Welding sheet metal. Shielding gas or flux core??

hey fitzy here back at it again with another one many of you have asked about migur what size wire do you use uh can you use flux core wire well today we're going to find out about the flux core i have different size wire that i'm going to use with gas and i have a roll of flux core wire that i'm going to experiment with and see if i can do a cotton bud with guess what tony can make a mess too around [Music] okay so here i got four different styles and sizes of wires okay what we got here first this is the one i use the most is .023 or six millimeter and i use a gas with this wire here over here now i have a roll of o three oh uh eight millimeter then that's also gas now the difference between the two of these is this is a thicker wire than this here that's basically the only difference in the two of them and i'll show you the difference in the two of them when i go to weld now over here i have the same size wire as this one but this is a shielding gas or flux core all three all point eight millimeters and there's a flux core wire this is the one that you run without gas okay this is the la the one that a lot of you are using and i find that i'm going to do an experiment today just to find out how this compares to what i use here more or less and i also got a thicker wire again which is a flux core 0.035 0.9 millimeters and as a flux core it's a really heavy wire itself so i'm going to see if i can put this one on my machine now in order to change these these two here and also with this one here you're going to have to put the proper tips in them i got the 030 tips six millimeter tips and then these two here i got the all three uh all tips with the eight millimeter tips and then over here i got the o35 tips so you gotta change all them on your welder in order to work on them now the welder i'm using is my little mirrormatic uh 140 auto set it's a good welder it's much the same as the older 130s this is a newer model of it this one here got more settings and everything on it i had this set up here now roughly about where i would use the o3o welding probably 18 gauge as you can see here this is 18 up here but i got it down here in the 20 gauge this is a lot of the cases of using the thinner metals and whatever the settings are all according to what you can use okay but i'm going to use this welder for all these applications and see what i can come up with okay the gas i'll be using with the uh the shielding gas is going to be co2 carbon dioxide now a lot of people can't have been talking and saying they can't just get to co2 all you can get is like a co2 ergonomics can you use it yes it is a better gas than this here the reason why i use this is because i use a lot use it for bodywork only and you're going to be grinding all your wells down the aragon mix gives you a cleaner weld uh you get less splatter with that type of stuff with it the it's just that i find that having that gas is a lot more cut it's more costly for me to run it when all i'm doing is bodywork so you know you can use either the co2 or co2 argon mix either or whichever ones you likes so you can see that there is only on 12 right that tells you how much gas is in your bowel but i usually sit there on 12 and then when you when you treat the trigger it'll come down to about 11 you don't need no more than that you've got the wire feed set up there with your wheel your wheels will have to be changed okay from the different size wheels this one here is pretty well a nice little this quick disconnect on this one as you can see here and basically whatever side that you have facing out see that was all two four six millimeter and you turn it over that'd be the side the face is out but it's marked on the opposite side so this side here is for that side over there somebody should have down both these this is an ore machine so this is all you all you got to set up at and it just snaps right on there like so now a lot of the machines have these little charts that are on your welders on the inside of the door as you can see here that you can actually get a baseline of where to start from it's a good reference point to get yourself started but don't look at it and say this is caught in stone so this is exactly what my setup should be when i use a certain size wire or certain gas or whatnot because it's a ballpark figure it'll get you started so you use these if this information on these charts here o2r and then you've got your gauge of metal and it'll tell you two to four right so this is where it comes from up here on the and this unit here which is out front here right it'll say like two and then before up here see now as you can see my settings are totally different right because i played around with it and got one that i like better a lot of times these are not as close as they should be i just find that they're a good reference point for when you first get started start here and then play with it from there okay now most welling how-to videos you'll always find guys how to set up your welder and how to weld and how to bought weld and all this stuff and they're always doing it with this type of metal okay this is a piece of 1 8 or 3.2 millimeter steel it's a thicker piece of steel it's very easy to weld uh fellas you know do a lot of welding videos on these and heavier plate and stuff like that and i find it very hard to find anything around when it comes to sheet metal uh welding this is not the same as welding automotive sheet metal it's not the same process showing how to weld by using this here and you're going well up quarter panels on your car well that's to me that's not a really good explanation now up here i got three different style metals okay this is big heavy 14 gauge um i've used this on in some of my videos for making mounts and stuff like that it's a heavier gauge 2.8 millimeter stick the most common one i use is this one here it's an 18 gauge 1.2 millimeters this is the the most common steel i like using this even when i'm running slider metals like that over there uh because it get it's it gives you something more strength to it and we are doing a lot of grinding and stuff like that if you concentrate on this here if you start with the 18 gauge and start growing it down you'll grind it down to 19 or 20 or something like that when