we're just going to practice that do that a few times we're going to add some filler material when you add filler material you'll see that the heat from your weld also has to heat the filler material so you do need to have a little bit more power to compensate for that cold material that you're adding that also has to be heated up so anytime you dip your weld it actually cools it because you're having to heat up another piece of metal so that's something to think about when you're welding so I'm going to set up for that we'll put this thing back together we're just going to do some little dots on this piece of metal then we'll graduate to little beads and then we're going to start doing actual beads and joints together thing I'm going to also go over is uh the tungsten grind okay so you we do have to grind these tungstens and this is sharpened to a point similar to a pencil might be tough to see there for the most part the angle that you have it meaning how sharp it is is it a 90 degree angle is it you know is it sharper is it less that basically is the actual shape of the arc coming off of there so if you have a point that's very sharp well your Arc coming off of that point will be similarly sharp meaning your puddle could be smaller if you're if your tungsten is sharper your puddle is smaller if your tungsten is more dull then your puddle will also be more dull or wider so that is something to think about for the most part for myself my own experience I pretty much sharpened them almost all the same all the time I just go about three times the thickness of the tungsten is the length of my sharpen between two to three times depending special situations you might want something sharper or less sharp depending on building up a weld on thicker material or having a smaller well on thinner material so it's kind of a rule of thumb but something you can play with at home not everybody does the same thing so like I said these are the basics and then you can sort of take it from there all right torches back together I've got 120 amps I've got about 25 cubic feet per hour as my flow rate for gas and like I said this is one of those gas lenses that that fuses it a little bit better so we do have a little bit better gas coverage and we are able to have that much stick out it's very important to be able to see really well when you're TIG welding it's also very important to be comfortable when you're TIG welding so you want to make sure that you've got rest you want to hold the TIG torch in such a way that you have control over it you have control over your pencil that way that's how you should hold your TIG torch too that's kind of how I like to hold mine I hold my tick torch like this choked up on the end I've got my finger on top this allows me to have my arm against the table it allows me to have just incredible amounts of control because I need it for TIG welding when you're when you're getting close to the material the other thing I wanted to give you as a bit of a rule of thumb is the thickness of your tungsten approximately is how far you should have the tip of your tungsten away from the material so I guess the length of your Arc should be approximately the thickness of your tungsten more or less a little bit more probably never less but um that's the other thing what we're going to do now is we're just going to do these dots here I'm just going to I'm just going to use my foot pedal I'm going to roll on I'm going to try and be steady I'm going to watch myself create a little Dot and then let it cool so I'm going to roll onto my amperage and then roll back off this is what I want you guys to practice if this is your first time so here we go [Music] we'll keep going so right now you just want to make sure that your Arc is nice and steady that your hand is nice and steady you want to see yourself make that puddle and then also roll off a bit so once you've mastered the art of creating tiny little dots we're going to move to moving so we're going to do small little beads we're not adding filler yet we're just trying to get comfortable with moving while the arc is on so I'm going to do the same thing but I'm going to do maybe three quarters of an inch or an inch long trying to keep my travel speed consistent as well as my arc length one more thing to consider is that usually when you're welding well most of the time when you're welding you've got your filler in your left hand if you're right-handed you want to angle your tungsten and your torch in the direction of travel okay this does a couple things for you number one gives you a great view of what's Happening number two is it makes your puddle turn into a little bit of an oval and that's kind of a key thing because now your puddle is extending in front of your tungsten giving you a place that you can add filler without crossing your actual Arc now if you were to put filler right through your Arc it would ball up and drop a piece of filler and you would never be able to dip it into the puddle so by giving yourself an angle in the direction of travel and an oval puddle now as you're traveling you have a place to dip you have a puddle to dip into rather than burning up your tungsten before it hits your puddle so like I said we're just going to do a few short lines trying to control our hand and move without changing our Arc Length meaning the distance away from the material and without wiggling around too much so get comfortable try and hold this tungsten in or your torch in such a way that you can be solid about it and give this a shot okay so I'm just trying to be as consistent as I can I want the puddle to just be the same width the whole way I'm starting my puddle and then I'm starting to move and shutting it off if you