Welding Basics & How-To TIG Weld - Livestream Part 1 of 2 - Eastwood

everybody it's matt from eastwood company thanks for joining us for another live technical show that we're putting on for you guys today we're discussing TIG welding we're going to do an intro to take welding for anybody that's just knew with this or you just want to hone your skills a little bit learn some things you might be doing wrong I'm gonna try to show you all that in a an hour . so we got a lot to cover if i get everything in and then stick around at the end we're going to do some questions and answers and hopefully I can help some of these individual questions you guys might have so let's jump right into it TIG welding what is it for anybody that's not familiar with it TIG welding is basically it's a the best be described as similar to oxy acetylene welding in the manner in which you are using a filler rod you have a torch so imagine old-school oxy-acetylene Welding this would be your torture flame and your filler rod which looks a lot similar to what you would have used that's about where those similarities they end with TIG welding basically like I said this is the business end of it with this so I'm going to break this down and show you what each of the parts are what they do and you know kind of the choices that you have here so with with TIG welding there's a couple major parts as i take this apart here the most important thing to show you is this is your electrode this is what's actually sending the amperage is going right through this this is what creates your art this is very important as a lot of different electrodes that you can choose i have a few wait out here that i just want to show you guys real quick probably the most common ones that have been around for a long time they all have a I should go back and say they all have little bands on the end here colored bands most people just call them read you know red tungsten green tungsten they do have different elements that they're made up of that we could probably talk for hours about the different elements but i'm going to try and keep that short is a boring but basically the red is going to be your most common that's used for steel with some of these inverter take welders that are out there you can use this for aluminum but what actually happens when you get into the higher amperage and heat with with welding AC for aluminum it will start to get a little like cauliflower like on the end of it that will make the ark wander and jump around it's it's really not great you can use it in a pinch the green hear that i'm talking about the green is really that's a woman i'm only tungsten and this is most commonly was most commonly used on transformer welders for AC only but with the introduction of inverter welder is like the East would take 200 ACDC that we're talking about and then we also have the take 200 DC that we're talking about those are both inverter welders so these waters can use a little more broad scope of electrodes than some of the other ones so i have a couple here we often get questions about why why are we selling the purple or why would why would you offer the red anymore you know the green the purple one here which is a commonly called it's like III is the name a lot of people call it this one here with the purple band on it this is pretty good for aluminum steel most boast metals and this will be a lot more stable and hold us a more stable arc will be more pinpoint when you grind it and you again you can use it on a woman on you can use it on steel you don't need to switch out your electrode when you're welding like you did with the transformer welder with a red and a green the other one that i have here that's that's pretty good is there's the gray ones that have a great band so these ones are similar to the purple we're gonna have a really stable arc you can use them on basically any type of metal so you don't need to switch them out so when you're when you're no shopping four electrodes it's you know you're definitely be safe if you're going to use a purple or gray or anyone it's in that family we offer the purple so you can vibrate through the website you can purchase a couple of those and you're set to go so that's the first major part of the torch that we're taking apart here the next part is the collet body and the actual college so this is your college body this is your college what these do is the collar body you can see on a traditional style has these little holes in it that's where you're shielding gas comes out so this is where gas is going to come out and this is fit into thread it into one of these that basically threads into this which is your gas cup and those little holes are going to shoot the gas out like that it kind of fogs your your electrode and singing stick that this little little fog your electrode and also your weld the shooting guess is going to go out and around that now what the actual college does is this collet it's going to be hard to see but they have little slots cut in on try to adjust here so you can see him so you can see the the slots that are cutting that the reason that is this when you slide a let me just make sure they run here 3 30 seconds so when you slide this in here it actually goes into the back of your college body and slides through and what happens is when you take your back cap here this goes over the end and as you tighten it down it pushes on the back of that college and in which pushes into the column body and that's going to actually make those little slots compressed and that's what grabs your electrode keeps it from moving around makes a nice tight connection and you can also see on the on this back cap here there's all different sizes there's a little stubby ones longer ones everything you can imagine but they all have basically the same thing in common they had a little over ring or seal on them and that just keeps your gas from flowing out the back side of the torch