TIG WELDING STAINLESS STEEL - How I get COLORFUL welds!

hey everyone in this episode i'm gonna do a demo on tig welding stainless steel and how to get colors what's up everyone welcome to another episode from pacific ark tig welding my name is dusty to all the arcades who watch the show every week what's up welcome back i appreciate you as always and to anybody that may be new to the channel make sure you bounce back and check out the previous episodes i have on my channel as well one of my favorite things to do on this channel is tig welding art i do two-dimensional and three-dimensional art pieces where i basically try and break as many rules of tig welding as possible and go through all the schooling and stuff that i've learned to do cool tricks and making art pieces as well as art pieces on this channel we also do tig welding how to's where we do how to's on specific weld joints and weld tricks as well as gear breakdowns and tutorials on how to use different uh torch setups and different things like that all things tig weld related so if you dig what you see i would really really appreciate it if you like subscribe and most importantly share what you see on this channel i really really appreciate that so for today's episode i always read in the comments especially after i put out an art piece one of the most common questions i get is how do you get the crazy colors with your tig welding so in today's episode i'm going to break down what i do to achieve this look and again i that being the key word a lot of people have different opinions and different setups this is just the way i do it but first let's go over what we do not want to achieve with this exercise what we don't want to see is any gray or or chalky basically what this means is these welds have become overly oxidized that's what we do not want today basically over oxidization or too much oxide formed on a weld after you finish a weld is basically a combination of a couple things combination usually uh between overheating too much heat on your work piece as well as inadequate gas coverage so a couple tips that can usually rectify these problems if you're getting a lot of ashy looking or chalk or looking looking stainless wells which are obviously not very nice looking and not very shiny there's a couple things i focus on i focus one thing on not going too slow so with my art pieces obviously i'll show a couple clips again these are just some roll clips of uh kind of in between a welding project right now so these passes take a very long time to do now when i'm doing these passes if i tend to hang out in the same area for too long obviously this is very easily going to overheat the weld so with these passes i want to make sure i'm not going too slow i want to move a little bit quicker obviously not too quick because i want the puddle to set down nice and even and wet in properly but if i go too slow it's going to form that oxide which we do not want as you move along a weld pass a little quicker you're going to tend to have less heat which is going to allow for the weld to become more shiny which is good and also if you find that sweet spot with your speed uh you're gonna get those cool colors so another thing i do that uh really helps out with my technique to get uh some really cool colors is something i call the foot pump technique uh max from fifth street fab shout out to you max what's up calls us the pedal bump uh pedal bump foot pump whatever you want to call they're both basically the same thing uh and again it's basically where i'm just using my pedal with my foot to just pump instead of just holding a straight arc on uh this is going to cause a little kind of like a pulse effect where you're going to have little cold pockets it's going to keep your material a little bit cooler i did an episode on this uh it's called do i use pulse i'll put that link in the description below so make sure you check out that one if you're interested in that one specifically that's a pretty technique based video we get into a little bit more of the nitpicky stuff on how i achieve this effect so if you're interested check out that in the description below now the other main reason that i mentioned that welds can become overly oxidized is inadequate gas coverage so there's a couple ways that this can happen something to do with your setup where you haven't set up your gas lens and your gas flow properly that's probably the most common one that i see another one is bad torch angle if we have a torch angle that is too steep a lot of the time what can happen is if the torch angle is too steep you're not going to get any trailing gas so the trailing gas what i mean by that is gas that's going to travel behind your ark even though you've just moved away from the weld you still want to have some gas flow traveling to the area that you've basically just come off of if you have too steep of a travel angle you're not going to have any trailing gas your gas is going to be all pushed ahead of you so basically all that gas that you spend a lot of money on or someone else has if it's uh your boss paying for that is going to be wasted it's going to be blown ahead and you're not going to actually affect any of the well that you've just done and probably the most important thing that i see that causes over oxidization on welds is improper post flow so post flow for anybody that does not know we set it up on the machine settings and we'll go over that in a second here it's the amount of time that the gas comes out