Welding Tips and Tricks

I took an aluminum test recently without having much practice and failed. It was both mig and tig. For the mig test I had to weld in a restricted type of joint that resembled a half H shape. Anyone have tips for preventing a sooty weld? It was a flat plate with 3 plates going vertical about 1/8 thickness. They gave me a practice run on a t-joint and the weld came out pretty clean on that.

For the tig test they wanted me to keep the tungsten buried in the cup for some reason no stick out. I've had practice with tig before but was just too nervous by that point to keep steady.

Welcome to the forum firebug306.

Did you clean the area well? Was it wild with any chemical, this can make is sooty very easy. Was the mig with a spool gun?

As far buring the tungsten ....you typically need a little stick out even if it is miminal.

The aluminum was extremely clean, probably the cleanest I have ever seen. The soot problem only happened on the inside of the 1/2 H shaped joint. It was hard to keep the correct gun angle in there, I'm guessing that was the main factor. I was using a push pull gun. Probably this set up.

http://www.millerwelds.com/products/wir ... aluma-pro/

Hey I just saw the company on the miller website Metal shark. Kinda weird how that worked out.