this is very important the size of the cap doesn't really matter it's just whatever you feel comfortable with using obviously the longer ones are you're not going to have to change out your electrode is often if you you know you keep grinding it gets really short so on alternatives that I just wanted to mention because i use these on a lot all the torches here i use them just because I prefer them again it's a preference thing another one is a what they call a gas lens kit so this is your college body and this one here I actually have is a dirty old one so there's all kinds of specs on it but what this has a little mesh screen in the center there instead of holes being drilled actually has a mesh screen no and the benefits are using that is it actually has a much better fogging ability which allows you to stick your arm your electrode or tungsten out further so you can so this is like that this is your cup your guests lens it goes on top of that see how it's a lot bigger please call it come in all different sizes everything from big wine glass tile all the way down like a pinpoint but the nice thing is you can actually stick your tongue stew now much much further you know if you try to do something like that with a normal gas cup it's not going to work you're not going to get the coverage but with this you can crank that the big ass up and get better coverage and you can get into tighter corners using this and again it cools the cools and hip and keeps the the gas around the actual weld puddle much much better so i just wanted to mention that that's a good one I have them all my torches here I didn't want anybody to get confused on why we have this but that's something that we have there so now we covered the basics of the of the torch want to get into your filler rod the other part of this here so i'm going to put this back together just so that you can see as I'm doing this this is your back cap here and i'm going to show you guys that in a little further on how to adjust this and get it all set up but just want to make sure that can get kicked around so filler rod is the next thing so we told you about your torch you're starting the arc you're making metal mail next thing is your filler run it's all different types of filler rod but you can use out there really the best again without trying to talk for an hour on just filler rod the best thing to remember is try and match your filler rod the best you can to what you're using this is just for basic this is your kind of general use for carbon steel this is what we we offer you cannot they're stainless steel there's four 4 3 four aluminum there's there's all different types that you can get there's a bunch of different women homes and also steal so you really want to research what you have when you're trying to weld and what you need to use but for future students steel which is what we're just covering today this rod here and i actually have a little tube that comes in but the ER 70s we have here you guys can see that but that's basically the tuba comes in and your 70s again is going to be probably your most common that you're going to use on carbon steel and you we offer these online in the tubes or you can buy them you know you're welding supply store if you need bigger supplies but these little these little tubes here usually a little west most people for quite a while so the filler rods they come in a bunch of different sizes you want to match your filler rod basically to like the electrode that you're using generally is a good rule of thumb so the most common that we we sell and submit comments that you , you'll use an automotive general fabrication is there's 3 30 second and there's 116 it's a good way to tell so one in this hand here is your 1 16 that's your 332nd you can see that hopefully see the difference in diameter let's give us a second here to get you zoomed in so you can see what's going on so now you can see that does the same thing with your filler rod so the most common is 3 30 second and just 116 you know you can see see if we'll get a difference in those so you're going to use the 116th on you know some of your smaller fabrication later duty stuff and the 332nd you're going to use on some of your heavier stuff when you get a little more experienced some guys will guys or gals will like to use you know some people prefer to use the the 116th / - 3:30 second what happens with that the reason you that some people prefer with their wedding style - well fast or slower and it's just a preference thing a lot of time so if you're going to use the 116th on something like these test pieces i welled up here it's quarter inch you're gonna have to be moving pretty fast so I i did a quick kind of comparison here so this thing i welded with the 116th and then the same joint right next to it with the 332nd it's pretty hard to tell but the 332nd the dabs are a little bit bigger you're taking off you're filming a bigger area that now if you're trying to fill this hole join up the 332nd might be a little better because you can actually add more filler rod in there you can add a bigger dab in that it's going to fill this a little quicker number the 116th that's a lot smaller but depending what you're doing you may need to stay in a room tight area so you may want to pick the 116 but again general rule of thumb is you want to match the the tungsten electrode to the filler rod that you're using and then we're also going to get into towards the end some real thin stuff with sheet metal with sheet metal you're going to probably going to go down to like 0300 35 even know two three depending what you're doing 16 18 20 gauge 22 gauge that's where you're gonna have to get a little you have to get a little outside work outside the box and get something smaller so what I like to use so i used motor McGwire had to run some wire right off the spool and run this is 0300 big wire so we'll show you that towards the end I have a piece of sheet