you're finished going down so you got room to the grind the metal down to finish it at the end now over here this is the most common metal you're going to find in a lot of modern day vehicles it's 22 gauge uh 0.08 millimeters now this is the stuff that a lot of you guys have i've seen are welding off so what i'm going to do today i'm going to do all my welding on this sheet piece of metal here this stuff here is a lot easier to work with okay this here is not as not as easy to work with so when i start putting all the heavier gauge wires and the flux core wires into this here you're going to see a difference in it so i'm going to cut individuals pieces at this here and i'm going to do a bot weld on all of them and i'll show you that but this is the metal we're going to use it's just a regular automotive car this is a roof off a ranger pickup that i saved so it is an actual car roof uh actually they come off a car because it's not just the sealer from the royal finals so i'm gonna take cut a bunch of strips out of that and get started on now to get a better understanding of the gauges you can see here the thickness markers 20 gauge 22 gauge 24 gauge 16 14 18 what not you can see actually how thick the actual metal is so this will give you some idea of the different metals now we're at the second last one up here 22 gauge there air cars out there now today with 24 gauge on them and it's extremely hard to weld but for the most part we're going to go with 22 on this one today as you can see 18 gauge is what i usually wait well that so uh let's get started now now for each one of these tests i got little strips of metal cut out is the 22 gauge it's all gonna be the same way i clean up the metal both sides all right i just cleaned it up with a 24 grit disc and my air grinder i'm going to clamp them and i'm going to do a bolt weld down through here and all these here on each panel i'm going to butt weld one and i'm going to go through the process of what is like the weld and mat nut so what i'm going to start off with is what i'm always using is the uh 23 gauge wire or sorry the o23 wire six millimeter and i'm going to go to the process of welding this off now i always spot weld when it comes to welding automotive panels um the one thing you see when fellows teach you how to weld videos online when they're welding the heavier steel is the boys are running beads don't go running beads on sheet metal okay uh especially this 22 you're going i'm going to show you what happens because i'll actually run a bead on another piece here not a sec but all you do is you do spot welds right have them about an inch apart and then off them one at a time after another and work on basically getting the panel up and cooling it down the key to it is to keep the panel cold if you get any amount of heat in this thin metal you're going to warp the dead out of it now when you're welding with the gas you got your tape which in this case here is a 0-2-3 tip uh make sure that your wires are sticking out a small bit from it but these nozzles on this machine here got a tendency to drop back on the backsides when you push them on the tip sticks out by right you should have the tip submerged below the end of the nozzle so make sure that you you haven't got this type of thing going on you'll find that it doesn't get the shielding gas as good so you got to have a little bit of protection like that over the nozzle in order to get the gas so you may have to adjust the small bit or replace it when you get the new one you'll see this round sleeve on the bottom here this will be more to the bottom but i've have to clean it that many times now is after sliding down putting it on taking it off right so i just has to keep an eye on it i put it on i just pulled it up small bit [Music] all i'm going to do here is i'm going to hold the place here on the end at the tack well now and then put one every inch or so [Music] i like cooler over there uh some say put a damp rag on it but you're gonna have to weld this and you'll contaminate the metal where well and it was wet so it's best to do it with here be very patient with it because uh if there's still heat in the panel there's a greater chance you're gonna warp it all off okay so now i'm going to go in now and all i'm going to do i'm going to start tack welding next to these here and work my way across to each one and each time i tack weld it i'll cool it it's a long process but it pays off and i'll show you why [Music] so [Music] little water i'm sticking to a small area there so i'm going to stop it there there's all i got done as i got them welded next to each other and i gapped them out and done them apart that way okay so now that well is done there and you can see i'm getting a decent weld on that there was easy to weld the smile itself i had a bit of trouble at first but i adjusted my welder and so i turned around and weld it now over here my settings on my welder i have a high wire speed of about uh 70. i like it up there and then down here i got a setup and between two and three and 22 gauge around 20 gauge and it's halfway down i like that setting there i like my wire speed here i like having a bit of water speed so that's the setting i use this now you can't go by this setting on a different welder okay this is something you got to play i have a video on setting up welders so it's best to go back and look at that one and find out the best way for this welder here for me doing this metal here this is where my settings will be all welded up on the inside okay and you can see that's the inside and there's the outside so you're getting good penetration there's just spot welds and this is what you're after is to get this penetration you can see i had a bit of trouble up here i burned through and there's a bit of knob wiring that's fine now when you lay that down there you can see there's a little bit of warpage on it wiring away i've been growing that off but anyway you can see the little bit of warpage that's on that there that's because it's small now that here i can get that out because these small panels but what i'm going to do is i'm going to go over and take two more pieces now i'm going to attack three spots on it i'm going to run beads on it and i'm going to show you what happens when you put too much heat in the panel okay same process before