- This is Chris McQuay from Unobtainium Welding on Instagram. Today we're gonna be doing
stainless steel welding on your Everlast PowerTIG 255 EXT. (intense rock music) So I'm welding the stainless today. We're just gonna recap the settings. You want to make sure you're on DC, that you're on high frequency TIG, and we're gonna be down around 50 amps since we're using 16-gauge
plate to weld on today. So for the stainless demonstration we're gonna go straight to filler. If you're looking for
some puddle control demos and some practice you can refer
back to the previous videos. So with was stainless
you'll notice right away that it puddles up faster and it should weld a little smoother since it's higher quality
material, less contaminants. So on stainless steel you could see me run a
slightly smaller bead than we would for mild steel. This is relatively thin, it's 16 gauge, so we don't need a ton of amperage. You can see from the backside that we are fully penetrated through. So we don't need to go
any slower or any hotter. This color here, this slight pink color is
about what you are hoping for with the regular collet body
set up without a gas lens. So you want salmon as like
your best case scenario. So I'll do one next where I go slower and you could see how
that will affect the weld. It'll go gray if you overheat it. So, one of the more common
mistakes I see with stainless is going too slow, thinking that lower heat
and slower travel speed is the better way to do it. And I'll show you that
when you go too slow, you actually put more
heat into the material. So if you run less amperage you can see that it takes longer to get the puddle to where we want it. And we're basically just
pouring heat into the plate while we're waiting for that to happen. So you can see here on this pass we turned the amperage down, but we actually had to put
much more heat into it. The heat effected zone is wider and the material is completely gray behind besides the post purge. So this plate is all warped. We had to put a lot more heat into it, to do roughly the same
weld with lower amperage. You can see where through again, but the heat effected zone is way larger. We put way more heat into the plate to accomplish the same thing. So now we're gonna do a demonstration where we go too fast. We want to stay in that happy medium, but we've shown you too slow. Now we're gonna show you too fast. So now we're gonna demonstrate what happens if you actually get. trying to go too fast and try to get ahead of that puddle because you're trying to keep
the heat out of the plate. So now you can see in this weld, we have these really uneven edges. the bead is very narrow and very convex. So we're going too fast. We're not waiting for that
perfect fusion to happen before we add the filler. And so this weld will not be as strong as one done at the right speed. So you can see we're avoiding penetration. We only have a tiny little bit. So for this demonstration we're gonna demonstrate how
too long of an arc length can be much the same as going too slow. A good arc length is between 10 and 20
thousandths of an inch. I'm gonna run one at about
an eighth of an inch. So it's much easier to get in there without touching the
filler rod to the tungsten, but we're gonna overheat
the plate the same way. So I'm starting off with
about an eighth of an inch. So it's a really long arc. And you can see as I'm going I'm raising the arc and it starts to actually
ball the filler rod before I get it into the weld puddle. And you can see the
oxidation is gonna get worse. We're gonnaget more
and more gray as we go. So you can see on this weld where we pulled a much longer arc we have a lot of oxidation, it's very gray, our heat effected zone is large, and you could see in the video it was starting to ball the filler. You don't get anywhere near the coverage and you get a lot more heat
input when you go this route. So these are the four
welds we've done today. This one is too fast, where we were going as
fast as we could basically in being able to add filler. This one is the right speed. We have nice clean edges, smooth puddle. This one is going too slow, or you can see we're
starting to get a lot wider - - heat affected zone. And this one is too long of an arc. So you can see that this one
has bowed the plate the most. So we probably have the most
heat input into that one. None of these welds are ideal because we're still not getting the best gas coverage that's available. For that we want to swap to a gas lens. And so we'll show you that next, how swabbing to a gas lens
gives us laminar gas flow. And we'll see a lot more colors in here like you do on the good
welders on Instagram. So this is a good visual representation of what the difference is between a gas lens and a collet body. (bell rings) Collet body has orifices where the gas comes out
perpendicular to the cup, hits the inside of the cup, and then rushes down the end. This has a flow straightener in it, just like the faucet on your sink. If you unscrewed the little filter that's in the end of your faucet, the water would come all turbulent. This does the same thing. So there's screens in there
that straighten the flow and make the flow laminar. This is much better gas coverage because the gas comes out smoothly, relatively straight to cover your weld. So to swap out to a gas lens, unscrew your collet body, pull out your collet, push it back in there. You'll need this adapter
insulator that goes over top. Then you run your gas lens, screw that in. Then you run the gas lens cup. Now you have a gas lens set up. So now we're welding with a gas lens. You'll notice that the arc and the puddle are much more stable with that
laminar gas flow around them. Same rough stick out, same basic travel speed, same filler size, same amperage. So here you can see the drastic difference between the one with the gas lens and the one with the collet body. The gas lens has much better coverage, much better colors here. This mostly gray with a tiny bit of pink
and gold at the ends here. The pink is about the worst
we get in this one section. Otherwise we have some of
the light blues, the golds, and even some silver. You can also see the
filler rod additions easier because of the lack of oxidation. So if you want to make
a nice weld like this you should get yourself a gas lens. So today we've gone through
the basics of stainless setup, some do's and don'ts, and we also talked a little bit about how to get a better quality
weld with a gas lens set up. Now this gas lens set up was meant to be very
close to the same size as the number six we were using, but just with a gas lens
as a good comparison. At Unobtainium Welding I like to use the Furick Fupa number 12 for stainless. It's a double diffuser setup so it comes with the gas
lens that's in your torch and it adds another set of
screens on a number 12 cup. That's how you get some
really nice silvers and blues and golds and purples
like you see on Instagram, some of the other great
welders that are out there. This is Chris McQuay
with Unobtainium Welding. Weld mean, weld green.
