Tungsten Color Theory is a VERY Sensitive Topic

in the traditional and corporate workplace environment long before your favorite beer was a sensitive topic there were typically four things you never discussed religion sex and politics yes I do find that a little bit interesting that I have to bleep those out but in the welding workplace environment there are actually five sensitive topics that you never discussed and that fifth sensitive topic is the color of your toxin it's weld coach your personal welding instructor anywhere if you're new here welcome to weld coach my name is Justin I'm the creator of the fabrication series YouTube channel and I teach classes one-on-one over at weldcoach.com you should go over there and book a class or at least after this episode right because we should definitely cover some stuff from when it comes to tungsten now before we get carried away arguing down in the comments about which color works best we should probably understand exactly what tungsten is and why we use it now tungsten is a naturally occurring metal element found in the Earth's crust according to the periodic table of elements it has the highest melting temperature of any other metal on the face of the Earth has excellent thermal conductivity and is resistant to just about everything corrosive except for salty old welders on the internet that refuse to get with the times who wrote that oh tungsten is so awesome that we've been using it for almost a hundred years exclusively as the electrode and TIG welding but over the course of those almost 100 years some things have changed with the different varieties and such with tungsten some of them have different elements Blended in to create an alloy of tungsten which maybe makes it serve a better purpose or unique to an application and some of them have even been claimed to work better on newer machines as technology continues to evolve but if you've ever tried to research the topic of which tungsten color is best and works for which metal and which one is the newest and in what order they came in you've likely been greeted by the classic color chart that's on every welding supplies website followed by a sales listing and if you've ever asked something like you know Facebook groups or forums or whatever the case is you'll find a thousand different answers and a bunch of you know different explanations of it which likely prompted you to just buy a color and use it only to find out later that somebody told you that it's the wrong color well the good news here is that it makes absolutely no difference whatsoever which color tungsten you want to use there is no such thing as a Tungsten that will make or break a weld just because you used it anybody who says differently is either super stubborn in their ways or they haven't learned what you're about to learn right now different tungsten varieties and blends were all created to solve a problem that the early constant current machines AKA old Transformer units all had and that that was that they were all basically pretty much the exact same machine regardless of the brand old school Transformer machines were insanely primitive and horribly inefficient and as such different oxides were blended into the tungsten to make the machine perform better on a specific application in the beginning we only had one kind of tungsten and that was pure tungsten now color-coded green pure tungsten would weld everything but the problem was is that it would erode quickly it would never really keep its Point very very sharp and of course if you started to push it well above and beyond what it was rated for it would tend to want to split or kind of break apart that would mean you'd have to constantly change out your consumables or have a whole arsenal of consumables match to the correct tungsten size now if you had to constantly switch between consumables for different jobs that would mean it would take longer and cost more money there is a timeline somewhere in there of when all of these different oxides were introduced but no one really knows it all that much but zirconium oxide provided better Arc starts on AC and it could handle higher amperage than green pure tungsten it's also not radioactive cerium oxide was good for making an all-purpose tungsten which was also remarkably stable and crisp at low average it's also not radioactive landform oxide became super popular as lower percentages of it were remarkably stable on DC and higher percentages of the mix became the first all-purpose super tungsten that wasn't radioactive thorium oxide was responsible for making the tungsten virtually indestructible as it you could throw just about anything you wanted onto this stuff from fin to thick to pushing it well above and beyond its amperage but as is with all things radioactive they're good for everything except for you now the red stuff was my favorite tungsten for everything that I welded back in the day I mean red was it I'd grab a pack of it call it a day you could not tell me otherwise that red that any other color would be better than red like red was it but sometime in 2011 the radioactive Red Scare hit and a lot of packages were pulled off the shelves to the point where you just simply couldn't buy it anymore and a lot of people including myself were forced to change colors and to be honest with you I wasn't really keen on the idea of changing my tungsten colors I was right where it was at but I also wasn't interested in glowing green and of course I'm not going to give up my career in welding so a lot of people were forced to change and try different colors now the aforementioned colors are what we consider to be the classics of the tungsten color chart I mean there were other Blends and oxides that were mixed in to create another color but we simply just don't use them anymore they're few and far between however any one of those colors that I've mentioned up to this point can be used on an inverter machine at least once pure green tungsten has an arc stability problem on inverter machines in my experience it's basically that the The Arc will start once or at least the first time but if you try to fire it a second time the answer is no it will not do it or it will be so freaking erratic that it can't focus and it can't light up or whatever the case is so it's widely accepted that we do not use green pure tungsten on inverter machines and the same thing has also been said about white tungsten but the results are often mixed and in all honesty I don't use white tungsten I never really have so I can't really offer my opinion on that matter so in short the classic tungsten colors can be used to weld just about anything on most