just going to tack one of the two panels together i just stopped to steam the well i can tell you that i got the three them attack weathered in place and i was going to leave that panel just look at this deer now not going to do nothing with it i'm going to start running beads huh now right off the bat it starts blowing through because your heat settings are so high so you have to turn your welder down in order to keep running beads and that way i find you probably won't get as much penetration you see i'm start running my problems again because i haven't gotten that cool down so i got to play around turn my mother way down i want to get this to run a bee i like working with a lot of heat now i got it so i can actually weld it okay i don't like the wire speed on that turn that down a bit they're still burning through it because i know there is turn down some more now i was constantly running into problems with burning holes in it as you can see trying to run a bead i never cooled it i just kept going you can see the heat transfer i got going on here now how much is there compared to this one here see the heat transfer there's not as much heat transfer on that here there's wireless on this here now to probably run into [Music] when you turn it over you're not getting a consistent weld okay i'm running a lot of problems look at the problems i'm running into look at the warpage you've got going on here lot of craziness going on this is what ends up happening when you start running beads if that's still hot and there's way too much heat in there because of that this is what you gotta see like you can actually look at a guy with his welding in a rig and you can see see how much this here there's not a lot of heat in here okay just a lot of heat in here this here is trouble because you'll end up warping everything off on your panel you'll it'll separate you notice i put a spot weld here but it's still separated i mean and it looks messy as you can see and you compare it to that there right so that's one thing to understand when you're uh make well and sheet metal is the control of the heat run on a nice bead like i can just turn around and sit down here run a real nice bead on this here now and i'm going to warp the dead out of us because that's one thing people looks at when they see is this type of bubble gum welding if you want to call it or small spot wells like this here it doesn't look pretty you're doing body work it does not matter because you're going to grind all this off anyway here's your key there make sure you got good penetration and your panels stay together okay these are small panels and there's a small bit of warpage in this but that's because it's such a small panel but there's a lot more warpage than this if you look at it and what's on the other one see how bad that one is compared to this one here well i got this piece of 14 gauge here now what i'm going to do is i'm going to run a bead of each type of wire on here so we can compare them later on and see what the differences are in this is the o23 wire [Music] so there you have the o23 wire now i'm going to go up and i'm going to step up and go up to the o3 wire which is uh as this is for gas as well and we're going to go through the same process again i'm going to change the machine over for this wire here and we're going to try this the same process same techniques and see what it looks like okay so i took the large roll of o23 off which is six millimeter and i got to put on the larger roll or the small roll of o2 o30 sorry get that straight away now the problem you got is this here this is a small roll so it takes a small section on it this here has an adapter on it for taking a larger roll so i'm going to remove this adapter in order to change it over to the small wheel now the larger wheels are just held on with like an outfit like that sometimes there's a pin in them so you just remove all that you don't really have to remove all that then you just take off this in over here pull all that off and hold on to the washer you slide that on and you put the spring and the washer and everything back on again like so now i got the wire in place before i run it through i got a change over the wheel on it because this is set up for o23 wire you can see it's a smaller wheel on it and the setup for that there so i had to turn it around and reinstall it so the wheel would be on the larger side now that's ready for the uh larger wire i'll just feed the wire through it okay the other thing you got to do is change out the tape this is the o23 tip here i gotta take that out and i got to put in an o3o tip so i got that changed over with the new wiring out i got the nozzle on and start welding okay i played around with the welder playing around the settings on the weather because it's different wire size until i got to a heat range setting or basically that i was laying down a nice nice pass right and now this one's different now because i had to lower my wire speed down to about uh 45 and i had to turn up my heat setting to 18 gauge now the problem is when i turn that down to weld the slider gauge i wonder if it's going to work right but this i just did this for a rough test of it now so i'm going to try to see what it's like for welding the 22 gauge there so this is a thicker wire and because it's a thicker wire it's going to need more heat like i just sewed on the settings but at the wire speed i turn it down so i'm going to see what happens now when i get puts attack on this to see if them settings are going to let me weld together right off the bat i'm just blown holes in it so i gotta turn it down [Music] try it again you see the troubles i'm having now trying to get this to weld trying to get the weld here [Music] get it here [Music] see it blows through very easy it's a thicker wire it's a lot more heat so i'm going to run into a lot more troubles trying to weld this i turn the heat off to get a better penetration pretty good back there well as you can see now i got the larger wire in it and what's happening it's harder to control the heat uh in the thinner metals you start blowing through holes another little feature that i know on this here if you notice is that my welds are bigger right and because the welds are bigger there's more grinding involved in it because i got to add more heat to it