Welding Tips and Tricks

I need to learn to weld Aluminum so I can make some small metal parts for the (fiberglass) boat I'm building. Never welded before in my life, bought up a Miller Diversion 180 on Thursday and sat down this evening for a couple hours to give it a whirl. I basically followed Jody's advice about just running bead after bead in order to get "seat time". This welding was done on 6061 1/8" Al, with 3/32" 4043 filler, 3/32" ceriated tungsten (sharpened on my DA sander with a 40 grit paper), #7 cup, 15cfh 100% argon, with amperage varying from 60 (way too low) to 110 (seemed more than enough, in fact had to back off occasionally because it was relatively easy at that level to melt thru if I stayed in one place). I probably contaminated my tungsten at least 6-7 times but oh well that's how you learn.

First welds in my life ever (not so good, unsurprisingly - mostly didn't have enough amps, too nervous to really give it the gas):



Getting there:



And this is where I quit for the day:



My "welding table" clearly is not the best, but hey it was cheap .

As a noob, I was surprised to see how sensitive you have to be to how much the metal has been heated up...the very first bead on a cold piece of metal behaves a lot differently than the tenth bead in a row.

Anyway, just thought I'd share. I plan to build a welding cart first (using the plans that came with my welder) before tackling anything super important. Thank you Jody for the great web site.

thx,
Jay

I must say, you are catching on fast. You can definitely see a remarkable improvement from start to finish. You are definitely right about the weld pool acting differently from a cold piece to a hot piece. That it what it is all about, Heat Control. I would recommend one thing though, if you are using a standard collet body switch to a gas lens instead. Can save you some headache in the future. By the way, noticed the LS-17 torch. How do you like it? Is the remote amp control easy for you to adjust? Just curious.

Thank you Jim.

I thought I had done my research, but i hadn't noticed much about gas lenses. Will take a look at them - doesn't appear at first glance like you can lose anything by trying one out.

On the remote control: my welder came with a foot control, but I honestly had every intention of not using it, thinking that learning to weld with just the fingertip control would be more flexible in the long run. Trying to weld for the first time though, I found myself fumbling around trying to make my torch hand do the right thing. So I gave up, plugged in the foot control, and felt immediately more comfortable and productive. I guess I can't really comment much on the remote amp control beyond that.

Jay

You are right about the foot pedal being more comfortable. It definitely is. But you should get to be good at using both. It will come in handy some days.
Check out this web page http://www.weldcraft.com/2008/01/gas-le ... s-for-tig/