Practice, practice, practice...and cleaning
After an annoyingly long time away from welding (48 hours, but who's counting?) I was able to get some more practice in last night. It wasn't much, but it helped.
I had purchased some new tungstens of various sizes (this is the metal rod in the torch that carries the electrical charge for the arc) at the welding supply shop on Monday. I had a few new ones sharpened up and ready to go. I used the one I had already set up for a weld or two, and then tried a fresh one. Damn! What a difference that made! I zipped up a very nice bead amazingly quickly! Note to self: keep tungstens sharp and clean, it really does make life better!
I did a few autogenous welds (that means I just let the arc melt the two pieces of metal until they flowed and fused together), and then I was fitting up two pieces that had a big gap between them. This isn't ideal for welding, but it can be worked around if you are using filler rod - and it was at this point I went, "Hey, I just bought that yesterday! Perfect!" Pulled that stuff out and went after it.
The results were not outstanding, but they weren't totally horrid. Well, maybe they were kind of horrid, but it was my first try. I did two or three more of those, and got to the point where there at least weren't huge globs of extra welding material sticking up all over the place. I'm far from the legendary "stack of dimes" sort of seam that so many people take as a sign of a good weld. I'll get there.
I did figure out one important thing. I had been having problems with apparently random instances of the weld just going to hell, bubbling, and pitting badly, and I do mean badly. It looked kinda pretty if you didn't know what you were looking at, but you could grab it with your hands and break it in half, which is obviously not what you're going for if you need to keep anything, you know, together! I couldn't figure out what I was doing wrong, as I wasn't changing anything between one piece and the next. The guy at the shop said it was either low gas flow, or dirt/impurities in the metal I was trying to weld. Last night I tried out this awesome sort of Scotch-Brite pad that I'd picked up at the weld shop. It did a *much* better job of cutting through the dirt on the steel I'd purchased, and it was at that point I realized that the steel that looked cleanest actually had a layer of some sort of protective coating on it. Once I got that scrubbed off to really bright steel, the welds came together great. It just looked so nice and clean before, I had no idea I wasn't getting all the coating off. Live and learn. Now I need to get more of those scrubbing pads. They pretty much kick ass.
Pics of various random badly welded things will be coming before too long. I managed last night to also get my photo issues with my computer resolved, so now I can get them off my cards, onto my computer, and uploaded to Flickr. Don't get too excited, it's mostly shots of blobby-looking pieces of gray metal, but, well, maybe it's slightly more interesting than listening to me talk about it endlessly.
I had purchased some new tungstens of various sizes (this is the metal rod in the torch that carries the electrical charge for the arc) at the welding supply shop on Monday. I had a few new ones sharpened up and ready to go. I used the one I had already set up for a weld or two, and then tried a fresh one. Damn! What a difference that made! I zipped up a very nice bead amazingly quickly! Note to self: keep tungstens sharp and clean, it really does make life better!
I did a few autogenous welds (that means I just let the arc melt the two pieces of metal until they flowed and fused together), and then I was fitting up two pieces that had a big gap between them. This isn't ideal for welding, but it can be worked around if you are using filler rod - and it was at this point I went, "Hey, I just bought that yesterday! Perfect!" Pulled that stuff out and went after it.
The results were not outstanding, but they weren't totally horrid. Well, maybe they were kind of horrid, but it was my first try. I did two or three more of those, and got to the point where there at least weren't huge globs of extra welding material sticking up all over the place. I'm far from the legendary "stack of dimes" sort of seam that so many people take as a sign of a good weld. I'll get there.
I did figure out one important thing. I had been having problems with apparently random instances of the weld just going to hell, bubbling, and pitting badly, and I do mean badly. It looked kinda pretty if you didn't know what you were looking at, but you could grab it with your hands and break it in half, which is obviously not what you're going for if you need to keep anything, you know, together! I couldn't figure out what I was doing wrong, as I wasn't changing anything between one piece and the next. The guy at the shop said it was either low gas flow, or dirt/impurities in the metal I was trying to weld. Last night I tried out this awesome sort of Scotch-Brite pad that I'd picked up at the weld shop. It did a *much* better job of cutting through the dirt on the steel I'd purchased, and it was at that point I realized that the steel that looked cleanest actually had a layer of some sort of protective coating on it. Once I got that scrubbed off to really bright steel, the welds came together great. It just looked so nice and clean before, I had no idea I wasn't getting all the coating off. Live and learn. Now I need to get more of those scrubbing pads. They pretty much kick ass.
Pics of various random badly welded things will be coming before too long. I managed last night to also get my photo issues with my computer resolved, so now I can get them off my cards, onto my computer, and uploaded to Flickr. Don't get too excited, it's mostly shots of blobby-looking pieces of gray metal, but, well, maybe it's slightly more interesting than listening to me talk about it endlessly.