better metal here I'll show you how to correctly set up a joint when you take welding sheet metal and you know give you a little action shot of that so now we cover that the next thing up the whole tape rolling process is the foot pedal so depending on the machine you're using your foot pedal is going to look different between different brands are is a pretty basic setup one nice thing about the eastwood a TIG welder pedals that we actually have an average adjustment right here on the side of the pedal so if you're working the most times you know what the tip world it's going to probably be off to the side there and it's kind of a pain to keep walking over to adjust your average to get it set exactly where you want so we added an average adjustment right on the right on the pedal now we also offer on our torches hey that's the mini sick so it doesn't matter here we go all right so you can see this little finger switch here that's another way that I different brands do with different ways some have little rollers some have will have little rocker switches like this so this little this is basically on ours is an on-off switch so you're going to change your amperage on the machine machine directly and this is just an on/off switch so if you set up to 90 amps you're going to get 90 amps but this is good for is if you're doing at a position welding you need to tack weld something or if you just can't get into a spot where you can use the pedal you can set this up to kind of the middle middle ground and you can get something welded together with this or just tack welded so you can get in a better position to weld it so these little finger switches are nice again personal preference type thing but there is times you'll find it with roll cage roll cages and under - kind of stuff you may need to do that so foot pedal pretty simple now we have that i'm going to go over there the controls here will show you on the tick 200 ACDC a bit our machine has this is probably the most stripped down you can get just your essential switches and knobs so we'll work our way around and kind of describe what each of these does so the arm this knob right here in the a on it that's for amperage so that's the average that you're going too well that was shared you on the pedal where you would just a few using the pedal this is very to adjusted for using the finger switch so the way the average works the best way to think of it is the higher the number the harder it's going to get so as you're welding the thicker the material the more amperage you're going to need the hotter you need it to get so you're going to you're going to turn this around to where you need it to get now on the foot pedal you're gonna just that actually to somewhere where it's a comfortable zone for you to put your foot to actually move the pedal up and down so you may set it to 110 and you have to play with the pedal a bit just to get a feel for it to get it to be in the sweet spot for you everybody is a little different with that some people like it to be more wide open throttle when their welding some people like to bear maybe on it but have the ability to kind of go further if they want clearance effect we're not going to go over too much today this is mainly really just used for aluminum for the AC side so there's a negative and a positive what this does is this is going to change the actual like the wavelength for the welding so you can get more cleaning or more penetration with steel you're really just going to leave it at zero the last to hear our pre and post flow what these are as this is for your guests so your pre flow this is basically how much gas is going to flow how long the guest is going to flow out before it initiates an arc so I keep it anywhere from one second to two seconds somewhere in there and it gives a split second you know before the i'm sorry . one second i misspoke before it actually starts in our a good thing with this with this is if you have any contaminants that are actually in your in your hose this is going to purge that out before it actually starts a well so you don't get an initial dirty weld the post flow that's what probably can figure that out but this is a this is how long it's actually wedding gasps come out after the ARCA stopped so important thing when your TIG welding is that you do not unlike mig welding where you would just hit the trigger you make you make your boiled and just take your hand away with TIG welding which we're going to show you a little bit you want to keep your hand over the world and let the gas flow over top of that weld until it fully solidifies so you can change the time that the post flow is just depending on what your welding how hot it is in the type of material with the women on you may want to leave a longer post flow so they can cool it can both cool and you know solidify so when we are welded steel I keep it anywhere 23 seconds something like that for welding something that's a little thicker maybe even on a little longer but anywhere in that range is is pretty good so that's where i have it set so the only other to hear which are pretty self-explanatory of the foot pedal panel controls that's the finger switch in the foot pedal like I showed you earlier and DC and AC so pretty simple a lot of other machines out there may have you know machines that are a lot more money they're gonna have all kinds of blinky gauges on them that are nice if you know how to use them but sometimes it can be confusing and get you in trouble if you start playing with them and you don't know exactly what they do so with the bare minimum this kind of gets you get you going you can put some really nice welds down so the only other thing before we start getting into some other stuff is obviously you're shooting gas so we have a bottle here pretty much majority of the time when your stick welding you're going to be using a hundred percent Oregon so no you cannot use your MIG welding bottle you