machines but if you're still rocking an old school Transformer unit you'll likely find best results if you just stick to the Chart but this is where it gets interesting the rare earth blends purple tungsten hit the scene somewhere around 2011 right after that radioactive Red Scare it claimed that it could solve all of the other tungsten's problems and shortfalls by combining several oxides together to create one super tungsten that wasn't radioactive basically soon after a few other manufacturers popped up with their own colors and derivatives of this that basically did the exact same thing but with the manufacturer's own kick to it Rare Earth Blends feature several oxides Blended together to create one super tungsten instead of just one it's largely up to the manufacturer to define or decide which percentages of each one they want to use but generally speaking they all use different blends of lanthanum yitrium zirconium and even cerium some of them even use all four Rare Earth Blends are widely accepted as the tungstens that weld every single metal on every single machine that ever existed and for the most part that's completely true but then ultimately the question then becomes is which color should you use well as is with many things in TIG welding there's never really an exact answer for it because it's largely based on preference unless a written procedure says otherwise basically meaning you can throw any color you want into your torch load it up make the Weld and if it did the job you wanted it to do then you're good there's technically no right or wrong but if you want my opinion on this one I'll give it to you and with full-on disclosure transparency here this is not a paid product endorsement but at the time of this video this is the color that I use CK Worldwide laser tungsten color code chartreuse not to be confused with actual green after the radioactive scare in 2011 I was forced to change colors of tungsten like many other people were and for a while I went right back to blue because that was you know what I used for a little bit and I kind of liked it except for well it wasn't really nearly as good as red my beloved red two percent lanthanated or blue tends to kind of slowly dull over the course of time and didn't really hold its Point forever and ever like my beloved red would do and of course I couldn't really push it as high into the amperage range as I wanted to it would just wouldn't wouldn't withstand it it would kind of I don't know dull itself out or whatever the case is like it was good for all around but not really what my red could do and of course I tried purple for a while and you know it's good but it tends to split in the in the higher amperage range when you really start to push it and then same thing happened with pink and I tried a few other colors like Q4 and everything else like that even went back to like two percent seriated for a while that used to be colored orange but now it's colored gray for some reason they switched it right so I've been kind of all over the board with all of my tungsten and it's been in my choices is now eventually they did figure out that red or thoriated two percent thoriated was not radioactive or as radioactive as it should be to be scary if you will but at that time the damage had already been done you tell me radiation and I think Chernobyl about three years or so ago laser came across my workbench and like all the other ones I gave it a try but then I soon discovered that this stuff is about the closest thing I ever have to my beloved red it is virtually indestructible in my 332nd or 2.4 millimeter size can weld everything from razor blades to quarter inch aluminum without really having to change it out you can push it and it's remarkably stable on every other end and until something better comes along this is the color that I'm going to use and if I find something else that I like well I'm going to give it a try and if it's good that's what I'm going to run with and that's what I encourage everybody to do try a bunch of different types of tungsten if you like it then run it if you don't like it don't use it try something else but it's a good idea to not get stuck in your ways and say well this is the only thing because it's well it's technically not true one more thing worth mentioning here is the tungsten itself or the different brands and the price tags that you often see in the beginning you're going to go through a lot of tungsten it's just the natural progression of learning how to TIG weld you're going to screw it up and you're going to use a whole lot of it it is a consumable at the end of the day so most people in the beginning are like you know what I'll just buy the cheapest stuff as possible so that way I'm not you know going to be out so much money while I'm learning the biggest problem with that is cheap products produce cheap results you're never really guaranteed to get what you actually think you're supposed to get or what is claimed to be on the box so let's just say it's a two percent lanthinated tungsten which is extremely popular you can't guarantee that on that ten dollar pack it's going to actually be two percent lanthinated to that quality standard in which it's supposed to be basically meaning if you bought the cheap stuff you're probably going to see a lot of different anomalies in your welds and art characteristics that are not conducive to well good products you're gonna find better results with better products so in other words stick with actual name brands stay away from all the Cheapo stuff that you see on there because they pretty much sell tungsten shaped objects that sort of almost just barely work and that's really not what you want well I think that just about wraps it up as far as tungsten is concerned pretty sure I covered all of it is quite a bit to take in but hey at least you know what your coaches know so that way when you get onto a class you're not wasting a bunch of time trying to figure out you know what what do I use for Tungsten and asking all these questions or whatever you got all the answers right here right it's a great thing and if you're new here maybe you should consider subscribing because we could use it a little bump in the algorithm kind of thing you know and if you found this helpful maybe share it with your friends and uh go book a class on wildcouch because you get an instructor like right then and there in front of you running out of stuff to say about tungsten thanks for watching

Channel: Weld Coach

Views: 64,470

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Id: MHts4kq7Skc

Length: 12min 3sec (723 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 19 2023