TIG Welding Stainless Tube

hey Jody here thanks for watching another video from welding tips and tricks calm we're TIG welding stainless today my friend Roy's previous employer was about to throw a box of these short coped pieces of stainless into the scrap and he asked me if I wanted them and I said sure so I've got them now and I thought it would make an interesting video let's just talk about several different things they're roughly 120 wall thickness slightly under 120 a little bit less than three millimeters it's common to have a real sharp edge out here on this end whether it was cut with a hole saw or however and it's best to knock that down a little bit it's hard to get a decent cross-section thickness on a knife edge so it's best to knock a little flat spot on it where you can get a nice little fusion tack in there and then also a little bit of penetration without having a ground up weld to do it one of the handiest things I purchased recently is this fixture plate from my friend Roy chrome Ryan so I'm going to use it to kind of lock it down before I get the first tack on it you've seen me weld several things with this fixture plate it's super handy for small parts I'm gonna give my filler rod a little quick wipe down with some alcohol here before I get started always a good practice another good practice is using a gas lens setup now my go-to setup is usually a number eight stubby gas lens on a 17 air-cooled torch if I'm using air-cooled this is a jazzy 10 it's a ceramic Furyk cup and it's going to give me a little bit extra gas shielding today the cool thing about it is it screws right on the stubby gas lens kit without having to have an additional adapter if you've got a nine or a twenty style your your gas lens is going to look something like this and it'll screw right on there as well without any adapters but if you want to get started using one the cheapest way is to go with the adapter kit like this pull the o-ring off set that up boom ready to go you can use a nice long stick out good 5/8 even 3/4 no problem twenty cfh really I've used the same gas flow as I use with the number eight on this 10 Cup when I'm tack welding stainless like this I like to get a good quick burst tack I've got the Machine set to 120 amps I'm full pedal I'm getting the rod in there really quickly I'm getting a dab or two and then I'm getting off of the pedal and that makes for a nice small clean tack and it'll put a lot of heat into the part I want nice clean shiny small tax that's gonna help everything go better when I weld over those things or if I start on them so a really good gas shielding making sure the metal is clean and free from adhesives tapes residues anything like that and holding my post flow for just a count getting that puddle started getting a little bit of rod dabbed in there and then holding the post flow nice shiny bright tacks makes everything go a lot better now I like to take a few dry runs I found like a broken record when I say that because I do it all the time I just think it's really good practice once you get doing hundreds of parts or something like this you know maybe you don't need to take any dry runs if you're welding the same thing every day but anytime you're willing something new never hurts take a few dry runs make sure a torch is not going to get hung up on anything make sure you can rotate your wrist and maintain the right torch angle and it sort of builds a little muscle memory jazzy 10 is doing a really good job here I'm holding the torch still while the post flow times out a cool thing about a fixture plate like this especially being aluminum its rigid but it's pretty easy to just to spin around what we do anymore today I want to talk about one thing and that is getting that puddle started quickly and getting moving don't let that heat build up try to outrun that heat one of the characteristics of stainless is not very thermally conductive so it heat builds up really quickly so getting that puddle started within about two seconds one second even better really helps part of that is just really being comfortable and not getting hung up on anything the ABCs of welding remember always be comfortable and the TIG fingers gonna let me be comfortable here that thing's gonna get roasty here in a minute but my fingers are not and they're gonna slide along this polish stainless almost like it was some type of glide mechanism I mean it's that smooth on stainless like this this is pretty much the same finish as would be on sanitary stainless tubing so I'm going along here not slow not like crazy fast but just as you know at a good clip I don't want the heat to build up so not only do I want to start the puddle really quickly and get going but I want to keep going pretty quickly and once again I want to hold that post flow until it times out let's take another look at one when I light up let's count how long it takes me to get moving to dab rod in there and get moving thousand one thousand there goes the rod right in there so I hit it at 120 amps and then after about three dabs or so I back off the pedal a little bit probably to about 90 amps or so I don't know I wasn't looking at the machine again trying to keep going at a pretty good clip trying to keep the hot tip of that rod shielded with argon that's another benefit in using a gas lens and also in using this this number 10 this jazzy 10 it gives you a little bit more forgiveness on flipping that rod around and if you don't have the post flow extended long enough you can bump the pedal and get a whole nother cycle you'll see it discolor right there that's when they post flow timed out you notice my red torch holder with the magnetic base there big banks to Jimbo's garage Jimbo thanks for sending that out can't stress enough the importance of taking a few dry runs unless you just do this stuff all the time I found while I was welding this