Welding Tips and Tricks

Beware, this is a long read with lots of questions from a newbie.

I'm trying to teach myself to TIG weld with less than spectacular results. I'm a fairly decent MIG welder (along with stick and Oxy-Acetylene from way back), but TIG is driving me crazy.

With MIG, heat requirements are pretty much a matter of looking up the proper settings for heat and wire speed, making slight adjustments to "dial it in"and adjusting travel speed as needed for the proper penetration and bead size. TIG welding, well lets just say its not as easy. Aside from the newbie problems of dipping the Tungsten into the puddle and hitting the Tungsten with the filler rod, I'm having a devil of a time trying to determine travel speed, and developing a proper "dabbing" technique when adding filler rod. I can do OK when laying down a bead without filler rod, and managed to do a decent lap joint or two when fusion welding, but add in the filer rod and it all seems to break down.



I seem to start out OK, but then things go downhill fast. I generally follow the rule of 1 AMP per .001" of thickness for steel, i.e. setting my welder for 125 AMPs for 1/8 material, then using the pedal to control the heat. No pulse, ramp up or down or any of the features that the machine is capable of (yet) just straight DC and .3 seconds pre flow and 5 seconds post flow for the gas (100% Argon). The problem is that when using filler rod, my beads are very inconsistent. Some area are obviously to cool and others to hot...not to mention having to stop so often to resharpen the tungsten.

Since I'm used to pulling a MIG bead, it was a little difficult learning to push the TIG bead. Also to me, it seemed much easier to "read" the bead when pulling a MIG bead vs pushing a TIG bead. Is there a rule of thumb that relates to what I'm seeing as far as puddle size vs travel speed? Also the majority of my puddle seems to be even with or slightly behind the Tungsten, but it I increase my torch angle, the arc wants to jump around. Does a "dirty" or dull Tungsten cause this? I have no problem seeing the puddle, but the end of the Tungsten gets lost in the arc glare making it difficult if not impossible to judge the distance. If I darken my helmet to where I can see the end of the Tungsten, then I can't see the puddle, so I try to find a happy medium.

Once in a while I can get a bead running for more than an inch or two, but then the fingers on my torch hand start getting uncomfortably hot. I'm thinking this may be from the material itself rather than my grip (like a pencil).



My attempt at TIG welding Aluminum



I'm hoping to take a TIG class at the local community college this summer if they offer any, but for now, I'm stumped. Oh yea, one other thing, I've watched almost all of Jody's video's and still can't quite get the hang of it. They've definitely helped a lot, but I think it's time for some personal instruction in a class.

In the meantime any hints will be greatly appreciated.

Tim can you repost your pics?


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Tim8888 wrote:Beware, this is a long read with lots of questions from a newbie.

I'm trying to teach myself to TIG weld with less than spectacular results. I'm a fairly decent MIG welder (along with stick and Oxy-Acetylene from way back), but TIG is driving me crazy.

With MIG, heat requirements are pretty much a matter of looking up the proper settings for heat and wire speed, making slight adjustments to "dial it in"and adjusting travel speed as needed for the proper penetration and bead size. TIG welding, well lets just say its not as easy. Aside from the newbie problems of dipping the Tungsten into the puddle and hitting the Tungsten with the filler rod, I'm having a devil of a time trying to determine travel speed, and developing a proper "dabbing" technique when adding filler rod. I can do OK when laying down a bead without filler rod, and managed to do a decent lap joint or two when fusion welding, but add in the filer rod and it all seems to break down.



I seem to start out OK, but then things go downhill fast. I generally follow the rule of 1 AMP per .001" of thickness for steel, i.e. setting my welder for 125 AMPs for 1/8 material, then using the pedal to control the heat. No pulse, ramp up or down or any of the features that the machine is capable of (yet) just straight DC and .3 seconds pre flow and 5 seconds post flow for the gas (100% Argon). The problem is that when using filler rod, my beads are very inconsistent. Some area are obviously to cool and others to hot...not to mention having to stop so often to resharpen the tungsten.