can't switch it over if you have a mix bottle you need to use a hundred percent Oregon and with the gas flow on this you're gonna probably want to turn the gas flow up a little higher it's a little high on this one out so we hit the pedal but normally with mig welding you're probably gonna be a little lower the inside numbers there is the the cfh and you're going to probably be down in more at the like the 10 to 12 maybe 15 range with TIG welding I like to keep it 15 that 15 or 20 or even a little higher depending what I'm welding this is it definitely helps with the appearance your weld and it's gonna you know the queen of the better would take world in which we are going to show you in a second here so that's the basics of the you know the controls on the machine how everything breaks down and how the torch goes back together next thing I have to cover i know sometimes it's a bummer but i think it's very important for us to talk about is the safety TIG welding does not it does not create Sparks and spatter like mig welding but there are so there's not the danger there with that but there is other dangers on the the UV light that comes off with TIG welding is really bright very very bright and you can get us a sunburn or sun tan really quick and not the good one so you want to be welding wearing a welding jacket or a long sleeve shirt something like that so we offer these welding jacket here that work for mig welding as well as take welding and this is going to cover your arms you know everything that you need when you're welding to keep you from getting burnt it doesn't take much if you're wearing a short sleeve shirt and doing some higher amperage TIG welding you're gonna you're gonna burn your arms real quick next thing obviously is gloves I got a bunch of gloves laid out here so you can kind of see the difference of what you can use the the gist of it all before i go into it is you need to wear gloves you might see on TV you see on the internet guys that are welding without gloves TIG welding without gloves because there's no no there's no splatter there's no sparks but again you got to think about the heat and the rays that are coming off that the UV rays which is not not good at all so even if it's something like this I keep these around if I'm just doing some thin sheet metal welding or fights need to attack something I want to throw it on these are just real cheap throwaway knit gloves but this is going to keep you from getting you know block your skin from the you know the Rays be a small little barrier another thing you can use if you don't have anything around here in a pinch just a set of like you know mechanic style gloves like this will work fine these aren't going to hold help you very much with the heat but they will block you a little bit if you're doing some you know load and moderate temperatures next ones I have here I have two different style take gloves that are actually designed for TIG welding they use a different type of material on their little thinner depending on the style these are a little thicker but they're made to be have a little more dexterity to him then like you're just a normal traditional mig welding gloves so this is these will work fine but it's going to be a little difficult to get when you're when you're trying to learn how to take well it can often times be difficult if you're using make welding gloves because they just don't bend the same it's hard to grasp the filler rod and sometimes this is this is as much of a problem as you know other parts of your technique when people are learning how to take world so it's good to get a set of gloves that are going to that are going to be just to tick welding gloves it's good to try and do that something that scene that's has a little more dexterity to them do not use I even bring them out don't use stick welding gloves on the big thick heavy stick welding gloves you're not gonna be able to hold the torch is going to just completely cover up that torch and it's not going to help you at all so that's the gloves obviously the helmet like with any welding you do need a helmet two-block walk out this harmful rays and a really bright light that comes from TIG welding you definitely I would say most most definitely in my opinion you need an auto dim helmet with TIG welding you're using both your hands you need both they're both your hands to weld you're not going to really have a hand to flip down it's a pain to to nod your head down to get the foot down get an auto dim helmet if you plan to do any kind of TIG welding even mig welding it's it's a big help to fix shade helmets they're not very good for it with the auto dim helmets - you can change the darkness your lens here and then also on the inside there's some adjustments for the sensitivity and everything so when you take well depending on the amperage you can you can turn it down a little bit to help you Allen's it's not quite as quite as dark you can turn it down like if you're doing sheet metal or something like that you can adjust the studio suit your needs for a fixed lens it's whatever that lens is so if you're doing lower average you're not going to be able to see anything when you're setting up and may even have trouble seeing the Archon lower amperage welds so get a good auto dim welding helmet this is one of our Eastwood a logo helmets that we offer you can see on the site should be underneath the player that where that you're viewing this from right now so now that we talked about the the safety I wanted to get into setting up your torch setting up your workpiece what's what's needed what's necessary and some best practices so grinding the electrode of the tungsten is something that you're probably gonna get really good at when you're first learning how to to take well let me grab let's see here pick one that isn't ground already and this is a little kit that we offer as well as i'm fumbling around here we'll just use this the screen guy