in order to get this to burn but when i add some more heat to it it got intensity you want to burn through so like you got the smaller wire which is the o23 and this is the o3o it's not a big difference in the wire sizes but there's a big difference because this here now will you get welded with it it's tricky because it's a larger wire so both uh you've got a lot of grinding on it because of the the larger wire now this is the o23 war right here i did that we went welded there and this is the o3r okay now you look at that that looks like a nice weld okay and then you look at that here and you don't think much of that weld here now i turn this over there's our penetration there turn this over there's our penetration there we're not getting full penetration out because i'm trying to reduce the heat to uh to get it to weld so it don't blow through you could probably play around with it and probably get that a bit better than that but you can just tell by just looking at that and looking at that the difference in the two welds it's a lot harder to do that you can see the heat transfer on that there moving out and the same and this one here now i never cool this one like i call that one there so that would play a part of these last you here but even at the very top up here if you just look at this very first one that i hit and this very first one i hit here this here is a colder welder than this one but the penetration on this is not that good and you'd have a lot of grind to do and you'll end up going through it so the thinner wire does wonders as you can see there the way better penetration here than there is here now i got the old two three here so now i'm going to run a bit of this here i'm going to always run it the same way i'm not going to change the angle because it'll change the the layout of the the welds you can change it well this way or well this way but i'm gonna roll each bead the same way [Music] now this is 14 gauge metal but i got i'm welding this here with the setting that i used on the slider gauge that i can try to weld with so like i could turn it down or turn it a bit make it harder to burn this metal but i'm looking to lay this to weld down at the setting that i set it up at now the setting that i have this one set up on i have it here just on three and it's on 45 i lowered the wire speed down here because i had to lower the wire speed down because of the thickness of it and it burns hotter so i got to slow the wire down and the gauge wire the gauge is roughly in the same location as the other one the other one was about right here when i was wearing the o23 wire and i just moved it up to here i played around with a bit and that's basically the setting i got so i went ahead and i welded it in here and already you can see there's a big difference in the two wells this is a thicker wire that's a thinner wire so when you look at it when you size them up this way you can see you would have a lot of grinding to do all right now it's time to move on to the flux core okay so now i just took the roll of all three oh or 0.8 millimeter steel wire out and now i put the flux core in it and this is the difference in it this here has a core in the middle of it uh with flux in it in the middle of the actual wire itself so this is the stuff that a lot of you guys are welding with uh when you buy a cheap little welder and it doesn't come with gas this is the wire you would run um this is the stuff that you know you'll be able to do out by the door you got no issues with it this stuff is used a lot in outdoor welding a lot of welders do like it but what i mean by welders these are guys that do a lot of structural work these are great this wire is great for welding heavy plate steel and stuff like that is a really good product for that when it comes to auto body it's a totally different game altogether so like i've never used this right from day one this is my first experiment with this here now so i'm going to play around with this i'm going to put this in the machine and i'm going to play around with it for a while before i even try to do any tests on it just so i can get a feel for the stuff i've been at just 30 years and right from the get-go i started using wire with gas it was just basically it was told to me um that's what i had to use for auto body okay uh this stuff here uh was something that welders used to use but as this like when i got into it the small mig welder wasn't very popular so it was still big makes so it wasn't like there was a lot of fellas around that had the small welders but when the small welders got popular a lot more people start using this wire in trying to do bodywork with it and like if you're if you're a first time welder and you're just starting the body work and you're using this stuff don't let it frustrate you and because it is not a very good wire for welding bodywork um there's guys out there that got the knack of it figured out they've been to edit for a number of years uh it's probably better to do lap wells with us than it is to actually try to do a bot well with us but i'm going to do a whole bunch of experiments here now i'm going to play around with it and see what i can come up with but i'm going to put it in the machine and i got to change one thing on the machine so i want to get this installed first and then we'll set the machine upward one thing to remember when you're putting out a new roll wire is to turn around and adjust this tension here and that's what that spring is for don't have it too tight that it won't spin freely but make it tight enough that when you're running the wire through that this don't keep spinning when you stop the trigger so just play around until you get the tension right out now here's where it comes in we're using flux core wire now so we have to change the polarity right here what this is right here you got your work clamp okay and then you got your wire drive lead this is your power source here and then this is your ground wire so if you look at your here's your ground okay ground wire that's your ground wire we had to reverse this here this goes into the machine here and it comes up through here and it goes to here what we got to do is we got to put this one here on this log and then put this one on this log it's a simple process you reverse the polarity on this here change