Welding Tips and Tricks

Working on customer built roll cage that was mig welded but he had a lot of starts on each weld and it doesn't look great. I would like to grind the majority of the weld down and then put a tig pass over the top. Would that be OK. I sure don't want to have to remove and replace the tubes. Any suggestions? was mig welded with 70S6

You might be able to wash walk over the top of the mig weld with the tig torch to even it out without grinding. I'd clean it up with a wire wheel first. If the mig weld has contamination throughout you might have to grind the lot out before successfully tig welding.

Be prepared for lots of headaches.contamination will boil out as you weld like on cast if there are impurities. You have to grind out the spots as they boil out and then go over them again sometimes 4 or 5 times.This is ok if your repairing just a few joints but if your doing almost all of them then you might want to start over or grind them all the way out first.

Unfortunately you might be trying to polish a turd. Never fun when they ask for help AFTER they already effd it up. It's faster and easier to just start over and do it right the first time.

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vernd wrote:Working on customer built roll cage that was mig welded but he had a lot of starts on each weld and it doesn't look great. I would like to grind the majority of the weld down and then put a tig pass over the top. Would that be OK. I sure don't want to have to remove and replace the tubes. Any suggestions? was mig welded with 70S6

First off, grinding marks on the tubes are an automatic safety fail in most racing series. You can grind out just the weld and be fine but don't touch the tubes beside the weld at all. Frankly, I wouldn't touch them since there will be padding all over the cage anyway but If you really care about the aesthetics, you could just remelt with tig using pulse and it will make it look a lot better.

-Sandow

Tig welding over mig or stick welds will prove to give you a very dirty puddle. I wouldn't suggest it. And if you have to grind them all down and re-weld you'd be saving yourself a lot of time and money to redo it.