Welding Tips and Tricks

Hey welders! Love your work. I'm a millwright with 15 years experience, but I've mostly done hydraulics, pipe fitting/bending and general machine troubleshooting. Up till now I've always just called in a pro to weld when I need something but now I need to be able to weld my own projects. With the pandemic it has been harder to get welders to come into our shop and I want to step up and fill that role. My shop has a TIG welding machine but I I don't know how to use it. I'm a shit MIG welder and I'm even worse with stick. Can you helpful people help me learn TIG first? I'd appreciate any tips or links. Thank you!

If you can't Stick or MIG weld, TIG is beyond your reach as it incorporates EVERYTHING the other two processes utilize plus.

The best thing to do is to practice and learn Stick. Watch YT videos and practice, practice, practice until you are reasonably competent. Then, you can undertake TIG because the principles and mechanics of what you need to do will make sense and be available in your muscle memory.

It is the VERY RARE individual that can be self-taught TIG without being able to do the others.

as above.

fortunately a lot of tig welding machines have a stick function tho it may be very basic.
stick forces you to learn how to weld and all that carries over into tig.

i'm self taught and its not an easy way to do it. it takes 10 times longer to learn anything. learning tig is hard enough after learning stick, let alone trying to do straight off.

Its hard but not impossible if you've got the time to practice.

Best advice I can think of would be to just get practicing. Start with the basics of getting a puddle and moving it around. Try different things like height and torch angle see what they do.

Once your comfortable with that start adding filler and pad beads on a piece of metal.





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It's sort of the old "crawl--walk--run" analogy. It's a good idea to develop the basic skills first and then progress from there. It will help you enormously if you spend maybe a few weeks learning basic puddle/heat/arc control with stick before moving on to TIG. You certainly don't need to take the time to become a master stick welder, but getting a solid grasp on that first will undoubtedly help to ease the learning curve with TIG.

But either way, start running beads with something. No amount of typing will help you become a proficient welder if you aren't running beads. Hood down. Arc lit. Post pics.

The host of this website has a number of youtube videos on welding. He has a series about the basics of learning TIG. Watching those videos, and then watching them a second time, will be your best bet for trying to learn TIG on your own.
By the way, welcome to the forum.

Lots of folks here started out with a tig welder and do just fine. Yes, it's possible. I don't really find any method considerably easier than the next. TIG's biggest difficulty in my opinion, is all the parts and pieces to know and deal with. I don't really find the process difficult, and I've had loads of people try it on my welder for the very first time (of ANY welding) and do ok.

I always tell people not to be afraid to try anything.

BugHunter wrote:Lots of folks here started out with a tig welder and do just fine. Yes, it's possible. I don't really find any method considerably easier than the next. TIG's biggest difficulty in my opinion, is all the parts and pieces to know and deal with. I don't really find the process difficult, and I've had loads of people try it on my welder for the very first time (of ANY welding) and do ok.

It’s not a “difficult” process, especially if you have a modicum of competence with the other processes. Or no experience to measure against. Such is not the case with OP who stated he struggles with Stick and MIG. It would be a small miracle if he were able to self-teach TIG with far better results. That was the point of the responses to the “negative” side.

But you are right, no harm in trying. Just don’t expect results that differ is my advice.

I know a lot of people who went straight with tig and are perfectly capable. I'd say go for it. If its too hard, then learn stick and then go back to tig. Keep working at it and you'll be proficient over time.

I disagree with the idea you need to know either of the other two processes to learn tig. However what I will say is if you've tried and failed to learn how to mig weld let alone stick weld then your odds of learning how to tig weld competently are slim at best. The reason in my mind that stick welding is the best process to learn first is due to stick welding requiring at least the bare minimum level of competency in all the skills the other two require.

I wouldn't suggest someone go out and buy a TIG welder as the first experiment, but you already have a machine available, so it's really a different scenario.

Lots of people learned how to gas torch weld as a first process, and TIG shares a lot of similarities, so I don't think it's an impossible task. If nothing else, with TIG is far easier to see what you're doing compared with stick or MIG, and even the videos of TIG offer a much clearer view of what's happening.

Watch some of Jody's videos, get some metal clean, clean, clean and then just get an arc started and a puddle going...everything will build off of that.

What kind of welding? Functional? Decorative? Nuclear plant? Or all 3?
I've done stick, gas, flux core, and tig. By me, TIG is the easiest, similar to soldering or brazing.
My only problem was getting my fingers to feed the wire without thinking about it, but after 10-20 hours of practice it became automatic.
Jodie's videos fer sure!
Good luck!

cj737 wrote:It’s not a “difficult” process, especially if you have a modicum of competence with the other processes. Or no experience to measure against. Such is not the case with OP who stated he struggles with Stick and MIG. It would be a small miracle if he were able to self-teach TIG with far better results. That was the point of the responses to the “negative” side.