Since I'm used to pulling a MIG bead, it was a little difficult learning to push the TIG bead. Also to me, it seemed much easier to "read" the bead when pulling a MIG bead vs pushing a TIG bead. Is there a rule of thumb that relates to what I'm seeing as far as puddle size vs travel speed? Also the majority of my puddle seems to be even with or slightly behind the Tungsten, but it I increase my torch angle, the arc wants to jump around. Does a "dirty" or dull Tungsten cause this? I have no problem seeing the puddle, but the end of the Tungsten gets lost in the arc glare making it difficult if not impossible to judge the distance. If I darken my helmet to where I can see the end of the Tungsten, then I can't see the puddle, so I try to find a happy medium.

Once in a while I can get a bead running for more than an inch or two, but then the fingers on my torch hand start getting uncomfortably hot. I'm thinking this may be from the material itself rather than my grip (like a pencil).



My attempt at TIG welding Aluminum



I'm hoping to take a TIG class at the local community college this summer if they offer any, but for now, I'm stumped. Oh yea, one other thing, I've watched almost all of Jody's video's and still can't quite get the hang of it. They've definitely helped a lot, but I think it's time for some personal instruction in a class.

In the meantime any hints will be greatly appreciated.

Essentially what you're asking is to skip the entire learning curve that is TIG welding! lol

Best advice I can give you from my perspective is that you need to learn/find out three basic things to get your understanding going:

You need to find out how much bead reinforcement you need (aka the size & profile of the bead, which in and of itself can mean many things because it depends entirely on joint configuration/geometry). For example: if you are doing an inside-corner fillet weld, you need to determine your required leg size and throat size, and you need to practice until you obtain that result. There are books that likely show these kinds of things in great detail. I have yet to obtain them, but then again, I do my research on Google and look for free white-paper's that discuss these kinds of things.

The next thing is to determine whether or not your required weld that you just established from the above critera, meets your need for penetration/depth of fusion. For this there is no way around cutting and etching. If you don't already have a set of sanding pads (maroon/blue/gray) and etching solution, you migh as well order it right now. You can't determine penetration just by looking at a bead, contrary to what you see on some "instructional" YouTube welding videos.

The third thing is to repeat the above two over and over again, time and time again.

Real progress in learning Tig only happens at the grinder while sharpening dipped Tungstens.

VA-Sawyer wrote:Real progress in learning Tig only happens at the grinder while sharpening dipped Tungstens.

That's why I use a diamond wheel

Richard,
You have been doing it a long time, so probably don't need to spend much time learning at the grinder.

VA-Sawyer wrote:Richard,
You have been doing it a long time, so probably don't need to spend much time learning at the grinder.

yes, it's the by product of practice

Yes it's hard to see how you're going as your pics don't seem to be posting properly and are not showing, but as others have alluded to, I think a lot of your issues will be just from being new to the process, which can only be fixed by practice. And don't fool yourself that those who are good at TIG picked it up in only a couple of hours (ok, there might some lucky ones) but it does take a looong time.

I learnt on stick and then coming across to TIG, found it was a completely different ball game, even though in my head, it's all still just melting metal together isn't it? I think 90% of the issue when coming from another process is that you lose your free or prop hand with TIG, compared to both stick and MIG that can both be done quite well after a while with only one hand and your other hand can be used as a brace/prop for balance. The hassle with TIG as you know is that you need both hands and this immediately throws your balance out. Not just your hand balance, but your whole body. I know this doesn't sound like it should be a big issue, but it really does make a difference, because the second issue running along with this is you now have two hands to try and teach muscle memory and movement into. Add to this that as you said, it's harder to distinguish where the arc stops and the puddle starts and before you know it, there is a whole bag of BS that you have try and sort out.