them around this is your power source and this is your ground so just reverse the two of these here for flux core wire that's all i indeed i got my ground on my positive side and i got the power source and the ground side now before you go like that do not forget unplug the machine doing this with the machine plugged in so make sure you got that unplugged when you're doing that so now the welder's set up for flux core wire now when it goes back to uh solid water and i start using gas again i'll have to change these around again i'm not going to do nothing with the machine here i'm going to leave all it's going to leave the bottle turned off i'm not going to bother with none of that i'm going to leave the tips and everything alone i'm just going to go ahead now and start trying this and see what it's like now i've played around with the welder some and i come up with these settings here i'm down around two and the gauge meter and the material thickness and i'm just a little above 40 up here playing around with the wire speed i did a bunch of test passes uh i have a bunch of scrap pieces here i play around with i've played around with the piston just trying to get a feel for using the stuff uh it's different um it's my first time using the stuff i got pieces set up for now i will say one thing a lot of you have watched me and caught me on a few my videos well and without a helmet uh it's not a good thing shouldn't be abs but uh i noticed something here going with this flocks you cannot do it without a helmet the flux is a lot brighter uh there's a bigger arc and everything on it so you know you're not doing this the way i does it with the uh the gas welding i can hide the arc behind the tip of the gun and there's not much of a flash like in terms of there's much not much light coming up i've been doing it that way for years just being quick doing bodywork it's not a way they should do it should i always wear a helmet i say that again and again again but everybody keep asking me about it all i do is i hide the arc behind the tip of the gun but with this flux core forget it you'll never do it i'm here and uh i tried it one arc and i said nope we'll be at that so then i've gone back and i'd wear a helmet and everything like that i played around with it it's different views um it has it's um what do you want to say it has his pros and has his cons uh it's really cheap cheaper to use uh right now i haven't really found no cons to it other than the heat range is trying to get it low enough that i can weld the thin stuff so i'm going to go ahead and do a few patches on this here and try to join together a few beads and see what it comes out like you know i played around with cleaning flocks off and i played around with just leaving alone and going on welding and i don't seem to be any advantage of working the flocks off i would thought you would think that you would have to clean the flocks off every time you start welding again boss i went and turned around and i did some welding and i grinded it off and it doesn't seem to affect us so i just want to leave it along with the flux on it and i'm just going to go ahead and i'm going to run a little beetle on it let it cool down a bit i am not letting that cool now but it's my own fault i'm just trying to weld the slayer stuff i'm totally amazed at how well how nice it lies down and the penetration that it gets i've never used this before it's my first time using flux what i what i want to do here and i want to experiment with it a bit more and see what it's all about because a lot of you have asked me about it and i had an understanding from listening to other people and what i've seen that you should always use gas wire it is harder um it's uh it's a different well i can guarantee that now there's what it looks like before i even bother to clean it up or whatnot so i'm going to go ahead and clean that up all i'm going to use just a simple brush steel brusher that stick said that so all the flocks is office and it's a very low weld i'm totally amazed with that but this is what gets me [Music] okay here's the weld that i just did okay there's the penetration totally amazed with you know a lot of people have a lot of negative things saying about it now there is a high heat to it now i put a lot of heat into that so uh i'm going to turn around i'm going to add that to my list and the thing over and do a bead on it with that setting and then what i'm going to do is i'm going to do a um up here in this panel here i cut a hole in this and i'm going to do the cotton bust and i'm going to use the flux core to do it so far i got the o3o and i got that welded on and then i turned around i've done this here what i all i've been doing here again i'll repeat it is i'm setting up the welder to light too well this light stuff here that i got down here and then when i'm doing whatever the settings are i just wants a little bit along here to see what it looks like now most people will be saying well tony water you just brought a bee i do all pulse welding and i gotta assimilate the same thing as i'm doing on the metal if i just run a straight bead on it it's not the same you cannot do that on a sheet metal so i went ahead and i turned around on a pulse um style welding out like i've done with everything else so there it is i haven't battered clean it all up it flocks all three all and you can see compared to the other two so i'll just clean that up there now and show you what it looks like and there you have it it's a narrower weld as you can see uh and it is a higher weld or a high well it's about the same little less than yeah it's a bit in between this one this one the height of it but there's an awful lot of splatter an awful lot of splatter so there's a lot of cleanup they had to be doing after the fact as you can see the splatters all around us here and then you look up here there's very little line right there and that's using co2 if you had used an argon mix you'd have less than that again but what i'm going to do now i'm going to get that done i'm going to go ahead now and i'm going to do a little cut butt test out see what it's like now i went ahead this is the 22 gauge all i've done is i took a square i cut it off the bottom bit i'm just going to lay that right over the top of that here i'm going to tack weld that on there