Welding Tips and Tricks

yeah it looks like a trained rat welded it.

however its the hardest one i've had to do. i'm poor at stainless as it is and this one had some curve balls.
3" dia thin wall sanitary tube into a tub made of even thinner steel.
add to that the fit up was bad. at least a few mm's of space around it.
so i did the weld up high and wash down over the gap, hence the massively big weld. all that metal helped to be a heat sink so i didn't blow the thin edge away. i used an aluminium backer plate which was good until the thin sheet warped a bit and lifted it off the aluminium and promptly blew a hole.
of course the smallest tig rod i have is 1.6mm which is far thicker than the work.
plus i had to use the my cheap back up helmet which has a lower shade but had issues seeing through it.

clean up tomorrow.

sometimes that's just how it goes, you got it done, been there as well...

Really nice Tweak. Some day I want to get my hands on those design engineers and break their sharpened pencils in half and give them a crayon to draw with and they might understand about clearances to work on things.

you guys are to nice

the clearance wasn't a design issue. i had to cut the pipe out, turn it around and refit it.
so ground out someones excellent welding but ended up with a bit bigger hole.
i had planned on just cutting the pipe, turn it and weld it back on. but they had already shortened the pipe right up into the curve.
its rough but it won't leak or fall off.

stainless requires a lot more precision than i'm capable of. something to work towards.

An option next time is pulse or cold tacks. Because your filler was larger than needed, some cold racks in lots of places. Let the work cool, then come back on pulse and wash the welds in. Washing will fill the gaps and heat the racks enough not to crack.

But at the end of the day, not all welds are IG worthy because real welding in the field can’t always be pretty, but always has to pretty strong.

unfortunately its a big tricky to use pulse unless its whomp the pedal. my machine looses the pulse function when you connect the pedal. even then it only has 2 pulse settings.
its an entry level machine so its got some drawbacks, but its half the price of a good machine.

tho i should have done a bit more work on the backing. could have gotten that better which would have reduced the overheating a bit.