go slower your puddle will be wider if you go faster it will be narrower and those are just some of the things that you'll get the feel for as we move along now one more thing I'll mention is that there is a post flow of the gas which means that as soon as you stop the arc it will have a timer that will keep the gas on after you've stopped the arc that's called post float there's another thing called pre-flow as well we're not going to get into that because it's not necessary right now but the post flow allows your weld to be shielded while it's still hot and molten if it were to cut the gas immediately while it was cooling there is potential for that oxygen to contaminate your weld right when you finish so depending on how hot things are how big things are you might have more or less post flow for mine I've got just a few seconds of post flow at the moment and that's plenty enough to wait for my weld to solidify so that it does not have some some kind of inclusion in it contamination so now that we've got our dots and dashes figured out and we're getting comfortable and you might have to do you know 10 of these or 20 of these whatever whatever it may be now we're going to start introducing filler material so what I'm going to do is I'm going to use a 1 16 filler which I hopefully have anywhere there my little hiding spot inside the mission inside the table so now that you've got dots and dashes we're going to start moving along and just adding a little bit of material what I'm looking for here is that you guys just are as consistent as possible move a little bit dab it move a little bit dab it move a little bit dab it try and be consistent that's all you're trying to do throw my puddle up I'm going to give it a dab Move Along give it a dab Move Along give it a dab Move Along give it a dab Move Along it's a very wobbly looking well I actually have to add a little bit more amperage because I could just tell that that was not happening fast enough now that I'm cooling the weld with this material I need a little bit of extra heat so instead of being at 120 I'm going to go up to 130. and right now I'm I am Full Throttle hammer down that's what I'm doing um you know because it's a variable foot pedal if you need to back off or give yourself more you can but for learning I would say set your welder so that you can just floor it you can worry about figuring out that later you know as far as your foot control but right now when we're just trying to concentrate on being as steady as possible you don't need to add a third limb into it so right now I know I need a little bit more heat so I'm bumping up the welder and I'm gonna still just floor it [Applause] [Music] this is a much nicer weld because I was able to move a little bit faster because I had a little bit more heat um that is all that really is is playing with your heat settings and the speed that you feel you're allowed to go now something I'm going to try and explain to you guys because this is personal experience I worked for a shop when I was first learning how to TIG weld and uh and he kept saying that my welds were too hot I kept saying that my welds were were too hot they looked too hot they were too hot and I was welding pretty cold that I thought and I couldn't understand why why is this guy telling me my welds are too hot you know I I feel like I'm welding as cold as I can weld well that is another misconception about TIG welding or something that could be confusing is that if you are really slow with what you're doing the slower you are the hotter things you're getting so to have a cooler weld sometimes you have to have higher amperage but move faster so think about that for a second is that if you're stalling you're heating up all the metal around and you're preheating everything around what you're trying to do and it's actually making the weld hotter uglier and more brittle so it is important to go at a speed that you can use the proper amperage which in some cases is a little hotter for your weld to be cooler I know it's something to think about but you'll figure out when to try all right so I want you guys to practice adding a little bit of filler and and just doing consistent beads try having a little less heat and see how slow you have to go and then try having a little bit more heat and speeding it up and when you're done your weld you'll see how much heat is in the material by you know the penetration or the the heat lines the discoloration that happens around your Weld and you'll know what I mean by slower is hotter it's a weird thing to get a hold of but you guys will figure it out so I think next what we're going to do like I said take your time like don't move on to the next thing unless you're comfortable with this one we're going to start off with a t-joint this is very you know Common inside corner type welding I'm going to do that with filler and what I'm going to do with this is I think I'm going to do it in such a way where I'm gonna just have the amperage constant so I'm going to set the machine like I was saying so you guys don't have to think about you know trying to find your place on the pedal I want you to set your amperage so that you can just floor it and know that that's the amperage that you're going to use that's at least one variable that you can take out of the equation once you've set your amperage that's what we're going to do right now so I'm going to start off with the amperage that I have which is 130 amps and just see if that's hot enough cold enough where it is so I'm going to attack this piece together and then I'm going to give it a try with a little bit of 1 16 filler 3 32nd tungsten let's do it now when you're tacking a lot of the times if it's tight enough you can you