and i'll do a cutting board all the way around it and tack weld it on and then i'm going to weld it all the way around i'm going to grind and dress it a reason why i want to i just want to run this through the process to see about how much trouble i'm going to have because doing what i'm doing i'm really still not getting the full effect of any issues that i'm going to have uh like i've done this here many times doing these type of panels with the regular o23 wire gas but i've never done it with flux core so like a lot of fellows are asking can you do it flux core well we're going to find out now if i can do a flux score that's a whole point of anybody else but um that's the biggest thing i'm going to find out here now so i'm going to go ahead now and start tacking this on and get this all done now this is a very small patch we're doing a cotton ball on so i got to be very careful with heat because like i'm not that far away every time i welded so i'm going to do a lot of cooling it's going to take me a little while to do it so i'm going to try to see if i can do a really good job with this now or just using flexible [Music] [Music] right off the bat my first thing i'm noticing is when i first hits the air there's a hesitation for and get a good penetration i'm going to try cleaning the tip off snipping the end off it and trying to spot weld on that deer before it does anything else because usually got a dirty wire on the end of it so if i cut this off will it make a difference let's start with a fresh piece right so to me the process is the same it doesn't make a difference if i do it or not so i'm gonna go ahead and start cutting that [Applause] [Music] [Applause] so i start to see a major heat transfer a lot more heat coming from this so [Music] when you start using a product or using something and actually using it for a job at hand you start to see things like to me i looked at that when i was welding it seemed like it was a really good weld everything was going on i've seen a lot of things going on here now uh the gap is uh if it's either one at all it's very hard to weld this uh the heat is on rail when it hits it with the air how much heat transfer you get so like if you're welding up panels with this stuff and putting in the car and you're not getting the flat straight like you see on the videos that i do that's one of the main reasons why this flux core is very very tricky to use the smallest you can get is 0.30 the wire size so it needs to be hotter and it just seems like uh it's going to it it's a hard thing to work with is that the same just run the bead on it so i'll continue on see how far i get with this make this look presentable open see if i can make a patch [Music] so [Music] it seems to be harder to break clear on the back side i usually don't have no troubles with this this usually it almost falls off but there's that much heat going through it it's actually welding piece on trying to get there we them now that they got prepared [Applause] i got the piece taken out had a lot of troubles getting it out so now i'm going to go ahead and start tacking it around here and see if i can weld it up go ahead and move it out here on the end because it's going to weld at the top of things what i can see so okay this is where i'm to now as you can see here now i'm burning holes in places i just turned down the welder even more uh i'm turned way down here now getting down to the lower settings i haven't touched my wire speed yet i left that alone i'm just trying to control the heat and this here to bring it down lower so i can weld this so i'm going to go ahead now i'm going to get a bit of warpage on this because it's just a flat panel and it's open and of course it is slightly metal but i'm just going through the process here now just to see how much trouble i'm having with this now you've seen me do a lot of this work and you don't see me with a lot of this i get it at times but this is like crazy the amount of blow through you're getting through on this here so like if you're using flux core and you're getting this type of thing on the go it's not you okay um yeah well it is you but still in all this flux core to me is a lot harder to work with with sheet metal than it is anything else like this here between this here and what does he do this welding here that's the o23 with the gas and this welding here it's night and day i can tell you that right now um i've used this a lot i've done this technique a lot you've seen me you do many videos i'm having a lot of troubles here with this well in this with the flux core with the o3or you can't get smaller wire and i'm turning it right down to heat settings i here's people talking about it so you know this is the reason why i'm doing this experiment i wanted to show you guys that you know i got 30 odd experience 30 years out of experience and i'm still having troubles getting all this welded up with using flux core and so i'm going to go ahead now and i'm going to start continuing welding this up and see if i can get it welded off [Music] [Music] okay what i'm noticing here uh if you if you go back and listen to it again there's a hesitation when you first strike the air to when you get penetration now there's a timeline between when you first strike the air and the penetration hits and that time you're adding heat to it uh i'm not getting like you're going to hear it again [Music] when it does that it seems like it's getting too much heat into it in order to make the arc and by then you're burning up the metal so i just thought i'd have to reload the wire speed now as well and i'm still having issues with it trying to get it welding now some guys have been at this a long time and using it for bodywork you could probably overlap wells with this without an issue uh but i do a lot of cottonbot and i wanted to experiment with this here just in butt welding alone you know it's probably great for patching up an old car or something slap the piece tint over it and tack weld it on have a bit of filler over fantastic for that but if you're doing any amount of restoration work or you want to do a really nice work uh it's it's a big undertaking to use flux core in this in this concept just listen to the world you can see me there trying to get the heat and you got to leave it there for a little bit just for it