Welding Tips and Tricks

well I knew this day was going to come, getting discouraged. haven't given up because it was just a bad night ill get it.
On the brighter side my Chinese machine still works incredibly well

brokeitagain wrote:well I knew this day was going to come, getting discouraged. haven't given up because it was just a bad night ill get it.
On the brighter side my Chinese machine still works incredibly well

If it was easy, everyone would do it.

Hang in there.

Steve S

Why quit now? It is easy to get discouraged when you watch Jody's videos and see the results of many of the members of this site but you need to realize they have many years of experience. They make it look easy. TIG welding takes a lot of skills to do right and it takes practice, practice, practice to consistent good results. I to get discouraged but then look back on the progress I have made. Whenever I have a welding project, I practice running some beads on some scrap metal. I put the date on the last practice part then put it in my scrap bin. When I get discouraged, I pull out a sample of my work from weeks or months ago which confirms the progress I am making. Hang in there and keep practicing. Since I travel a lot for work and don't get to weld a smuch as I like to, I made up a checklist to remind me of things to pay attention to such as torch angle, arc length, tungsten dia., electrode angle prep, gas flow, etc. so I don't have to relearn. Keep practicing and hang in there.

Jim

NYWELDERJim wrote: I to get discouraged but then look back on the progress I have made. Whenever I have a welding project, I practice running some beads on some scrap metal. I put the date on the last practice part then put it in my scrap bin. When I get discouraged, I pull out a sample of my work from weeks or months ago which confirms the progress I am making.

I like the dating your practice pieces idea! You can almost start a "photo album" of your welds as you progress. This would be a great learning tool.
-Jonathan

When I have achieved some really nice results (at least nice for me) I hang them on the peg board above my welding table to serve as an encouragement. I recently got the "stack of dimes" look on some luminum practice parts so that piece serves as excellent encouragement.

Jim

The welder that I use at home spent most of it's life at my Dad's house where I grew up. I bought this welder in 1982 at an auction and it was like new. I knew how to stick and Oxy-Act weld fairly well but had no idea how to tig weld, there was no such thing as a welding forum to scan and what little advise I could find came from a neighbor who was an excelent welder but a horrible teacher. I kept a notepad on the top of the welder and wrote down what worked and what didn't. Trust me when I tell you there was way more pages of what didn't than what did.

I worked that fall with a friend tearing down an old steel mill and found in a steamfitters locker a box with I'm guessing 200 peices of tungsten of all lengths and I had no clue that you needed different colors for different metals. If I happened on to a peice of pure and it balled up I would take it out and try another and I put those all in a seperate coffee can. When I found out that they were used for Aluminum I thought I hit the lottery.

The point of this story is even with the fact that I knew how to gas weld with the best of them it still took me four years to get good with a Tig torch. Now I'm not talking about welding everyday for four years, but pretty often. I could have easily given up and just had my neighbor weld anything that needed to be Tig welded and he was the kind of guy who would gladly do it for free.

You can't learn to weld watching videos anymore than you can mail someone a haircut. If you don't have your face stuck in a welding helmet practicing every chance you get you'll never be a great welder, sorry. You have to put in the facetime on the backside of that helmet. Like Steve said if it was easy everybody would be a welder and there would be no need to pay us to do it.

One last thing. Anybody who has never been disappointed has set their goals way too low.

Len

I am certainly not going to give up, I rolled my Millermatic 175 over to the table yesterday and put down some really nice welds to remind myself what I am capable of, that machine has got to be the best $300 I ever spent.
I switched my 3in1 machine to stick and burned a few rods with that too, I still got that going good for me lol. I suppose those Chinese machines aren't all that bad for learning, I think I might pull the cover off and get some internal pics and write a review of the machine