Welding Tips and Tricks

Hi everyone,
I'm new to the forum, just wanted to introduce myself.
I have owned/operated my own glassblowing business for a few years now, but I do a lot of projects that involve metalworking. I have had an old Marquette buzz box for years, but I recently picked up a Miller 330 A/BP Tig/Stick machine. I have been having lots of fun learning to run some tig beads, and I am excited to learn more from you folks!
Thanks!
-Nick

Welcome, Nick!

The glass arts have always facinated me, and if I ever win the lottery and can do what I like, that's on the list. I have played with glass, mainly old neon tubing which tolerates heat/cool cycles well, to create some, err, "smoking accessories" for my friends in college...

There's an ever-growing number of people to learn from, teach, and/or generally share with here.

Steve S

Sure Steve for your friends... Wink wink

BTW welcome Nick. One Nick to another...

Welcome to the forum.

Welcome aboard Nick!

Glass blowing? Isn't that a bit hard on the lips?

Haha not unless you put the hot end in your mouth

Nick, your parts are on the way!

Thanks!

Wow, tig welding is FUN! Finally got some cans stuck together. Im noticing that some of my beads on aluminum are shiny, some seem sort of satin/textured, like they have goosebumps. Most of them have shiny sections and dull sections. Do you guys think that is too much heat? or maybe a shielding issue? I think they are structurally sound, I have cut a few open, its just on the surface.

Im having too much fun playing around with it, not getting nearly enough work done...

The satin/texture finish is usually shielding. On some parts of a weld, on round surfaces in particular, it's hard to get ideal torch angle and good visibility at the same time. It's also tricky to train yourself to maintain the same angle on a round surface with your hood down, you tend to get steeper as you advance, and reset to 90 when repositioning. A larger cup will help with this; If my welds had to look their best, I'd look into those Pyrex "showerhead" cups. As you noted, though, it's a surface thing, and a wire brush will make the weld look consistent.

The "nice" thing about aluminum, is that it's easy to tell when you're too hot... It falls out on your shoes...

On cans, there's the additional problem of the way they're made. They're stretched from disks in powerful lubricated dies, so the lubricant gets imbedded in the pores and is difficult to completely remove. They're also lined on the inside with laquer, LDPE, or epoxy, which can migrate into the puddle.

Great weld in the pic, BTW! Controlling heat on material that thin is a challenge!

Steve S

Hey thanks for the reply Steve!
That is good to know, I will run a couple beads on some thin flat stock that isn't a can to see the difference. I saw the Pyrex cups on the Internet, they look like they could prove fairly useful. I will have to pick a few up and give them a try. Replacements are fairly expensive, and seeing as I work with Pyrex for a living I might be able to make my own. Might even be worth trying to make and sell some, I'm sure welders are breaking them quite often. There might be a market for some differently shaped ones also (flared out, or necked down like a standard alumina cup) the ones I have seen are just straight tubing.
What do you think? I would appreciate any suggestions...

I see an untapped market in Pyrex cups...

They mount to the gas lens with an o-ring, which automatically means they can be rotated relative to the torch, so they could be "shaped", to provide trailing gas coverage on a pipe or tube weld, for example. A chevron shape for a fillet weld... an inverse chevron for an outside corner (always a shielding challenge). The possibilities are endless. I often customize my ceramic cups for specific needs, but I can't see through them as with Pyrex.

The downside is Pyrex can and will melt at TIG welding temperatures.

If you get rich on the idea, remember me...

Steve S

Stahlin.Studios wrote:Hey thanks for the reply Steve!
That is good to know, I will run a couple beads on some thin flat stock that isn't a can to see the difference. I saw the Pyrex cups on the Internet, they look like they could prove fairly useful. I will have to pick a few up and give them a try. Replacements are fairly expensive, and seeing as I work with Pyrex for a living I might be able to make my own. Might even be worth trying to make and sell some, I'm sure welders are breaking them quite often. There might be a market for some differently shaped ones also (flared out, or necked down like a standard alumina cup) the ones I have seen are just straight tubing.
What do you think? I would appreciate any suggestions...

Hell yeah, that would be cool! I've never seen glass tig cups, but it would be a hell of a tool to have! Sometimes you can't see what you're doing and glass cups would eliminate that for the most part. How would those be made, from a glass blowing perspective?

Nathan, Glass TIG cup already exist. Look at CK industries:

http://www.ckworldwide.com/

They even have a microtorch with a glass cup.

Steve S

Yeah, I did a quick google on them. Looks really cool, I may be asking work if we can get a few. You mentioned problems with the cup melting, have you experienced it? That could be inconvenient.

It's not happend to me, I've never used them.

Another poster here mentioned using them on aluminum, getting close in, and melting one a bit. Seemed like a process error to me, as these cups and diffusers are designed for long stick-outs.

Steve S

How long you been doing this stuff, Otto? You're pretty smart about it. What kind of work do you do?

I've been welding in one form or another for 30 years, sometimes as a small part of my job, sometimes my sole job, sometimes just for my own projects.

Three of the last four years, I've been working on cryogenic tanker-trailers, liquid hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and argon. It's the most interesting work I've done. Welding is only about 20% of the job for me, so I find when I have to do some coded work, I have to practice a bit. Sometimes I'll spend as much as four weeks hunting for a vacuum leak, and then the next week making the repair, so I'm out of practice. Other times, though, I'm doing pipe and valve work for a week or two at a time.

So, sometimes my welds look like I know what I'm doing, others more like a fourth-week student!

Steve S

Interesting. What is the process for finding leaks on those kinds of vessels?

nathan wrote:Interesting. What is the process for finding leaks on those kinds of vessels?

Since the trailers are under extreme vacuum, I use a mass spectrometer tuned to helium, in conjuntion with a vacuum pump. A helium atom is actually smaller than a hydrogen molecule (since H occurs as H2 in nature). The mass spec is hooked to the vacuum pump, and a suspected leak area has helium introduced to it. The machine will pick up even a handfull of helium atoms leaking into the vacuum space.

Steve S