can just do it with Fusion you don't need to have any failure materials so that's what I'm going to do right here [Music] a little Fusion attack the same thing on this side [Music] [Laughter] touch my tungsten if you ever touch your tungsten with anything if you touch it to your puddle or you touch it to your filler material you got to re-grind it okay some people I've I've talked to people that say that you don't need to re-grind it it still arcs and you can still make it well it's sure you can you can still do all that but when you have a sharp tungsten your Arc is also sharp if you have a Tungsten that has you know where you've had to break it off the piece of metal it's stuck to or something like that the arc itself is going to be disrupted by whatever shape the end of the tungsten is so if you have a ball on the end or if it's sharp or if it's broken it's all going to be different coming off of it and your Arc May dance around or it may kind of go to one side so for learning purposes and in all cases you know you should always have nice and sharp tungsten's one thing I like to do is I like to pre-sharpen a bunch of them I know that I'm going to stick them if you just sharpen it once and then mess it up and you have to walk to your grinder again it doesn't make sense so try and get a few tungsten's sharpen on both sides so that either here and you can just continue welding all right so same deal as anything else I'm going to be in the direction of travel I think we should do this flat position like this just easier to see right yeah rather than horizontal it is the same as far as your angle you know I'm going to be kind of vertical this way in angle direction of travel but if I was doing this horizontal I would be you know still the same deal it's it's it's 45 degrees so you're pointing right in the center of that and we're just going to move along like this so one more thing with TIG welding that I probably could have said this earlier because it's very important TIG welding you must have clean material like I mean clean no Mill scale if you do a plasma cut like these were cut on my plasma cutter but even where it cuts it you have to grind that off because it will get a thing called Mill scale um or any material that is not cold rolled steel like if you have hot rolled steel and it's got that scale on it TIG welding doesn't like that okay so using cold rolled steel or if it's hot rolled steel you must grind off the mill scale you must have it clean the cleaner your material the better it's going to be to weld take does not like mill scale you can mig weld it all day but TIG welding you don't want it promise okay now that we're tacked we're gonna get onto this like I said I'm going to hold this torch angled in the direction of travel by about 35 degrees similar to what I say when we're MIG welding and then it will be you know 45 degrees to that work piece so it'll be directly in the center and angled forward so that we can make this world happen I am going to set the welder so that it has a constant amperage and you'll see that every dip I make is what's going to make our little bead kind of Dimes people talk about stacking dimes it's every time you drop the filler material it makes that little C shape so let's give this a try okay Full Throttle [Music] wow so whenever you start a weld it's a little bit colder so it might take a second while you're still there I think I could have actually Juiced my amperage up maybe just a little bit to move a little bit faster but for the most part I'm pretty happy with that weld although it is a little bit too concave for my taste and that just means that there isn't quite enough filler there which is also an indication that it was a little bit too cold I wish I could have added a little bit more filler so what I'm going to do is I'm going to up my amperage to about 140 and we're going to give it a try again so when you're welding MIG welding take welding anything you definitely want to have a weld that is you know a tiny bit convex or or kind of flat if it's under I mean they look pretty that's a pretty looking weld but it's not quite adequate because it's undercut a little bit so the weld technically isn't as strong as it could be so when you're when you're filling you want to be able to feel enough that it is an adequate weld so that's why I turned it up a little bit so that I'll have a little more heat so that I can add a little bit more filler because like I said before the filler cools the weld so if you need to add more filler you're going to need a little bit more heat also the different joint designs like we're going with an inside corner here it takes a little more heat to do an inside corner than it does say a butt weld so there's some variances there so this is 140 amps 1 16 filler 332 tungsten give it a try I'm also dipping a little bit more often here to get enough filler in foreign ER because it's got a little bit more fill this is 150 amps Full Throttle dabbing it in now I want to tell you guys that when I do weld some of the times I would say most the time this is just my personal preference I throttle the pedal so I'll add a lot more amperage than I would normally use and I will use more amperage only when I'm filling and I back it off as I'm moving so that's something that you can play around with later but that's just the way that I kind of drop my dimes into whatever I'm welding but for this tutorial type situation for beginners I think it's easier to start with as many consistencies as you can have so we're eliminating variables by not having a variable foot pedal right now okay so 150 amps 1 16 filler three thirty seconds tungsten [Music] foreign I was able to get a little bit more filler in there but I