to get the heat going and then by then you got so much heat into it you're burning holes in it now you can see here now i've after welding it up on this side here and a few times after blowing through the biggest thing that happens when you go blows through the first thing you're going to want to do is to keep going and put more heat in or to try to fill in that hole you got to stop you can leave it alone you got to go on weld something else and come back to it again later and i'm constantly blowing through holes all i'm trying to do here now is just i'm not going to bother trying to finish this whole patch because this is way too messy is i'm just trying to finish this much of the patch so i can dress this up to see what a lot looks like you know it's it's it's not easy right it's not an easy thing to work with especially on thin metals and a lot of you guys are using you know a lot of later model vehicles and that and then you go out you buy a cheap little welder and you put a roll of flux and you start welding and one wire you're such a bad welder well you know it's it's not always you this flux core is designed for structural steel okay you can do wonderful jobs with this hair put beautiful beads on it and like welding the two pieces of plate together it's very very tricky to use on body panels okay i'm going to go ahead now and i'm going to continue on and try to get this all welded up so i can get it to here and then i'm going to grind it off see what the penetration is like on the other side right now and grind all this up see what it looks like [Music] [Music] as you can see here if you look at it there's a lot of warpage in that a lot of that got to do with it's just being laid out it's a small panel and it's got no structure built around it and whatnot but there is an abundance more heat in this than i can than i can see than i'm used to right and like you can see me trying to weld it up it's really very frustrating to try to weld something up and then you you blow another hole and then you got to weld up that hole and you blow another hole you know so it's very very very frustrating so i'm not going to well no more of this i'm going to go ahead and grind up this section here and see what it looks like you do get really good penetration with it that is you know that's one good quality about it you know you're getting the penetration that you're after so you got no worries about letting go but you know you're getting that much heat this is what you got going on a lot of that is you probably see me hitting it twice here and there uh like anybody else i get a little bit frustrated with it because it's not welding together for me now like you know there's pretty gap pretty big gap steer it's not as tight as fit as i'd like it but i run into that problem all the time it's not always tight i always manage to get them welded up with the mig welder and so you know this type of thing i played with this earlier and i thought it was wonderful stuff but now that i'm actually making doing a panel with it it's totally different right uh like when you start getting into welding uh do your voice from a certified welder guide you know an iron worker that if you're planning on doing body panels restoring old car he's not the guy that you should go to to get advice from uh because he's using structural steel unless he's a he's a guy that does it himself and does auto body and you know you know felt like that would probably be a good fella to go to but every time like when you see welding online uh how to make weld and you know how to butt weld and all those types of they're always using heavy steels to do it it has nothing to do with bodywork this is a totally different puppy right so now i'm going to go ahead now and grind that up and see what it looks like [Music] now i went ahead and i grinded it all off it grinds much the same way as few imperfections in it nothing serious but the biggest thing i'm finding is that right down through the wellness too it pulls really really hard like it's really low if you look across it you can see how much it's pulled down and that's because of the amount of heat that's in it i don't like the whole idea of when you strike it and almost takes three attempts for it to actually get penetration that arc is uh very uh unpredictable that's probably the best thing about to say about us and you would love your one heat but you don't need too much and the flux core applies too much heat now i got a couple of spots here where there's holes i'm going to try to weld them up there now you can actually see that pulling away but you can hear the way it arc that time [Music] so you'd want to hit that again [Music] worked out all right you can use it but ah it's hard but if you're new with this and you're just picking it up as a tr as a hobby i do not recommend using that now people are gonna say yeah well tony you know yeah it's your first time using fluxboard yeah no [Music] now i just turned the welder up i never even tried to put any settings around it i got two pieces one eight plate here now try my hand at flux core and do these together [Music] a little marshmallow try this and that is a flux core weld on heavier steel bring it after [Music] that's pretty good world so it's not like i don't know how to weld uh this is what flux core is designed for that's a really nice weld for welding plate and everything together but you can see and can hear how nice that weld is and this is what you always see and it's like you see if i can lay down beads like that is great but then you take that and apply it to this and this is what you come up with so this here and this here is totally different so using uh knowledge of this here to weld this here it's not a good idea now i do have this roll of 035 which is flux core it's a bigger roll again or as a heavier wire again i got everything there i'm really not going to go through the motions of that because i know it's for a fact that that'll never well that okay i'm having a hard enough time trying to weld that with the 30 so you can only imagine what it's going to be like if i try to do it with 0.35 so you know all is going to end up happening is if you look at it here you can see the difference from here to here it's a bigger weld so the same thing is going to happen here there's going to be more heat