But you are right, no harm in trying. Just don’t expect results that differ is my advice.

I get the skepticism to a degree, but I still prefer to encourage people to try stuff. I mean, nobody doing this has any divine grace, they're just people. And for any of us, the first time we tried it, we'd never done it before! (ie: Everybody starts somewhere).

With stick I can see how a person might have difficulties, and I'd actually be willing to say MIG is more difficult than TIG, especially with an entry level machine. Many of the cheapo MIGs people use are 100% analog and have no scales whatsoever for the settings. It's 1-10... Both on voltage and wire feed. The controls aren't even linear, so in the event someone actually knows the range of values 1-10, they're still handcuffed on what the settings are. It's no small wonder people have a terrible time getting a MIG welder making a decent bead. Furthermore, when they first start out, they think "Wire is wire", and never give any consideration to the diameter of wire they're running for the particular application or even what alloy the wire is.

At a minimum, I would say all 3 processes are equally difficult, just in different ways. They all require learning, and there's a lot of subtle motor skills and "feel" to the processes. Of all the people I've seen give up on welding, I'd say most of em gave up very early on with some crappy welder, and really quit due to welding-101 level issues they were unable to troubleshoot. But if they'd asked for assistance, probably would have done just fine.

i still like the stick for starting of with.
only one control to mess with. as long as you get some run on everything rods its pretty straight forward.
no gas issues to worry about.
only doing one thing, no feeding rod or working pedals.

if you give it up, its only cost you a cheap stick machine, helmet and a few basic tools.
if you go on to other processors you still have it for those odd jobs. its not like its going to be wasted.

the other thing to is when you start you have an idea on what you want to do, but once you get into it that all changes.
i never really planned to have tig machine, let alone end up with two ac/dc machines. my mig gets very very little use.

tweake wrote:i still like the stick for starting of with.
only one control to mess with. as long as you get some run on everything rods its pretty straight forward.
no gas issues to worry about.
only doing one thing, no feeding rod or working pedals.

if you give it up, its only cost you a cheap stick machine, helmet and a few basic tools.
if you go on to other processors you still have it for those odd jobs. its not like its going to be wasted.

the other thing to is when you start you have an idea on what you want to do, but once you get into it that all changes.
i never really planned to have tig machine, let alone end up with two ac/dc machines. my mig gets very very little use.

The difference is he already has a TIG machine at work so he doesn't have to buy anything. Heck, since it's for work they might even let him practice on the clock when it's convenient.

It sure seems like a no-brainer for him to give it a try.

G-ManBart wrote:
The difference is he already has a TIG machine at work so he doesn't have to buy anything. Heck, since it's for work they might even let him practice on the clock when it's convenient.

It sure seems like a no-brainer for him to give it a try.

a lot of tigs have a stick mode.

tweake wrote:

G-ManBart wrote:
The difference is he already has a TIG machine at work so he doesn't have to buy anything. Heck, since it's for work they might even let him practice on the clock when it's convenient.

It sure seems like a no-brainer for him to give it a try.

a lot of tigs have a stick mode.

Sure, but he didn't say "we have a TIG machine with stick leads" or anything along those lines, so we don't know if that's an option.

Even though I learned stick before TIG I don't think stick skills translate very well to TIG at all...different in almost every way that matters.

People are making this into some big, complex thing when it really isn't. In just the past year (people with time during the pandemic) two friends purchased TIG welders as their first welders, and got decent results right off the bat without any prior experience and nobody looking over their shoulder. I don't think that's terribly uncommon.

tweake wrote:

G-ManBart wrote:
The difference is he already has a TIG machine at work so he doesn't have to buy anything. Heck, since it's for work they might even let him practice on the clock when it's convenient.

It sure seems like a no-brainer for him to give it a try.

a lot of tigs have a stick mode.

Sure, but he didn't say "we have a TIG machine with stick leads" or anything along those lines, so we don't know if that's an option.

Even though I learned stick before TIG I don't think stick skills translate very well to TIG at all...different in almost every way that matters.

People are making this into some big, complex thing when it really isn't. In just the past year (people with time during the pandemic) two friends purchased TIG welders as their first welders, and got decent results right off the bat without any prior experience and nobody looking over their shoulder. I don't think that's terribly uncommon.

I learned on my own through Jody's videos and others. And heck of alot of time under the hood doing all sorts of things.

I still learn all new stuff all the time and the muscle memory isn't quite perfect yet but progress is being made.


I already had the gear at work and the boss had no complaints with me picking it up and practicing since the old operator retired.

Just go for it I say. Watch a basic safety video of you need to and give er.

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