of your cup out of your torch after you've extinguished your ark so we can be welding along and we'll finish our weld even though the weld is now off it's extinguished we want to make sure that we keep the torch there because the post flow is still releasing gas so we want to keep this gas over the weld area especially that area that is super hot that we just finished because it's going to prevent that oxide from forming if you are running your weld and you finish and remove your torch right away boom that oxide is going to form immediately it's going to happen immediately and then yeah you're going to have a weld that's super oxidized right away so make sure that you set your post flow long enough again it's very situational i won't give you a number as far as how many seconds it is i usually shoot for anywhere between five to seven seconds but again i've timed it with a stopwatch the machine settings are not exactly five to seven so it's very situational you need to pay attention to how long your weld is generally glowing for if it's glowing red hot it needs to be covered with gas i usually wait for it to stop glowing red and then i give it an extra five seconds or so and again it depends what i'm doing the settings may be slightly different but again experiment i usually shoot for too much gas coverage and then i'll dial it back to save a few bucks when i'm doing an art piece so as mentioned before the prevention of oxide we're talking about over oxidization over oxidization is what's going to give you that gray black or look to your weld color itself here's the important part here's the disclaimer of what i'm about to say to get me out of trouble with a lot of people color is an oxide there are many job circumstances that will call for no oxide to form on a weld so an oxide free weld i'll show a couple on screen right now they're typically gold or straw color so a gold or straw color means that the material has cooled at a proper rate it has had adequate gas coverage so there is no oxide formed on the surface again everything i do in this shop here all of my art pieces i'm working on a crazy art piece right now and i want as much oxide as possible so as much color as possible that's my preference that's just what i do here and i do it for fun so again i will not speak to specific job requirements and stuff but that's my little disclaimer color is an oxide so you need to make sure if you're doing this for an actual job what the job requirements are and pay attention to those instructions so what we're going to do is we're going to set up our machine right now i have some stainless plate here it's all prepped up and clean i have some stainless tig rod uh i'm gonna show you a quick torch set up and then we'll get into it we'll just play around and try and get some cool colors okay so let's get the machine going here today we're gonna use the canon weld 201 pulse d this machine is dope i love it it's super simple very easy to use i've got a link in the description below a full review and breakdown on this machine so check it out let's turn it on wake up there we go we'll just wait for the fan to turn off there we go nice and quiet again we will run through uh settings real quick of what i'm using here on this machine but very very simple you're not going to see a lot of flashy settings with me here we're running dc negative direct current negative uh what we're going to do for amperage i probably will turn this down we're just going to goof around a little bit so let's probably set it at somewhere about 100 amps i'm using the foot pedal so i can goof around with that as i go zero down slope uh we got about five let's turn that up a little bit let's turn that up to about six seconds of post flow zero up slope there we go so no pulse nothing fancy uh i did add a ck torch to this machine which is a really really nice torch i'll put a link in the description as well to their stuff but yeah that's it let's check out what i'm using for a torch setup okay so for torch setup here as i said this is a ck worldwide nine style torch i freaking love this torch it's the flex head model it's very very simple it's the gas cooled or air cooled whatever you want to call it very very nice stuff ck you make great stuff if you're watching so we'll take out this little adapter here for the cup i'll put it together and show you how it all works but basically what we're using is a 332 gas lens and call it set up inside i prefer the wedge style collets these are my favorite and then a simple gas screen for the nine style torches and the green tungsten there is what i'm using it's the ck worldwide laser tungstens these tungstens are really really nice so if you're doing any extensive really flashy uh stainless tig i definitely recommend the laser tungstens the laser tungstens are very very nice just tighten that up slightly there i'm using a shea spec back cap shoulder to shea spec that stuff is super nice as well but i'm gonna show you something real cool so i got sent this kit from edge welding supply edge welding makes amazing cups they send you this little adapter with every kit you buy it's a little piece of aluminum with two o-rings on there screws onto any existing uh or for the most part existing gas lens type setups you'll use and then what it does is you can pick whatever cup size you'd like and you just slide it on like so and then you set your tungsten and you're ready to rock so it's a very very nice setup it's nice you can switch between something as small