the whole nine yards right so like you know the oh that's the o3o2 which six six millimeter point six millimeters and then you got the point three zero it's a bigger thicker weld as point eight millimeters okay and then of course that's the flux core there which is there's a lot of splatter it's a narrow weld uh as you can see up here it's a much hotter weld just uh as it takes a trick to it to get it to work right but like i've i said many times fellas talk about wire sizes what size wire do you use okay let's go over some of the things now the characteristics of it i always use 0-2-3 for doing auto body work sheet metal work or anything like that why because it's a smaller a wire and it lays down okay this wire here if you look at the two of them one is a lot harder than the other okay that's what ends up happening when you use this larger wire if i would say well i'll just use the o3 all what you're going to end up happening then is you're going to have to you're going to need some grinding to clean that up so here we have it now we've got the 023 or a 6 millimeter stuff and this is the weld here that's what it looks like it's small the heat range is small right let's get some good penetration right through the back side there don't seem to be a lot of warpage around the area over here you got the um 030 with the gas and you can see here there's a lot of heat around us there's more a lot more heat on the top side because i like i said earlier i went and ran the bead down through but if you just look at this top one compared to this top one there's a lot more heat now i think this here would react the same way using the o3o with the gas like as you can see down here i was blowing holes in it over here i never had no troubles with blowing holes we're talking about right so i was getting all the the penetration and this is only 22 gauge metal and then of course i've done this here test and it looked good had really good penetration everything i just found and the reason why i figured that there was like that is a really tight fit so the key to using this stuff i uh my firm believes is you've got to have an extremely tight fit so i wouldn't recommend doing the cotton bust using flux core because there's always a gap up there you'd almost have to file the fit file the fit to use flux core and then the timeline it takes for the heat range to use it uh it's so hot it runs the problem i do not recommend using flux core for auto body metal metalwork for the simple fact it has too much heat in it um it's a dirtier well as you can see up here you can see there's a lot of material everything on that you can feel it there rub your finger across it it's a lot of dirty wells and it's just the whole point of trying to control it trying to control your heat it's cheaper yes without a doubt uh get yourself set up again but if you're going to do bodywork with flux core uh forget about doing like butt welding and stuff like that just turn around just doing all that well like that and weld it down across here that's my advice to you because doing this here the cotton bot and butt welding and everything with flux core on sheet metal it is tricky so i'm hoping this here clears up a lot of things if you have any questions uh you know if you want me to say well why don't you try this or do this experience experiment here and you know this type of thing like you got to realize too this is my first time using flux core i've been in the trade 30 years and i can't even remember using it i was talking to one of my buddies and he says the same thing he he don't even remember using flux core he could probably go back 35 40 years ago and he thinks he can he might have used it but he's not quite sure so it's not something that i use a lot but do i know how to weld this yes i can use it i can weld with it right but it's heavier gauge steel this stuff is different okay so you know my advice to anybody that's going at sheet metal okay doing it as a hobby um first thing you got to figure out is what kind of weather you're going to get i would get a gas a wheeler that took gas and i would get a bottle of co2 or argon and with all two three or six millimeter 0.6 millimeter mig wire to do your metal work that's where you should start because the problem you're going to have if you're teaching yourself how to weld if you're going to start here you're going to frustrate yourself you should start here because this is like the difference between night and day we're trying to do two panels you guys have seen me do a lot of this work and you can see the mess i got made of this okay now you can only imagine like i got 30 years experience at this you can only imagine somebody just picking up a welder for the first time and trying to weld trying to set up these well they're trying to do it all and then try to do the same work it won't be easy right so i'm hoping this was all helpful for everybody i hope the tips were good and until next time [Music] [Music] do [Music] you

Channel: Fitzee's Fabrications

Views: 80,261

Rating: 4.9395199 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: 9ZLDNBAwr-s

Length: 63min 45sec (3825 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 13 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/MattsAwesomeStuff]

Fitzee normally just documents what's he's working on which is usually classic car bodywork patching on a budget. This is the first time I've seen him go waste time and money just to demonstrate something that people ask him about a lot. Figured I'd at least share it around to make it worthwhile.

TL;DW:

• Tony has been welding body panels for 30 years, he knows how to weld.

• 0.30" MIG is far better than 0.35" MIG.

• 0.30" Flux-Core is possible without a backer dolly to soak up heat, it's just really, really hard and it sucks.

• Flux-core has almost no tolerance for gaps in fitment unlike MIG. It desperately wants to burn through. His usual cut-n-butt technique for patching might not work.

• Don't let people tell you that you can't do something, but do accept how much more difficult and frustrating it's going to be if you choose the worse tool for the job.

My own experience mirrors his exactly (well, not the 30 years part, just the struggles with flux-core on body panels), and actually made me feel a lot better about my efforts and results.