TIG Welding Carbon Steel, Stainless, Aluminum, and Titanium

let's do it in this video we're going to be showing some common mistakes as well as some tips and tricks for carbon steel 4130 chromal stainless steel tips for cup sizes when TIG welding aluminum and even some tips on TIG welding titanium and how to avoid the number one biggest mistake on titanium I started out to do a really short product video on my TIG Pro kit showing each cup and what it's used for it's kind of a Swiss army knife of TIG kits cup for every situation but it kind of morphed into a much bigger video talking about some tips and tricks and some common mistakes we'll start off talking about carbon steel and low alloy Steels like 4130 chromal number one remove the mill scale trying to TIG weld over Mill scale just takes all the fun out of TIG welding right now things are going pretty good on the clean spot that I ground off that's about to come to an end right about now look at all that stuff floating around there it's like trying to weld in a bowl of corn flakes that Mill scale is going to be jumping onto your tungsten it's going to be clogging up your Gasol line screen it's going to be taking all the fun out of TIG welding if you're having trouble seeing the puddle at all first thing is to make sure you can read fine print about 18 inches away if that's fine the clear cups can help you a little bit they light things up kind of like a flood lamp they're not the be all end all but I really like them for filming and I have found out that when I go back to a pink cup it's like somebody dimming the lights another tip is to alternate TIG and aluminum beads when you're training and practicing when you're running beads and you're just stuck you're not getting any better it can help you from getting in a rut another common mistake is too tight of an arc I'm always preaching on holding the tight Arc but if you hold too tight of an arc on aluminum you're going to crap up the electrode and once you do that you really need to stop and break the tip of that electrode off and start with a newly prepped clean electrode that takes all the fun out of TIG welding too trying to weld aluminum like that for TIG welding aluminum I usually prep my tip something like this and then I just kind of usually let it ball however it wants to ball here's a technique that will keep you from having to clean electrodes a lot tight Arc while you're moving forward lengthen the arc while you're adding TIG rod I have found this technique to be very helpful on t- joints and lap joints and it's kept me from cleaning electrodes a lot and once again if you're just learning alternating beads between a piece of aluminum and a piece of Steel can keep your on your toes and help you learn quicker one of the cups that comes in this kit is a ceramic Jazzy tin one of my favorite cups for stainless and chrom Al with the added diffuser it hardly requires any more gas than a number eight gas lens but gives you a lot better shielding results lets you use a lot longer stick out and just gives great gas shielding the next one up is a number 12 really almost the same as the 10 just just let you use a longer stick out is great for chromal and stainless and you can see right there there's a very large area of argon coverage a lot of welding textbooks and manufacturers literature will tell you the optimum electrode angle and filler wire angle but all that kind of goes out the window when you're welding cluster joints like this it's great to strive for the proper way but the proper way is not always the only way the furic ceramic 12 really comes in handy when you need a long stick out this is about a 3/4 stick out it can handle a 1 inch even an inch and a quarter with no problem rule of thumb is generally you don't want to use a longer stick out than you need but some sometimes you need a long one and you don't want to sacrifice gas coverage when you have to do that nothing wrong with having a little discoloration on 4130 chromal or even stainless steel but if you have to do a two- pass well that second pass is going to go in way better if that first pass is shielded like this another really good use for the 10 or the 12 is Tick brazing with silicon bronze I'm using about probably about two pulses a second here but the extra argon coverage really helps keep that puddle from scumming up too badly helps it flow makes a big difference on silic and bronze now we're going to talk about stainless steel a little bit and something called the 3se second rule because heat can build up with you with a stainless you need to get your puddle established and get it moving within 3 seconds 2 seconds is even better if you take too much time getting started getting your glasses adjusted getting your helmet adjusted before you ever start adding rod and moving heat can build up on you so much that it's hard to outrun it and you're going to get excessive discoloration you're going to get warping it's not good another important consideration with stainless steel is purging the backside I'm not purging the backside right here because this is 8 in wall thickness very unlikely that I will melt through however if it was thinner where I was likely to melt through or if I wanted to get a full penetration weld I would need to Shield the backside with argon here's what happens when you don't when you penetrate through the backside on stainless with no shielding no backing no argon you get this Condition it's called granulation it's called sugaring it is a definite flaw and in some Industries you'll get black balled one being sanitary tubing one on the left had a good Purge the one on the right had no Purge for Aerospace welding tests you'll commonly weld in a purge fixture like this where you get purging on the backside on a plate on Aerospace welding tests it's helpful to have a long stick out and a larger cup for a couple of reasons one you see everything better it gets it out of the way gets the cup out of the way and number two it gives you a little bit of leeway in helping you keep the hot tip of that Rod shielded certain Alloys titanium nickel Alloys stainless don't like it if if you come in and out of that argon shielding with the hot tip of that Rod even on cold rolled steel where you don't necessarily need an oversized cup like this it's helpful to get that good argon shielding and to be able to use a