as a seven here something as big as a 15 uh again from edge so check out everything from edge welding their stuff is super cool look at that monster this thing's huge yeah you'll be able to take weld all kinds of stuff with that so what we're going to do here is we're basically going to try out a couple different cup sizes uh we're going to keep our settings remotely the same at the moment i am set up at 20 cfh on my working pressure out of my regulator what we'll do is we'll start with a bigger style cup so like i just had here we'll start with the 15. we'll just run a couple passes for the most part with a bigger style cup like so what's gonna happen is you're gonna tend to get way better and general gas coverage so your gas is probably gonna have very little um oxidization or colors build up on it so we'll start with the 15 here and we'll take a look at how it goes okay so we got our piece of stainless steel here this is about 3 16 of an inch thick uh the stainless steel has been prepped and cleaned with acetone as well as my filler rod then the filler rod i'm using is 316 stainless steel and it's 1 16 thick okay so as i said we're going to start with the number 15 cup uh i run not a lot of stick out actually i like to have my tungstens in a little further but yeah we're just gonna set down to it we're just gonna play around and run a couple passes let's see how they turn out here we go let's do it [Music] give it a sec to sink in lots of post flow give it all the post flow it needs there we go all right there we go who likes gold that uh is a gold weld right there oh well uh sat down pretty nice as you can see for the most part it's pretty much oxide free again we had lots of gas coverage going all over that one and that one weighted down really nice so there you go it's just a short little weld but that was an example of a well-covered pass so you're not going to get any any oxide forming on that for the most part so let's uh switch cups here and we'll try a different pass and see if we can get some different colors switch this monster off here that's warm uh let's just go all the way down to seven uh and just kind of switch it up here in a drastic sense again i'm gonna push my stick out in a little bit further there we go so we got about stick out here equal to the orifice of the cup approximately so this is a number seven cup from edge uh and let's give her a whirl see how it goes okay so let's run this pass just next to this other one here same settings same gas everything we're just going to run uh what i'll do is a little bit less filler rod on the plate and we'll run a little bit slower so we can cook it up and try and get some [Music] colors there we go so i removed the post flow a little quicker on that one and we did get a little bit of color let's have a look at it okay so there we go we're on that purple now yeah we here we go so we got a little bit of oxide forming on there it was heated up a little bit more uh the weld itself was not as good as the first one i kind of sucked on that one reaching around the camera at the same time a little tricky but we'll run a couple more passes let's try and get some blues and uh we'll see where we go from there [Applause] [Applause] i'm going to remove the post flow quicker here we go there we go that's what we're looking for let's look at that okay there we go now we're getting some colors so you can check it out now we got some blues we got a little bit of purple it's looking pretty good so compared to our first one look at the color difference as we start to let our plate heat up a little bit to where we get that sweet spot where we get the colors one way you can tell that the plate is heating up a little bit more is take a look at our heat affected zone here so our heat affected zone is this line right here so you can see our heat is starting to creep out a little bit further as opposed to our first pass our heat affected zone was in nice and tight because of the cooling action of the gas and everything kept everything nice and tight as far as our heat now because i'm traveling a little bit slower i'm adding a little bit less filler rod to the equation we're going to let this heat affect its own creep out a little bit further and as that happens because we're using a smaller cup we're moving away from it and it is building up an oxide behind us so that's why we're starting to get these dope colors now so we've got some good colors there uh to be totally honest i just want to run some beads this is like therapy to me so let's just run a couple more beats we'll see if we can get some more cool colors and we'll take a look at it after okay here we go so i'm going to run a little steeper of a travel angle give it a little less trailing gas and when i get to the end what i'm going to do is i'm actually going to pull the post flow away a little bit quicker and then we'll see if we can just give it a little bit of extra color but here we go okay gonna pull it away oh yeah we got crazy colors on that one try and fit one more on the plate here this is really awkward i'm reaching around a camera and a tripod at the same time but uh here we go we'll get another crazy color one on the end this one's hot all right let's see can we get one more on here let's get a couple more over here [Applause] what do you think one more because we got room let's do one more [Applause] so [Applause] there we go all right let's take a look at what we just did there we got some cool colors i'm happy with this okay this