Welding Tips and Tricks

I've been mig welding for about a year now and finally decided I want to learn to stick weld. It's not something I'll likely use everyday, but it would be nice to be able to add it to the résumé if I needed to. Luckily I have good equipment and an endless supply of scraps and rod to learn with.

My supervisor at work is a pipe welder and he was welding up a pipe the other day so I started quizzing him on things. He gave me some basic advice and said I could practice all I wanted so I just gave it a shot. These are some pics of my first root pass. I did practice on some plate for a day or so before trying pipe so these aren't my first ever stick beads. I'm running 1/8" 6010 at 75 amps on a Lincoln precision tig 275. I'm welding 6" sch 40 in the 5g position with a 3/32" root gap.

It looks to me like my root pass has just about filled up my gap in the first pass. I'm guessing that's because I ground my bevels too steep, but maybe you guys could give me some input on that. There's also a couple spots where I can see on the inside of the pipe that I didn't quite get enough penetration. Any advice for me on getting better at this? Is there anything you see that I should work on?

Too cold.Run it at 105-115 and shorten the "whip" A swirl is a more accurate depiction. It's not even a swirl. Pretend you have Parkinsons. It's a "jitter", nothing more.
The drag and whip terminology is really BS.
Drag does NOT mean drag. It means nearly zero arc length. Thousanths.
Whip means stir the pot a little. You aren't spanking the Vienna. Verdad ?

75 sounds better than 105-115 to start.. that is really on the high end for an open root weld with a 3/32 gap. My thoughts are that since you say your not getting much penetration on the inside your just building up on the outside. I jam my rod in there tight so I can barely see the arc but can tell the inside of the pipe is lit up and just watch my puddle from the outside. I like to just drag it up with a sort of very slight zig zag motion to make sure I'm tying into both sides enough as I'm traveling.

Thanks for the tips. The high spots are where I started to keyhole out of control and tried whipping it a lot farther forward and bring it back to try and get it to cool. It kept me from blowing a hole in it, but I ended up with a few high spots from it. I still think my biggest problem was having too steep of a bevel in it. Our WPS for welding an open root butt on carbon pipe here at work states 1/16"-1/8" root gap so I think 3/32" gap is pretty much right where I want it. I suppose I could tighten it up, but I didn't have anything that thin to lay between the two pipes to keep it spaced evenly while I tacked it.