TIG Welding Stainless Steel for Beginners | TIG Time

Welcome back to TIG Time I'm mister TIG Todayís episode is going to be one of the three episodes on welding stainless steel Now first of all What is stainless steelÖ what makes it different from steel? Well by definition it's chromium content. So if you have mild steel and you toss in about twelve percent chromium which makes it tougher and thus we have the stainless portion of it, or corrosion resistance Now you have stainless steel Itís actually easier to weld if you follow the instructions stainless steel defines real well in the puddle You could see the puddle real well you can define your dips of adding the filler material the dabbing And just so you know there are so many different types of stainless steel Weíve come up with the chart for you and you can go on Weld.com to get this chart Now I happen to have it In front of me I just wanted to find a couple of the stainless steels I mean there's a whole list of them. Weíve got 304 stainless, 301, 316 Weíve got 321 stainlessÖ Where does it end? How do you select the material that you want to use for your application? So we're going to start off with the most common stainless steel and the most common that you'll find is typically called the 304 for stainless When you get ready to weld 304 this chart will also tell you what filler to use and Iím just going to do a little cross-section here And Iím getting ready to weld 304 to 304 And the chart tells me to use 308L filler material And just so you know, you can weld mild steel to stainless steel again just looked at the chart and it will tell you what filler to use Now, this is the first of three in the series so we're going to weld 304 but we also want to do a little identification. How do I know Iíve got stainless steel? And sometimes out in the shop you have stainless and it might be three or four stainless steel you're not a hundred percent sure But a good way of finding out isÖ Iíve got two samples of material here and Iíve got one It looks like it's stainless steel because it it's a little bit shinier so one way to check is to take a magnet just a normal magnet and see if the magnet will pick it up And in this particular case the magnet doesnít pick it up so there's a good chance that this is stainless steel, there's a lot of chromium in it Now this maybe stainless or you know what it may be mild steel Letís check OhÖ it's mild steel So, that's just a quick check There are all kinds of little checks that you could do One of them is you can grind the difference between the two and sometimes you have a keen eye to see the difference sparklers come off But the magnet is usually the best one to use Now, one of the concerns I have in welding this material the chromium When you get activated, when you get a puddle Whatís going to happen it is oxygen is going to try to attack It, so with the TIG torch we have a gas lens This particular TIG torch Iíve got a gas lens, a one-sixteenth tungsten sticking out about a quarter of an inch that's going to be our standard and so Iíve got good gas shielding Iíve got a part set up here and is tacked At both ends Iím going to get good gas shielding here and as I weld Iím going to dab consistently When I finish the weld I am going to turn the part over and you're going to see the penetration Now if you put A purging or a gas back up to this penetration Youíre going to have an excellent looking weld on the back side If you didn'tÖ If you took shortcuts and you didn't put gas backup Youíre going to find that it welds a little more difficult and you're going to find oxides on the back side and these oxides will definitely shorten the life of your weld Or if you're welding up on of your expensive exhaust parts for a Race car, a high-performance car or just about anything it's going to shorten life SoÖ just want to let you know stainless steel has its place it's a great material Itís actually easy to weld So we're going to get started and I'm going to run Half of this plate without gas backup the second half Iím going to turn the gas back up on OkayÖ It initiates very cleanly you can see that puddle real shiny and I'm just adding a little bit at a time I can see That Iím starting to penetrate And this particular weld does not have gas backup SoÖ the likelihood is There is going to be a few oxides on the back side And we will show those to you a little bit later but the top side typically welds pretty nice AndÖ Iím finishing the weld Reducing my amperage and making sure that the crater does not fill too low. And weíre finished. Okay, weíve got arc initiation, you can see the puddle is forming Itís nice and clean Now this particular setup has purging on the back side Meaning argon gas SoÖ I actually get a little cleaner weld And a little more control It doesnít try to wonder on me ìA little dab of fillerî SoÖ very stable, very shiny And Iím going to finish up here shortly, so Iím going to Make sure I donít leave a crater crack. I am going to add a little extra filler right at the end. And you can see Iím only using like 045 diameter 308L And I get to theÖ Weld termination And I pull out of the puddle with amperage Little lessÖ little lessÖ and Iím finished. Okay let's take a look at what we just did Okay now this will write here we added filler material We had argon on the TIG torch and we did not have purge gas on the back side And youíll probably notice there's kind of a burn line here, itís kind of a dirty burn line If you move over to do this weld We also ahead purge gas and Torch gas at the same time it does have a burn line and weíre to cover the later how to get rid of that burn line But right now we're just comparing the difference between purging verses not purging your part. And now Iím going to turn the part over And this really is the tell tail sign whether you did it properly or not This is the oxide sometimes you hear it described as brown sugar The backside did not wet out well at all so there is going to be non-fusion and because you have these chromium oxides, cracks are going to start forming and you're going to have poor performance in your part or whatever youíre welding. It could be an exhaust system, it could be anything but it's not going to hold up as well as this right here This has perfect fusion You can see that it wetted out very nicely Now there are all kinds of ways of purging and we're going to continue those in section two and three of this. Well that's it for now Thanks for watching TIG Time Iím Mr. TIG

Channel: Weld.com

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Keywords: welding stainless steel, Welding, Weld.com, TIG, Weekend Warriors, How To, Stainless, Steel, Stainless Steel, Gas Tungsten Arc Welding, Tungsten Inert Gas, How To Weld, Gas Backup, welding stainless steel with tig, tig welding stainless steel, welddotcom, welding and fabrication, welding education, Stainless steel

Id: Ds6cLG3ThDY

Length: 8min 45sec (525 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 03 2012