one part I found better ways to do things I more comfortable ways to prop and to twist my my hand and to maintain a good electrode angle as I came up while I was holding a torch steady there is just always room for improvement I don't know if I mentioned it already I'm using a Oh 45 diameter er 308 L filler wire a general rule of thumb is that using one size lower for stainless on filler metal often helps like if I would generally be using a 1/16 for this job on steel using Oh 45 works great on stainless now to state the obvious I realize this is the best possible scenario you'll ever get welding on a fixture plate right on a table right in front of you a perfectly clean metal I posted this video a good while back and I put this thing up overhead like this just to show that you know there's some techniques that you can use where welding at a position is not that big of a deal not that much more difficult than welding on the bench right in front of you just got to figure out ways to walk around the part ways to prop and ways to be comfortable alright back to the stainless so now we're going to talk about a few other things as we will the other side I'm going to flip it over clamp it down again it stayed pretty flat for the rest of this I'm gonna switch over to a slightly larger cup I'm going from a 10 to a 12 I'm gonna bump up the argon about four cfh just to see if it makes any difference I don't think it will the Jazzy 10 is actually doing about as good as you can expect on stainless but we'll see we'll see if just a slightly larger couple just a little bit more argon makes a difference or if I've just wasted argon it looks a lot like it did with the jazzy tin so I don't think it's making much difference but you know the only way to tell is to finish the weld and kind of compare it as far as discoloration goes I was able to use a little longer stick out I didn't really need to I just did just to see how it did with a good 5/8 to three-quarter inch stick out I sped this up just a little bit so we don't have to wait for the whole post flow but it did pretty good but not really any better than that then the jazzy 10 so probably a little overkill going to a 12 here but if you need a long stick or if you need a little bit more forgiveness if you're shaky and the tip of your the hot tip of your filler rod is flopping around and you need a little bit bigger cup to shield the hot tip there it's kind of worth it for for extra cfh not that big a deal I mentioned earlier and you can see that I'm not purging this at all no argon on the backside it's a hundred and twenty thousand s thick almost and I don't know of anybody if they were making handrails that would go to the expense and the extra time it would take the extra aggravation to purge this out unless it was absolutely required and there are some jobs that mandate it but most of them don't for structural applications like this we'll talk about purge a little bit here in just a minute here's another view of the sides we're tied in and everything that Cup is doing a great job on this and here's a little shot from the inside just so you can see you know I definitely heat tended it a little bit on the inside but no melt through it all again 120 wall and I was welding max amperage at 120 amps and I was only using the max amperage on the start let's talk about purging a little bit here what happens when you do need to penetrate and you don't have any argon on the backside you get this mess it's called granulation also known as sugaring what it is is severe oxidation and it's a flaw it's an opportunity for failure it's an opportunity for bacteria to grow the best way to avoid it is to purge and the best way to purge it with a dual flow meter so that you can have one flow meter for your torch gas another flow meter for our purge line and then you know exactly what your flow rate is which you don't if you put a Y in the line and try to guess at how much your torch is getting and how much purge you're getting so the best way I can think of to demonstrate that is using this fixture that Adam booth a bomb 79 made for me we did a collaboration a while back and so by using a dual flow meter as well as this fixture I'm going to show you what it looks like when you get a proper purge on the backside of stainless also pay attention here you're going to see how quickly I get the puddle started once I light up I get a puddle started probably within one second there and get moving I get rot in there and I get moving and that's going to help a lot on stainless steel and preventing distortion preventing heat buildup and of course it helps with discoloration as well and the fixtures helping tremendously with discoloration because it's such a heat sink now I did this plate in two steps a little back step technique but you can see right there I got the puddle going really quickly as well I didn't mess around probably took only one or two seconds if you find yourself taking five or ten seconds you've got to work on that all right look at the backside here the penetration side with the with the dual flow meter purging on the back side nice and silver that's a sight better than that so that's bad mmm that's good so if you're interested in learning more about the dual flow meter I used or any of the other cups and things like that I use in this video visit weld monger comm that's my online store that's how I support these videos thanks for watching we'll see you next time you

Channel: weldingtipsandtricks

Views: 180,369

Rating: 4.9499445 out of 5

Keywords: tips for tig welding stainless, tig welding stainless, welding stainless, tig welding tips, welding tips and tricks, stainless steel welding, welding stainless handrails, purging stainless, jazzy 10 cup, furick cup, tig finger, weldmonger

Id: oXfCwIBWD2g

Length: 11min 42sec (702 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 22 2019