also noticed that my tungsten is a little bit contaminated based on the way the Arc was coming off of that I'm not sure if I dipped it or what happened there but I'm going to change it because I do want to show you guys me throttling it and what the difference is I'm also just kind of interested because I don't normally weld like that I kind of want to see what the difference is [Music] you know my welding teacher would call this uh mechanical pulse or manual pulse machines nowadays can be set to do this pulse but uh you know back when I was doing my welding welding school this is called manual pulse foreign let's try another joint okay we're gonna do a butt weld and we're also going to do an outside corner joint so let's start with that so for a butt weld same idea I'm just angled in the direction of travel so that I've got that oval in front of my tungsten that I'm going to be able to dip my dip my filler into I think for this weld like I said I'll do a constant I'm not going to pulse this I'm just going to do it with a constant amperage so I'm probably going to bring this down to maybe 120 we'll start there because this type of a weld with a gap in there will take less heat to make it burn [Music] okay we're going to give it a shot at 1 30. [Music] [Applause] oh look at how much that material is choked up eh you know it actually contracted quite a bit okay so that one was at 130. foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] so there's a bit of an outside corner same idea you just always got to keep your eye on the puddle every time I'm dipping I'm kind of watching that the puddle doesn't get too much wider you kind of want to dip and see that your puddle gets to the same size as the previous one something else I want to show you guys is just Fusion because a lot of cases you can fuse things together and uh and you might not even have to add filler in this case we're just going to do Fusion because it's something that you can practice as far as as moving your arm and and TIG welding it's so important to be comfortable you see how I've got this up on my on my shoulder here it's because the weight of this against the ground every time I move this the weight of this is kind of affecting how much this Wiggles so if you can put the weight of your torch and and your line over your shoulder now this becomes much lighter easier to control so that's just one more thing that you can think about so let's do a little bit of fusion right here I'm just I'm not going to use thinner at all I'm just going to try and steadily move my hand along and this is something I like to practice as well is if I'm going to do a weld that I don't want to stop during the weld I will without the welder on I will try and steadily move along the weld joint and see if I have enough reach with my hand position okay so if I started a little bit further I might be able to finish a little bit more solid rather than starting here and trying to reach for that last little bit if I can move over and start here then maybe by the time I get to the end I'm a little bit more solid so it's all depends on whatever you guys want to use as um as a rest or however comfortable you can make yourself it's worth it Whatever It Is these are all the things that you're going to figure out for yourself as you go so have a look at how I hold this it's always in kind of like a pencil type writing Implement sort of way so that you have more control you do want to be resting on whatever you can if it helps to grab something that's like this is a little bit taller than when we were welding Flats so if I wanted to rest scrap of Steel hand I can put my hand resting on this actually that's much more comfortable much more comfortable so that's what I'm going to do so let's just fuse this without filler for a little bit just to show you guys so you're just going to build the puddle up and just like we were doing on the dots and dashes you're just going to try and be as consistent as you can and run along that joint so here we've got The Fill we've got our puddle started I'm just running it straight along trying to be as consistent as I can watching that the side bead stays consistent I wiggled a little bit at the end of that how consistent it is you can see where my wiggle is but just try and be as consistent as you can these are all techniques that are going to help you be a better welder all right so I'm going to stop this video here I want you guys to tell me in the comments if you found this video helpful or if there's more techniques that you would like to hear from me as far as how to do this or more examples that I could give you this will not be the only TIG welding video that I put out but it is the first on thicker material so the next one you might see will be strictly on thin material we'll probably do the same sort of idea so thanks a lot for watching make it custom everybody thank you Elio behind the camera and I appreciate you guys if you guys want another way to support the channel there's always the custom crew there's a little button at the end of this video it's five bucks a month really helps me out also helps you get 15 off discount on our merch store which is Japan's customs.com and it gives you a badge by your name that I search every time in the comments to make sure that I get back to those guys as well as answer as many questions as I can in the comments so thanks a lot once again I appreciate your support everybody have a great week and we'll catch you next time on make it custom share foreign [Music]

Channel: Make It Kustom

Views: 197,803

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Id: xXfLJIB9DSg

Length: 39min 40sec (2380 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 03 2023