Welding Tips and Tricks

A friend of mine and I were talking tig welding and he mentioned that if only there was a #10 cup that would work with a non-large gas-lens collet body, but rather standard #9/20 parts including teflon gasket insulator. Well, I had done this previously with my 24-series water cooled torch: I added stainless steel mesh screens inside the #6 alumina cup to make a sort-of gas lens, like so:

Mesh screens on 24 torch



So what I did was punch out some SS mesh screen into 5/8" diameter circles (three of them), and formed (4) rings from some 0.035" 316L tig rod I had laying around. This way, the 3 screens would be firmly sandwiched by the SS rings in this order: Ring-Mesh-Ring-Mesh-Ring-Mesh-Ring.



I used a short piece of tubing I had laying around to push the rings and mesh all the way down, right before the tip of the collet body.


Here is the first inserted ring into the cup. The ring stays in place due to it being opened up larger than the hole size, so when squeezed in, it's own outward tension holds it in place.


Mesh screen going in. The hole has to be custom made for whatever tungsten is to be used, which in my case was a 1/16" tungsten.


First screen pushed down to meet the first support ring


Continue the order, and voila, a nice compact gas lens that works with standard 9/20 consumables. Costs pennies to make. Typing out this post took longer than it took me to make that pseudo-gas lens. :laugh:



Notes:

• I am not saying you should do this.
• Nor am I saying that this is in any way better than any other setup.
• This is just something that I did for a friend and myself, that I wanted to document and display, nothing more, nothing less.

Thanks for reading.

Crafty.

I'd be interested in seeing a comparison with this and a regular gas lens. Perhaps a bead on stainless comparing your gas lens with one more commonly used.

I doubt there would be much of a difference. I simply copied what a standard gas lens has, which is a few mesh screens and some rings to keep everything in place (usually). Only difference is this was cheaper.

I'll clean up some pieces of 304 SS tubing and see what I can find. On mild steel it does well (as well as my newbie tig welding skills allow, LOL).

Nice work man.

Where'd ya get that Stainless screen? And the rings?

I was trying out a few similar ideas and couldn't find any, but I didn't scour the earth very hard either.

Looks like a great cheap way out of buying a bunch of new parts.

newschoppafowah wrote:Nice work man.

Where'd ya get that Stainless screen? And the rings?

I was trying out a few similar ideas and couldn't find any, but I didn't scour the earth very hard either.

Looks like a great cheap way out of buying a bunch of new parts.

formed (4) rings from some 0.035" 316L tig rod I had laying around.

the stainless screen I found on ebay, #60 mesh. Ebay/Amazon are my usual "go to" places to find out if stuff even exists, lol.

I actually have proper gas lenses in all styles and sizes including pyrex ones, so this wasn't really a way to cheap-out; more like a way to get a #10 gas lens without using an actual large gas lens collet body that is ~1" in diameter and requires much longer cup, since the small gas lens for a 9/20 torch only has a #8 cup as the biggest cup you can usually find.