If you have an inverter tig welder with balance settings and frequency setttings, you can get away with much less amperage on 2mm thick pieces. With increasing EN percentage on the AC balance and higher frequency, you can probably do that with anywhere from 80-150A if you time the tack just right, ...

Going slow, at low amps, is not your friend. I used the low amps when I was trying to fill the hole in. With normal welding current, the metal on the perimeter would melt and the filler rod would only add to the "donut" around the hole. I was trying to heat up tiny fragments of the edge t...

Sorry, I thought the exact details didn't matter that much. Yes, it was aluminum, about 2mm in thickness, so rather thin. I just cut 2 small pieces, 1.5"x2.5" in size and tried to weld them together (butt weld). In several attempts, the two pieces developed two separate half-puddles, which...

What do you do when the two pieces, instead of fusing together nicely, violently separate, creating a hole? In my, ahem, experiments, the hole didn't get larger than a certain size, but it was still pretty hard to fill it in. I tried lowering the amps to an absolute minimum, and working around the p...

Not sure if this has been posted. A lot of interesting information about aluminium in the automotive industry.

http://www.alueurope.eu/aam/

Ok, so I tried higher amps (75, then 70), and I clamped the aluminum to a steel plate about 5mm thick. I also did shorter runs, and the warping was much reduced. Here are some pics: http://oi58.tinypic.com/xpy06f.jpg http://oi58.tinypic.com/25tg9pt.jpg http://oi62.tinypic.com/212g8p2.jpg I noticed t...

Following the suggestion from the first reply, I ordered a few 1/8" thick plates from eBay. In the meantime I can try clamping the strips I have to steel plates. So far I've been clamping them directly to the welding table (a small portable one), and it was getting so hot that it was hard to re...

I'm new to TIG, I started less than a month ago. I got some aluminum strips to practice on, and so far one thing that happens consistently is that the strips (about 2mm thick) warp every single time I try to put down a string of beads. The aluminum is most likely 5052. I have 4043 filler rods, at th...

Fat Bob wrote:Practice makes perfect so start buy argon and get after it.
Welcome to the site XTP glad you joined this motley gang.

Yup, I got a 80cf cylinder or argon and some scrap aluminum. I'll start a thread in the TIG section, since I can already use some guidance...

Hi y'all, I've been developing a fascination with metals and metalworking for quite some time. I have a small MIG welder (Lincoln Handy MIG), but my true passion seems to be TIG. I've been watching various TIG videos, including, of course, the WTT channel. Finally, a few weeks ago I got a Precision ...