here so you can see this thing's got a little ball in the end to say I want a this was used for AC welding but say i want to go grind a point on that or imagined boogered up we'll show you how to to do that so use a bunch of different ways you can grind electrodes or tongue students everything from using flap wheel flat disk on a grinder which is probably most crude way you can use a stone on it on a bench grinder the only thing about some of those methods the the the bench grinders and so great because in my opinion because of the stone can kind of be dirty you can also be a little too aggressive when you're grinding the the electrode so I like to do is I use a belt sander like this one here this is the eastwood belt sander that we offer then i added on some 3m this is 80 grit paper that's on here what I like to do is I like to pick an area you can see here on this paper if you're using this for more than just take welding I try and pick an area where i only like this area right here is the new section of paper but i'll try and only crime I electrodes on this area here the reason the reason I say that is because if you start using your grinding wheel your bench grinder or your belt sander and you're using it for greasy metal you're using it for just general grinding what's happening is you're getting your bedding that dirt the grime the rust or whatever into your electrode like i said already take body needs to be clean you need to keep that in mind at all times screen as possible as clean as you can be with it so try and keep it in one area or if you're using a bench cried if you have to use a bench grinder with a stone only use one side of the stone for grinding electrodes the other side say for your dirty grinding i have one ground here that's depending on that what you're doing this one is ground up so this one here that's a kind of a way i like to grind my electrodes pretty sharp point on it so when you do a sharp point like that where you're going to get is a nice small tight arc instead of the the wider this would be or if you flatten the end of it you're gonna get a little wider of an arc then with you have something like this whereas the ball and on it that's going to give you a big cone shape on it versus a nice tight park so when grinding that there's a bunch of ways you can do it we can stick your hand here and turn it like this try to grind is a pretty small one so i went to suggest doing that a trick that I've done I've learned to do over the over the time since I've been welding is just use a little drill grab a wet record this true or whatever and check up your your electrode right into this so actually use one that's been let's do that so you can see so this one here this is a bad electrode so this is one that was dipped in i did this just to show you guys dip that in the puddle and grab this one else can see so this one here that's a good one this is your bad one you can see it was all buggered up it had basically what happens as those welding stuck the filler rod in this is something is going to happen everybody suck the filler rod and it touched my electrode is sucked it right into that and infuse - right to the end of this soon as that happens you need to stop put in your head you have to stop because if you try to keep welding after you've touched the electrode or contaminated it you're at a locker well it's only going to get worse you're going to get more angry it's not good so what I like to do because said is a go check this up in here put some safety glasses on there are some gloves on to while you're at it and then we'll try to getting sort of course and what you guys see what it looks like when you're grinding this so where to turn this on here is going to get a little noisy so we want to do is get that spin in and start spinning this we got to get all that bad stuff round off or cut it off first so I'm just gonna drive it off check it a little more so once again hopefully you can see a little better this time so a couple things to note if you notice when I was grinding the electrode one thing that i didn't mention before i started is the wheel is moving like this I was grinding my electrode like this with the way it was turning not against like this so it's the same thing if you're using a bench grinder you want to go in front if this is your wheel like this do not want to turn it sideways by doing like this you put little scratch marks in it what that's going to do is it's going to direct it to where you want it to go you put your scratch marks this way and you're trying the world you are just going to wander all over the place so this is the one that i just showed it was all it was all gunked up that's what it looks like after its ground up you want a nice sharp . just like that that's what I prefer again depending on the situation you may want to flatten the end off before what I'm doing I like to like to keep it sharp so there's any questions on that again you know it so that we get a lot of questions about grinding electrodes you know at the end feel free to ask some questions i can do my best to answer them for you but that's the basics to grinding your electrodes grab your cordless drill grab a belt sander and try and use just one area of that for how you're going to sharpen it so that out of the way so now that we have the should have to grind your electrode as you're setting up we will i'm going to show you about cleaning the metal that's another key thing that a lot of times people forget or do not do so this is a piece that I know we're going to weld on in a couple minutes here that i set up so basically what I did is I hit this with the flat disk so this is this is probably the least amount of work you want to do you want to flap discs you want to take off any coatings and grime and grease anything like that one thing to note is that a lot of metal comes with a protective coating so even some sheet metal it comes aluminized if you ever