Tig Welding Stainless Laps with a Stubby

hey this Jodi with welding tips and tricks' calm with another weekly video today we're talking about welding lap joints in stainless steel sheet and some tips on tack welding and some tips on amperage and just like a lot of things with TIG welding a lot of the work is in the prep work and so get a good fit up with no gap make sure you wipe it down good with acetone that's really about all it needs and in order to get a good fit up you can use a little homemade tool like the one I have here it's just an old screwdriver with some silicon bronze weld metal welded on the end and then sand it off to where is this kind of like a little angle on it and I place that right next to where I want to put the tack put pressure downward and set the amperage to what I'm going to weld that and then I go full pedal pretty quickly to get that first tack now I'm using a strong hand fixture point table here and I could I could put a clamp on there and and use the clamp to hold this stuff down but a lot of people don't have table like this and so I'm just showing you a quick and handy way to do it Plus this is just really the quickest way using both hands one hand effusion attack the other hand to hold down and because of that silicon bronze number one it won't contaminate the stainless with carbon steel number two it draws heat out really quickly you can put it right dead next to where you're going to put the tack and it'll prevent the the puddle from wicking over and melting off that edge and this is especially important on stuff like you know when you start getting thin thin sheet metal like thirty thousands twenty thousands this becomes really handy and helps a lot and getting tiny tiny tacks on there without peeling away that corner with the amperage plus you can light up on that copper alloy part of it if you have a machine that doesn't have a soft start as you want you can put it right next to there and actually light up on the copper alloy part of it and then bring the arc down if you if you need to here's a tip for you use small tacks make sure that they're smaller than the final weld that way you won't see them when you're done welding here's a little close-up of how that I just prop the cup on there point the tip of that electrode right where I want the tack give it a quick blast of amperage and now I've got a really small tight clean tack that hardly does colors at all and to we won't melt through because it's so quick also you want to put tax fairly often now this is just a little small piece that I've got on the bench here so I'm only putting tax every two or three inches but actually if this was a actual job I might actually put attack every inch because you don't want you don't want that joint opening up with you any kind of gap in a thin lap joint like this will just cause problems and a lot of a lot of jobs like a lot of foodservice type jobs kitchenware and things like that you just do a little fusion welder you won't even use filler metal and in that case you really don't want a gap at all because you know you don't have any filler metal to fill the gap alright here's another tip and this one there's a really important one it's so important I want to I'm going to show you an example toward the end of this video but get started quickly get that puddle started going quickly stainless steel is not very thermally conductive so heat builds up very quickly and if you don't get started quickly and get out of the gate quickly heat builds up and you just can't outrun it and you're going to get a dull well you're going to get more Distortion and everything so get that puddle going within like a second or two and get moving get it rot in there and get get moving out that's a big one right here I'm using somewhere between 44 and 50 amps it's hard to tell exactly machines all vary just a little bit you know they're all going to vary anywhere from one amp to as much as ten amps as far as what the display is and what you're actually welding but later in the video we'll talk about a kind of a tip for for setting all right let's let's take a look at this now I've been using this stubby gas lens kit with a number six there but I'm going to I'm going to go ahead and swap back to the standard style collet body just to show you the difference between the two at a certain stick out the the standard collet body and set up works okay in certain situations and here I'm going to run that electrode out about 7/16 of an inch and you can convert that to metrics however you want using the ruler there I've got both of them on there but about 7/16 of an inch using 20 cfh gasps didn't really make it happen here you could see the results here in just a minute because even the even the puddle wasn't flowing right when you don't have good gas shielding on stainless steel it makes the puddle much more squirrely it's sluggish it takes a little bit more amperage to make it flow or you have to go slower doesn't it doesn't wet in like it's supposed to and it just doesn't look good now these cups work okay under certain certain circumstances and we'll talk about that a little bit later on but I just want to just want to show you a direct comparison here with a 7/16 stick out and the same exact gas flow that's that's not what what anybody's after when they're welding stainless steel so here I'm going to extend the extend the electrode actually at least 7/16 it's probably closer to a half-inch using the same size Cup but using the stubby gas lens kit on this big 26 air-cooled torch which actually makes it a whole lot nicer and we're going to we're going to compare same gas flow same everything and right away you can see I'm getting a little bit better results right actually a whole lot better results wedding in better I'm able to move on out at a nice rate and that's going to wind up just would better a better overall well with better appearance less distortion because I can motor on a little bit better and I'm going backwards here from showing backwards but I'm having to film one way and and get the arc shots going in a different direction but it's very representative of what was going on there so that's that's a big difference that's like night and day now the one on the left obviously is using the standard the standard Cup and the one on the right using the cast lens Cup now here's an example again of what I talked about earlier about getting going quickly getting a puddle established and get moving quickly I'm going to show this again in just a second from the time I light up to the time I get rod in there and get moving is not much more than a second and that is kind of what you need to shoot for let's look at it here 1001 and I'm moving you don't want to hang around and get your bifocals lined up with your cheater lens and stuff and you know and take 5 or 10 seconds to ever get rod in there that's that's going to give you