Welding Tips and Tricks

Practicing my titanium TIG welding. I'm a hobbyist, just toying around for now. I wanna give a shout out to Zank for his contribution to my titanium tig welding.

Looks like Zank's tips are paying off...


Kym

I have to weld some titanium at work from time to time. I usually have some color around the welds. I was wondering if that is bad and what problems it could cause.

big gear head wrote:I have to weld some titanium at work from time to time. I usually have some color around the welds. I was wondering if that is bad and what problems it could cause.

The straw and blue colors are due to the Ti not being shielded until it's cooled to 800F or less, if its gray or very dark blue then this is worse. If you're welding to a code or customer spec then they should say what is acceptable, usually a straw color would be accepted.

If the part is for a corrosive environment the contamination would effect the service life of the component.

Here is a chart form Miller's website.
https://www.millerwelds.com/resources/a ... -practices

The parts that I weld are used in acid. That is why they are made of titanium. I just get some straw and medium to light blue. Titanium does make some pretty welds and it flows very easily.

big gear head wrote:The parts that I weld are used in acid. That is why they are made of titanium. I just get some straw and medium to light blue. Titanium does make some pretty welds and it flows very easily.

Yea it's very easy to weld, the gas shielding is the big difference. I had some production Ti parts to weld that were thick enough I could weld these outside of an argon chamber, the thickness of the part drew the heat away quick enough that the gas lens provided all the shielding needed.

LtBadd wrote:

big gear head wrote: I had some production Ti parts to weld that were thick enough I could weld these outside of an argon chamber, the thickness of the part drew the heat away quick enough that the gas lens provided all the shielding needed.

That right there is what sucks about tig welding thin titanium tubing, in a sense. No where near enough metal mass surrounding the weld head that you have to have some kind of heat sinking if you wanna get anywhere in a reasonable amount of time.

I very recently welded Titanium for the first time. It was 1mm thick tubing for practice. The back side of the weld was purged (obviously) and I used a #18 gas lense. I got a tiny bit of color after my workpiece heat soaked a bit. For the most part I got a very light straw color. I found it disapates heat quickly and was allot easier to get a colourless weld.