plate is warm but take a look at our colors we got some really cool colors there so basically the only thing that really pisses me off on this one that i did was a little bit too close to the edge this was super hot as you can see our heat affected zone left off the plate it went all the way over to the edge and went su and jumped off into oblivion so that's how hot this guy was so it didn't really color up too much we did manage to keep it from getting overly oxidized but i think these other ones are better examples of the kind of color i usually look for when doing an art piece so again these two here we got really moderate kind of color coverage to start with this is our original one where you reuse the number 15 cup with very little oxide on it this one is when we switched and the plate was cold at that point because i was talking so much in between the two we got a little bit of oxide but then we really got going as we let it heat up a little bit more and started to get some true color going on there as you can see our next pass was these two here obviously this one overheated and kind of looks like crap but this one here turned out pretty nice again we got nice blues and as we moved into the last couple passes here where our plate was super super super duper hot we got a really wide a heat affected zone i was adding a little more fill on these ones because i knew it was heating up quite a bit uh but we still managed to keep it cool enough that we did not over oxidize and we got some cool colors out of it so the welds aren't totally nice uh it's kind of i don't know it's just freestyling here a little bit but that's all right we had fun here's a good example of some candy colored welds yum yum yum yum all right friends there we go we did it we goofed around we got some cool colors uh general idea basically how you can use the same settings on your machine same gas settings again we didn't change anything between those different ones we just changed the cup we changed a little bit of torch angle and stuff like that and we just goofed around had some fun we got some cool colors out of it so i hope you learned something uh again tag me on instagram my instagram handle is right there on the screen please follow me if you don't already say what's up i like talking to people on there you can comment below i tend not to get around responding to all those comments because the youtube comments come a little bit too fast and furious i can't always keep up with them and i usually take weekends off from comments so if you want to get a hold of me hit me up on instagram through direct message show me your work i want to see how everybody does goofing around with this this is a fun one i know a lot of you out there have hit me up for tips on doing tig welding art so please uh destructive asylum you're out there i know you are derek kohi welding what's up dude i i know you're all out there hit me up show me how you guys do with uh goofing around with a couple of these little uh tips and tricks but uh again this was just a fun one for me i really enjoyed doing these fun ones as everybody knows on this channel i am all about having fun it's pretty chill in this little welding studio here i'm all about positivity and at the end of every episode i encourage people to go and do a random act of kindness for a stranger so whether that's helping someone change a tire help an old lady across the street or writing something super nice on someone's instagram profile you've never met before just do something nice in the name of kindness and positivity we need more positivity in the world right now so it's a challenge to everybody at the end of every episode i do now so be sure to do that also if you haven't already like i said follow me on instagram go to my website my website is right there i have all the information i help people learn how to tig weld online i do an online training program uh it's a series of video lessons where i take someone from zero experience with aluminum tig welding all the way to basic comprehension of machine setup and we get into some pretty tricky weld joints and we get into basically the fundamentals of tig welding so if you're keen to learn hit me up right now i'm offering a bit of a deal where i'm going to help people out one on one as well as the video lessons so go to the website all the information is on there about it and you can get in touch with me and uh we'll see where you're at and we'll go from there as well on my website i have a tig welding blog a blog about tig welding i should update a little bit more but i do update as well as an image gallery for all the artwork i do so again head to my website check it out hit me up on instagram say what's up and do something nice for a stranger i appreciate everybody watching so so much thank you very much i hope you have a good one peace

Channel: Pacific Arc Tig Welding

Views: 105,437

Rating: 4.956284 out of 5

Keywords: how to tig weld, how to weld, tig welding tips, tig welding basics, tig welding, tig welding stainless, stainless steel, welding stainless, welding tips and tricks, stainless steel welding, Tig welding stainless steel, Stainless colors, Stainless steel colors, aluminum tig welding, how to tig weld for beginners, how to tig weld stainless steel, how to tig weld stainless steel exhaust pipe, how to tig weld steel, how to weld aluminum, how to weld stainless steel

Id: UJcn8W_Mv5I

Length: 22min 34sec (1354 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 16 2020