Turn ANY TIG Welder Into A Spot Welder

so the other day a friend and former student of mine sent me a message asking about this TIG spot welder attachment thing found on Amazon and wanted to know if it was legit and I kind of laughed about it because I remember there's a trick that you can use to turn any TIG welder into a spot welder and you don't even need special tools I mean you already have the pieces so after having shown him how it was done I figured why don't I show you guys I'm Justin welcome to weld coach it's well coach your personal welding instructor anywhere there are typically two styles of spot welds in the welding world that most people know and acknowledge the first one is done with a dedicated machine you can usually find this machine in the automotive or the HVAC Industries when power is applied resistance creates centralized heat in the sheet metal and the clamping pressure squishes the metals together the second type is commonly known as a plug weld where the piece to be joined with the bottom piece has a hole in it typically a MIG welder shoots at the center of the hole to heat it up and begin filling the bottom piece as it is moved outward in circular to join it with the edges of the upper piece this is most commonly used in Autobot repairs but if you only have a TIG welder and a limited budget you can easily make a spot weld using this very simple trick step one grab a sacrificial TIG cup number five usually works best for me and I've got a lot of them laying around also grab a collet body and a cutof wheel on a grinder secure the collet body to a vise and screw the cup on whatever you do do not try and clamp the cup down all by itself without being screwed onto something cups are not designed to handle any kind of external clamping pressure next you want to cut a small slit across the opening at least a/4 in or 6 mm deep now you do kind of have to be a little bit patient when you do this and let the wheel do all the work otherwise the cup might shatter if you're like a little bit too aggressive On It Whatever the cases but if it doesn't shatter you're good to go next step is to screw the cup back onto the to the regular way and install a piece of tungsten that is unsharpened or flat-faced there should be absolutely no stick out at all on this tungsten actually it's going to be slightly sucked into the cup roughly a 16th of an inch or about 1.6 mm I usually press my fingertip into the cup and that kind of sets the gauge just about right now set your gas flow to the recommended Lowe's setting standard now I did do a deep dive episode where I went into the four different TIG cups I use for every single metal it also has the general rules and settings in lots and lots of details if you want to check that out or whatever the case is now I did get asked about if gas is still needed to do a spot weld the answer is yes you still need gas and you still need 100% argon because this is still a TIG welder in fact the reason for cutting the slits is so that the gas can escape when we go to weld it now let's practice a little bit and try to see if we can dial in these settings here this sheet metal is 20 gauge steel from WM Metals online.com and it's a good average thickness to practice on ideally we want the process of each spot well to happen really quick so I'm going to set the machine pretty high for 20 gauge at 130 amps if you're using a trigger switch set it to 2T operation with no up or down slope time now you want to set the cup flat against the metal and smash that foot pedal to the floor once you see the back side of the joint glowing you're done take your foot off the pedal or let go of the switch once the part cools down try and tear it apart if you got it just right you will have to physically destroy it which I will show you how much effort that takes to break one of these at the end of the video but if you didn't get it right these are the two most common reasons why if you blew a hole through it you either had way too many amps or you waited too long to terminate the arc if it doesn't hold at all or it breaks off too easily then you either didn't have enough amps or you didn't wait long enough you should definitely try a few different techniques until you get it just right and then practice that until you have it perfect every single time if you need a clamp to go with your setup you can easily make one out of a cheap set of locking pliers and some bar stock first you want to cut four pieces of stock to about 4 in or 100 mm in length sharpen the bar about halfway and leave a blunted tip instead of rounding it completely I used a cordless drill to make this quicker but you know you can easily do it by hand you know just it just takes a little bit longer now we're going to pad some silicon bronze on the end of each bar stock this silicon bronze is also from weld Metals online.com now one of the main ingredients in Silicon bronze is copper which is soft and reduces scratching of materials now here we're going to TIG braze the Silicon bronze to the steel enss with a generous amount of buildup now brazing is kind of like a hot metal glue if you will we use the arc from the TIG torch to heat up whatever Metals we want to stick together but we don't actually liquefy them we only liquefy the Silicon bronze the ark is just a heat Source kind of like a flame from a gas torch so when you're brazing you typically use less amperage from your machine and you concentrate most of the arc on the existing silicon bronze so you can combine all of it it pretty much just sticks to the top of it so when you finish padding the tips up and they cool down run back over the grinder and round over the Silicon bronze ends next you want to clamp them in the Vise and smack it with the bfh until they hit about 90° you want to do this roughly an inch or about 25 millim or so from the end of the Silicon bronze end so since these are super cheap pliers I have no idea what they're actually made out of so the best way to attach this steel to these pliers is going to be with silicon bronze now just like patting the ends of the prongs we're only going to use the arc from the torch as a source of heat to melt only the Silicon bronze filler the goal again is not to liquefy the base materials but if you do liquify the base material you might be okay but it may cause a failure because the construction of the three different metal may not combine and play nicely together now once I had these four prongs brazed on I stuck them into the Vise heated them back up and bent them backwards to allow for a little bit more space inside of that throw so good clearance is a good thing the alignment of this may be a little off because this thing rocks around I mean they are super cheap pliers but technically doesn't matter cuz when you uh grip it all down it still has two points of contact the whole reason for rounding over the prongs and using prongs instead of flat Steel in general is for clamping to radiused or uneven surfaces and with the tungsten sucked up into the cup a little bit you can still spot weld something that's on a radius or a Bend or maybe even uneven I really hope the information of this video helps at least a few of you out that are kind of interested in stuff like this I mean there's actually a lot you can learn from somebody if you just ask them kind of like asking the coaches over at weld coach.com something specific that isn't necessarily what the whole lesson is about like me personally I was asked to create a class specifically for the purpose of TIG welding pins into barrels and that was actually a really fun class it was possible to do other coaches have been asked for consultations for things like shop layout setup efficiency organizing small spaces because not everybody has a large shop I even recall one coach was requested to set up a class for finishing like grinding and finish work instead of just sticking it all together what about after all of it there's a whole bunch of things that our coaches can help you out with in a live one-on-one class no matter where you're at out there all you got to do is let us know and with that I'll see you guys on the next episode is

Channel: Weld Coach

Views: 22,487

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Id: 03-05dzxBJ0

Length: 10min 0sec (600 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 07 2024