The issue with your bead having hot spots and then cool spots would likely be down to feeding the filler in at the wrong time and prob at the wrong angle and your travel speed, where you might have hung around too long in one spot and then in the next stretch, didn't hang around long enough. The filler actually cools your puddle a bit since you have a molten puddle lying there and then when you feed solid state metal into it, it takes some heat to melt that metal. One tip when starting out is that no doubt you've watched a lot of vids by the pros already, who get a regular drum beat going with the filler feed and then newbies try and mimic this. What I think this does though is tend to cause overuse and overfeeding of the filler. If it's all going to shite still, bite it off in pieces by forgetting about your filler hand for now and concentrate on the torch hand. So just do autogenous welds and aim to get a consistent and steady bead, even if it means using two hands on the torch to stop any jerky shaky movement. You might think you're looking like a total dill using two hands on it, but it's taking things step by step at this stage. The next step is to do fillets and get a consistent bead with that - again with no filler. Yep the weld will be sunken but it's about teaching one hand and when that's sorted, you can bring the other in.

For aluminium, it's good that you're having a go but alu is a lot less forgiving than steel and you need to bring your A game with it. The heat travels through it a lot more quickly, the AC arc behaves a bit differently and you need comparatively a lot more amps to get things going than steel. Things happen a lot faster and your filler hand needs to be sorted out well and truly as well, because if you feed at the wrong angle and wrong time and for too long, the arc takes the easy option of skipping the weld joint and just burning the filler back instead. Alu fillet welds also trip up a lot of people including me even when you get flat practice beads down pretty easily.

I hope this doesn't seem like a whole screen of waffling on, so the point is just keep bashing away at it. It took me weeks and weeks of practice just on steel and then when I went to alu fillets, it was like being thrown back down to the bottom of the sand dune again.

Tim8888 wrote:Beware, this is a long read with lots of questions from a newbie.

I'm trying to teach myself to TIG weld with less than spectacular results. I'm a fairly decent MIG welder (along with stick and Oxy-Acetylene from way back), but TIG is driving me crazy.

With MIG, heat requirements are pretty much a matter of looking up the proper settings for heat and wire speed, making slight adjustments to "dial it in"and adjusting travel speed as needed for the proper penetration and bead size. TIG welding, well lets just say its not as easy. Aside from the newbie problems of dipping the Tungsten into the puddle and hitting the Tungsten with the filler rod, I'm having a devil of a time trying to determine travel speed, and developing a proper "dabbing" technique when adding filler rod. I can do OK when laying down a bead without filler rod, and managed to do a decent lap joint or two when fusion welding, but add in the filer rod and it all seems to break down.

I seem to start out OK, but then things go downhill fast. I generally follow the rule of 1 AMP per .001" of thickness for steel, i.e. setting my welder for 125 AMPs for 1/8 material, then using the pedal to control the heat. No pulse, ramp up or down or any of the features that the machine is capable of (yet) just straight DC and .3 seconds pre flow and 5 seconds post flow for the gas (100% Argon). The problem is that when using filler rod, my beads are very inconsistent. Some area are obviously to cool and others to hot...not to mention having to stop so often to resharpen the tungsten.

Since I'm used to pulling a MIG bead, it was a little difficult learning to push the TIG bead. Also to me, it seemed much easier to "read" the bead when pulling a MIG bead vs pushing a TIG bead. Is there a rule of thumb that relates to what I'm seeing as far as puddle size vs travel speed? Also the majority of my puddle seems to be even with or slightly behind the Tungsten, but it I increase my torch angle, the arc wants to jump around. Does a "dirty" or dull Tungsten cause this? I have no problem seeing the puddle, but the end of the Tungsten gets lost in the arc glare making it difficult if not impossible to judge the distance. If I darken my helmet to where I can see the end of the Tungsten, then I can't see the puddle, so I try to find a happy medium.

Once in a while I can get a bead running for more than an inch or two, but then the fingers on my torch hand start getting uncomfortably hot. I'm thinking this may be from the material itself rather than my grip (like a pencil).

My attempt at TIG welding Aluminum


I'm hoping to take a TIG class at the local community college this summer if they offer any, but for now, I'm stumped. Oh yea, one other thing, I've watched almost all of Jody's video's and still can't quite get the hang of it. They've definitely helped a lot, but I think it's time for some personal instruction in a class.

In the meantime any hints will be greatly appreciated.

Tim,

Google Photos doesn't allow hot-linking. There is a way, but it's too cumbersome. Link them from somewhere else or send me the direct links and I will host them for you for this time.