Welding Tips and Tricks

Hello to everyone. I'm very happy to find this forum! I've been watching Jody for a while now.
I am a professional automotive mechanic, and have been for 45 years. I've owned my own shop for 28 of those. I'm a pretty good mechanic, but I'm a lousy welder! I would dearly love to be able weld decently, hence my happiness at having found this forum. I enjoy metal fabrication tremendously. I learned to weld in high school. As soon as I had a job, I bought a Victor gas welding rig and gas welded everything. So I have been gas welding for over 40 years. I'm certainly not saying I'm a good gas welder, but I realize I am as good as I'm ever going to get. I also have an ancient 185 amp Lincoln tombstone. About 20 years ago I bought a new Millermatic 250. I used it a lot, but I guess because I could never get good at it, I have never enjoyed mig welding. Actually, I hate mig welding. Until Jody's videos, the relationship of the two mig welding controls made no sense to me whatsoever. Amps makes sense to me. Wire speed and voltage do not. And then Jody cleared it all up with his video on wire speed. I still don't understand what the voltage control does, but it no longer matters, I sold the Miller! I bought what I have always wanted ever since I was a kid - a TIG welder. For the money, I just couldn't pass up the AHP. Night and day! I LOVE tig welding. It is absolutely perfect for what I need it for. I mean, I thoroughly enjoy tig welding. It is therapeutic for me. I'm not a good welder, but I can look at the tig welds after I'm done and be happy, especially on smaller, thinner stuff, vs. with the mig welder having to grind all the embarrassing electric diarrhea mess off and do it over again.

I really want to learn to be a decent welder. Thanks for letting me in here.

-groot

Hi
Welcome
I am of same age group and although have used mig most of my life have never understood why everyone talked about inches or mm per second but nearly all machines had 1-7 or 1-10 on voltage and the same on wire speed 1-7 or 1-10, Now was that inches per second, millimetres per second or what? unless you had the manufacturers manual to hand which with most people is rare, how do you know? The best way I found was to listen to the weld and tweak the two switches until I found the sweet spot as somebody once described as bacon frying on a Sunday morning but as with you I bought a tig machine and found I was in so much more control I now prefer it. That is not say that mig is not of use, as all forms of welding have their place.

Groot, welcome to the forum.

Welcome, Groot!

Volts and inches per minute are quite simple to calibrate with good enough accuracy for your purposes.

For wire speed, turn off your gas, cut the wire flush with your tip, pick a number on your dial, and (using a stopwatch) hold the trigger for exactly ten seconds. Measure the wire, and multiply by six for the IPM. Then release your wire feeder and roll the wire back up, and repeat with the next setting.

For volts, leave your wire feeder loose so it doesn't feed, set the dial at a number, clamp a DC voltmeter between the feeder and ground posts, and squeeze the trigger. Lather, rinse, repeat for each number on the dial.

Now, you have baseline settings to start from using a recommendation chart.

Steve S