problems with stainless steel you need to you know have things adjusted so that you can see what's going on soon as you light up get rotten now I don't want to I don't want to give the impression that these cups are no good I'm going to use a much shorter stick out here more like a quarter inch or so and I'm getting pretty decent results there have also got it sped up a little bit but the point is once you get that stick out to a certain point you're just not going to get that good results with the standard cup and a gas lens is going to work a lot better alright there is a rule of thumb that says that about one ampere one thousandth of thickness will get you in the ballpark well that's really based on carbon steel stainless doesn't need that much amperage it only takes about two thirds of an ampere 1000 so one way to set a machine is especially if you don't have any good numbers on the dial or if you don't feel like it's that accurate or maybe there's a pair of vice grips instead of an amperage knob figure out the amperage it takes to do a fusion wheel without filler metal and then add about 10% to that with filler metal so what you're watching here is just me using a little bit of the corner for filler metal with no no filler metal added ins taken 40 amps and that's just about right and adding about 10% to that or you can just say add a little bit add 5 amps just add a little bit if you're using filler metal and you'll be right in the ballpark again that's 44 amps to do this to this puddle right here now what is the rule of 33 I've been talking about that in a lot of videos it's basically if you have an inverter that's got pulse capability on it 33 pulses a second with 33% on time for the pulse and 33 percent background is a really good starting place and it works exceptionally well and then thin stainless like this in keeping the heat down and moving that puddle along with a minimal amperage but you got to have an inverter most transformers none of them that I know of are capable of 33 pulses a second and I don't want to watch anything that's slower than that 20 pulses a second just really hard to watch here's another tip for you real quick if you can't get that puddle going if something gets in your way and it keeps you from getting that puddle going quickly just stop like I was on the end right there and it took me an extra second to get the - to join instead of just keeping going I just stopped let it cool for 30 seconds or so and then lit up again and then things go a lot better because once that heat builds up even if it's on the end it's hard to outrun it so if it hit if you have to hesitate at all just stop and let it cool this video marks a kind of a milestone you know I've been selling my tick finger on my website my DVDs of you know I put all the YouTube videos every year that I do on a DVD and I offer those for sale and I sell t-shirts and that all helps pay the bills and you know keeps me in this weekly video habit that I've that I've gotten into well it's time to kind of step it up a notch to the next level and I'm going to start selling a few other a few other products but I only want to sell good ones I only want to sell I only want to sell things that I can vouch for that I've used and I don't want complaints I don't want problems you know so so I bought a stubby gas lens kit made by CK worldwide couple years ago and this is something I can really vouch for and I actually even got with CK and I had them kit together a certain kit that's unique for for for you for people that I think you know are the kind of people that watch my videos and so the kit previously had a went down 200 40 electro but only up to a 3/32 so I just kind of moved it up went up to an 8 but only down to a 16 that makes more sense to me and I've also made sure that they are 2% lanten ated because I think that that's the best all-around electrode the real quick let me show you what's in this kit what everything looks like you got three different cup sizes gas lens cups 6 7 & 8 along with collet bodies and Kaulitz to match the white ring there is an insulator ring and that is the adapter that makes the stubby collet body work and makes everything fit right but that's that does two things it's a gasket to seal to make sure you're not sucking any air under the argon but it's also a heat barrier to keep that heat from the cup from transferring into your torch body and messing it up let me show you real quickly how to swap it off here I've done this already but this is a nice CK trimline air-cooled 17 air-cooled torch and by putting the little stubby kit together on it it turns this thing into what's almost as small as a small water-cooled torch except it's air-cooled and it still it'll still handle a good 150 amps and actually it'll handle 2 hundred amps for short periods even this big trap of met style torch it's a big seventeen traffic traffic net style and I'm really not crazy about it but it putting a stubby kid on it makes it actually usable so there it is again and also to make this thing a much better value I'm offering a free bonus DVD disc and here's some of the highlights of what comes on that bonus disc some stuff on tips on what not to do as well as what to do on lap joints little pulse TIG welding on aluminum tubing then wall aluminum tubing that's about 63,000 swall one-inch diameter pulsing with the foot pedal as well as doing some using the trigger switch and then also a little bit of socket welds using a couple different techniques like this walk in the cup technique I did a video a couple weeks ago about heat input that's included on there as well as just some just some good arc shots on doing T joints and lap joints and all kinds of things like that there's a lay wire technique done on this big chunk of 4140 steel and talked about preheating some some considerations there using a big chunk of stainless steel too as backing for filling in a big gap on a big chunk of aluminum it's a vertical uphill a vertical uphill but joint and 11 gauge tips for doing that using the rule of 33 on pulse TIG for welding near an edge I explain that in detail is one of the videos it's on this bonus DVD some TIG welding stainless steel on some shafting and straightening techniques and then a 2g horizontal 11 gauge but joint tips for doing that you can see the full offer for this gas lens stubby kit a 12 monger comm or weld monger store comm thanks for watching we'll see you next week you

Channel: weldingtipsandtricks

Views: 424,220

Rating: 4.8931346 out of 5

Keywords: tig welding, welding stainless, stainless steel welding, tig welding tips, tig welding stainless, tig welding techniques, stubby gas lens, ck worldwide, air cooled tig torch, Gas Tungsten Arc Welding, Stainless Steel (Invention), Welding, how to tig weld, how to weld stainless

Id: XIPx5Qx90VU

Length: 13min 12sec (792 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 17 2014