Welding Tips and Tricks

A while ago a friend who TIG welds for a living gave me a small container full of short 1/16 tungstens, basically castoffs for him but still have a few more grinds left in them.




Most are long enough to work fine with a stubby gas lens setup. I like having a bunch sharp and ready to go, given that I am more talented than most at poking my tungsten into the puddle.

The problem with sharpening 30 or 40 of these at a sitting was that as they are so short I found myself either burning my fingers on them while grinding or just slightly sanding the skin off my knuckles on the grinder belt. Not ideal. So I cobbled this up using the chuck and shaft from a junk cordless drill I had laying around.



Not brilliant, but pretty handy and easy to make from junk. No need to tighten with a chuck key, hand tight holds them fine and the handle makes it easy to spin while grinding. No more burned fingers or sanded knuckles.

Sharpen both ends. Then you can flip it around if you foul the tip. Also, I have taken to polishing them (end-to-end) with a grey SctochBrite pad. The cleaner they are, the better they weld and the more precise your arc. If they are cast-off's, they are bound to have some contamination on their lengths that will influence your welds. Make them nice and shiny!

Good idea, plenty of life left in those electrodes.

I just chuck them up in my cordless and run 'em on the belt sander, works great.

For those who don't have an old chuck laying around.
It's a pin vice.
https://www.walmart.com/ip/General-Tool ... 3=&veh=sem

All good comments, thanks. I made this up just because I had the stuff around and the pin vices I have were all too small for these. But for 12 bucks, a real pin vice would work just was well. I know lots do the same just with their cordless drill but in my case, this was just more fun. I have the standard small pile of old cordless drills with dead or missing batteries that are not worth replacing the batteries, so I figured I do something with one of them. This one in particular was not very good when it was new, so I did not feel at all bad recycling it.

cj737, lots of these are sharpened on both ends, I'm about 50-50 on doing that myself. Usually the thing that prompts me to swap tungsten is that the one I'm changing out has a big glob of some crap fused to it, and won't fit into the collet any more...
I like the suggestion to clean them up, I'll add that to my routine. In this case I know that there were pretty much used only for doing fusion welds on very thin SS parts, mostly tubing, for vacuum and cryogenic applications, so they are all pretty nice.

I sharpen maybe 30 or so at a sitting (I get bored after much longer, short attention span) and drop them in a little pill bottle that I keep by my welder. I have another pill bottle with a small hole drilled in the cap, when I mess up an electrode, I just drop it in the hole and get another. When one is empty and the other full, it's time to do more grinding.

Thanks for the comments!

exnailpounder wrote:I just chuck them up in my cordless and run 'em on the belt sander, works great.

Same here - fast and easy

I bought a pin vise and I really like it. I prefer to hand-spin them on a grinding wheel. Oh and the buffing wheel on the Habor Freight 3" mini bench grinder is awesome at removing oxidation on tungstens.