bought a pet panel kit the steel patch panel kit it comes with a woman I steal so you actually have to grind off that aluminized coding to get down - no Queen metal so same thing with the thicker stuff some of this stuff comes to all most of it comes with an oil on it you have to actually had clean off if you leave any type of contaminants in here even if you do it on the back side what happens is those contaminants as you heat it up start to come up through so you can Queen apart really good up here and it's greasy down here you're going to start welding put some heat into it that Greece is going to come up and will pop up in your weld and spin spatter and it's horrible so make sure that the we store using a flat disk or a sander you know DA sander depending what it is flap this to clean it off another thing you can use if it's pretty clean metal already use a scotch-brite pad but what I like to do even if I've already cleaned it and it's sat on the table I like to get stainless steel wire brush like this one of these we also offer a smaller ones that you can buy a little toothbrush style ones depending what you're doing you want to get a set of these and use these is your last thing before you actually get ready to weld you want to use a stainless steel brush on your piece and then even if you want to go as far as using acetone you can get some acetone wipe it on your panel to get off any finger marks and Greece you know anything from you is handling it one thing to mention it's really dangerous do not use I'm going to repeat do not use break clean for a queen is the worst thing you could use when you're preparing something for welding mig welding TIG welding anything like that because what happens is when you burn that when you start melting it the metal it still has that in the pores it's going to pop out and that creates a guess that is not good going to kill more brain cells and probably most any drugs and it's gonna make it light headed so it's not good don't do what I've done it a couple times even have to be careful with some of the generic cleaners that are out there they're not going to have chemicals in them that when they burn off it creates something very hazardous guess so try and use acetone if you're gonna wipe stuff down keypad acetone mineral spirits something like that wipe it down wait for which wait for it to completely evaporate keep it as clean as possible so alright so now that we got that set up now we get to the fun stuff welding so get my helmet out here and one thing to mention when you're starting to get to welding I'll try and hold it up here get yourself a seat with some wheels and a seat on the City here a seat that's also got the adjustment on it first to go up and down the reason you need that is because whenever you take well depending on the joint what you're doing you're going to need to move around you're going to need to adjust if you're on a budget get an office chair or something like that and throw that in your shop whatever you need to try and get something that's comfortable and you can adjust some my handle here so you can adjust your handle so you go down to where you want it I'm some people like to be really close like this when their welding other people might need it you know and on your part you may need to be up taller depending on what you prefer so get yourself a seat that's that's comfortable wear gloves we got a helmet here the first one we're going to show you just so it's a easy to you guys to see exactly what's going on this is a butt joint that we have set up here and some quarter-inch steel and i'm going to show you guys how to get an arc started so we're going to start somewhere in here and i'm just going to run up a bead without even putting any filler rod in so I'm just going to run across and show you how the it creates an arc and then immediately after we do that then we'll start an arc here and i'll show you run in a puddle but first before you know we're getting the actual well show you what setting up your how you like your the hands to get set up and everything like that helmet on so obviously you want your gloves cover everything and got to welding torch here holding the TIG torch is something a lot of people boy there you go all right while holding the tick torch is something a lot of people make the mistake when they first do this to hold it like this so they're holding it up here not really the best way to do it the way I like this kind of described as you imagine this right here is like a pencil so you're gonna hold it I don't like it would hold a pencil so imagine you're writing it holds something like that that's how your writing imagine this be the same type of things you're going to grip it like that put your index finger out like this some people try it like to hold it up here which is ok but the thing that happens with that and this might be good for you to first learning how to well because you'll be less shaky probably this is it gets really hot really fast you're not going to weld much at all its higher amperage it's gonna get hot way too quick your hands right in there so you can hold it down like this can hold in the middle wherever but I wouldn't suggest holding it up right on the torch and once you absolutely have to yeah yeah yeah yeah

Channel: Eastwood Company

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Keywords: eastwood, east wood, eastwood company, eastwoodco, restore, restoration, fabrication, fabricate, diy, video, how to, how-to, weld, welding, welder, TIG, MIG, Do It Yourself (Hobby), Welding (Invention), Gas Tungsten Arc Welding (Literature Subject), metal fab, TIG mini torch, mini torch, low amperage, welding helmet, demonstration, how to weld, how-to weld, how to tig weld, how-to tig weld, live, learn, tig welding, lincoln, miller, harbor freight, longevity, mini tig torch

Id: aIyu-63ruMU

Length: 37min 13sec (2233 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 01 2014