Welding Tips and Tricks

So I am doing an infinity cube I got from weld metals online. The butt welds seam to be tricky to me for some reason. The outside corners I haven’t really done much yet. The fillets aren’t a problem for me. My problem with the butt joints is the puddle seems to wonder behind me as I go. I have played around with the amp settings and seems like 63 seems to work best. Material is .060” mild steel, 3/32 blue tungsten, .045 filler, 63 max amps, #12 cup at 24cfh. I have tried different grind angles and different torch heights. Just seems that when adding filler it tends to widen the puddle so if my dabs aren’t exactly the same they re different widths, height doesn’t change much. And some are tear dropped shaped. I attached a picture of a fillet, if you have any input on that as well let me know. But i feel they are good, just the butt welds are my struggle right now.

Looks good from here. Just tighten up your ripple spacing, unless that is the specific look you are going for.

On your first pic it looks like you changed your arc length pretty considerably in that ended up putting more heat in the part. Second pic looks like you may be overcorrected a little bit with the amps, where the current was probably right but the speed wasn't and you chose the wrong thing to fix. 3rd pick looks fine except where you ended. You needed one more dab.

But I think it looks pretty good All things considered.

Thanks guys. After posting and looking at the welds I was thinking too I need to make my dabs closer together, I’ll do some more tomorrow and see what happens.

Pictures 2&3 show that you need more amperage. If you are indeed using 0.045 filler, you’re stuffing a ton of it there. A wandering puddle can also be symptoms of torch angle being laid be too far. Try to stay as close to 90* as you can.

Ya know, if I did one of them I'd be tempted to Silicon Bronze it instead of welding, and then polish it and clearcoat it.

Does look like a fun project.

A while back I thought it would be fun to use up some 1/8 inch steel I had laying around and make a poor man's Faraday Box. Something to put my cell phone in. Turns out it doesn't work at all, I think the phone might receive and transmit better inside the box. LOL. But the construction was steel and silicon bronze.

Faraday box -Beryllium fine mesh screen is an example

I figured if I lose signal in a metal building, surely a 1/8" steel box ought to do it, but no.

I've sold the rolls of 99.997% pure copper screen for hospital radiation depts, but I don't stock it. If I had some of that laying around, I suspect I could use it as a lining and that might work. It was just a project for fun, so not something I was willing to invest time and effort into. More of just a fun project welding.