long stick out when you need it now let's talk about aluminum for a bit and the cup sizes normally used on aluminum the number one thing on aluminum is making sure it's clean before you weld weld it there are lots of different ways to clean aluminum and it depends on how oxidized it is but you don't want to Bear down on a on a worn out flap disc and create a lot of heat and smear oxides you want to use an abrasive that's intended for aluminum or a wire wheel that's intended and dedicated for aluminum a number five cup is a favorite cup for a lot of people for TIG welding aluminum it works great for a lot of applications some of the best tig welders I know use a number five standard collet body for TIG welding aluminum one reason is because it really confines the etching area and it confines that cleaning action and directs that energy into the puddle and helps you get a full penetration weld when you need it you'll see a really good example of a full penetration outside corner weld right here this is 090 thickness 5052 aluminum my friend Brad Goodman doing his pedal pump technique here fully penetrating this corner you you can see the backside here looks like a caterpillar inching along sometimes you have to blend off the outside of a weld and if you don't get full penetration like that you won't have much left sometimes it helps to use a large gas lens like this with a number eight Cup and the reason I would do that is to get more cleaning action because you get cleaning action where that argon flows so on a piece of cast aluminum like this you can see that cleaning action just dancing all around outside the path and I'm letting it work before I ever puddle anything I'm doing a cleaning pass there and I'm going to do the same thing here and you can see it kind of cooking away the oxides you can see that black stuff just kind of dissipating as I slowly go back and forth I don't want to puddle it until I get some of that stuff cleaned off right here you can see it kind of cooking away and cleaning right ahead of the weld there's a small path there you don't want to outrun it I lock to use use the large gas lens for walking the cup too and it helps to have several different sizes so a number six fits inside a Groove like this where you can wiggle it along and then as you get out on the hot pass and the cover pass you might want to increase the size of the cup so number eight right here and then for the cover pass switch all the way to a 10 once you're outside the bevel and you're truly walking the cup like you would walk a 55 gallon drum across the floor it's good to have the right size cup to do that I know a lot of people don't weld titanium might not ever weld titanium but in case you do you need a large cup like this and here's a tip for you to avoid the biggest mistake on titanium you might think it's argon shielding you might think it's cleaning and those are important but the number one mistake that'll really mess you up is using the wrong Rod is accidentally not knowing it's titanium and using a stainless Rod or a nickel Rod or maybe you know it's titanium but you accidentally left a stainless Rod out on your workbench turns it into glass you don't want that an aerospace test weld on titanium would typically be done in a fixture much like this one you want to be really careful as I mentioned before to Shield the hot tip of that rod with the Argon never let it come outside the Argon envelope keep a fairly tight Arc roughly 1 amp per 1,000 of thickness up to about 50,000 works pretty good and use a large cup like the furic BBW for gas shielding a large cup like this can also help with certain nickel Alloys and stainless Steels that have a small aluminum content it really helps clean up the puddle sometimes you don't need a big cup at all in fact sometimes you need to use the smallest cup you possibly can if it's a Saturday the welding suppli is closed you can't get get any more argon you got to get the job done a number four is really helpful for Flash tacks and burst tacks like this saves argon you don't need any more coverage than that for a small tack a number five cup gas lens works just as good as a collet body for getting a full penetration weld without using a lot of argon on aluminum a number six gas Lens comes in really handy sometimes for a single pass fillet weld like this when you want to walk the cup I had about 50 parts of these to do a few years ago and I did a lot of them just like this walk in the cup I know a lot of people like a number five on aluminum I found that a number six gas lens is a super good allaround cup for a lot of aluminum joints like this outside corner here and a number seven is a great allaround size for a lot of different steel jobs like this unless you get a pretty long stick out when you need it sometimes still get good coverage for stainless steel a number eight seems to be a favorite of a lot of people and I can understand why stainless steel sometimes you need that long stick out but you do need good argon coverage here's a good example of why I don't use the standard collet body cups on stainless I've got a fairly long stick out here but I'm using around 20 cfh it should be getting good coverage it's just not I've got to stick out a little too far and it's not Weld and good it's Weld and muddy and sluggish and it's all gray I switch over to a number eight gas lens without changing anything same gas flow like night and day switching over to a jazzy 10 with those extra diffuser screens in there does an even better job not quite as big a difference as there was between the standard standard collet body and the number eight gas lens still a difference less discoloration with a longer stick out and that's why I hardly ever use the standard collet bodies for stainless steel anymore I hope you enjoyed this video on my TIG Pro kit here we've put together these kits for both the 920 style torch as well as the 171 1826 style torch you can find them at weldmonger.com that

Channel: weldingtipsandtricks

Views: 145,861

Keywords: welding tips and tricks, weldmonger, weldmonger store, tig welding tips, tig welding carbon steel, tig welding stainless, tig welding aluminum, tig welding titanium, tig kits, tig cups, tig welding kit, tig welding cups, clear tig cups

Id: axxwX3DO8Mk

Length: 13min 43sec (823 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 26 2023