Welding Tips and Tricks

Ok, just trying to add a bit of something here. I make no claims that this is a great project or anything, but I always like seeing stuff people build. So I figured I'd add to the mix.

I keep a mixed pile of stuff to have a stock around my shop. Most of the smaller stuff is in some wooden boxes I have on a shelf under one of the benches but the longer material was sort of piled in a corner. It was always spilling out onto the floor and was just generally hard to pick through and in the way.

So using stuff I had in that pile, I made this goofy little stock rack. Most all of the material came from the remains of a set of aluminum crutches that I pulled from the trash someplace. No idea what the alloy is but I tried a few test welds on some scrap pieces and it seemed to weld OK. These aren't really mission critical welds (none of my welds are, thankfully...) so good enough for me.

I'll spare you closeups of my welds so as not to make any of you ill, but in any case the thing is stuck together. I used the aluminum tube just because I had it and it was not useful for much else. I gave me some practice on welding aluminum and on welding tube joints. I was reminded how critical it is to have the joints CLEAN before you try to weld them. I also learned that welding tube joints is some sort of magical thing that I have zero magic for. The only magic thing that I had going on was the magical attraction for my tungsten to find the puddle. Over and over. And over. So I got lots of electrode grinding practice in as well.

I considered just buying some square steel tube to make this but sometimes it's fun and a good exercise to try to make something just using what I have on hand. It makes you use your brain a bit and you never know exactly where you end up, which is part of the fun.

My stuff is now off the floor and roughly sorted by the type of material. It's a lot easier to pick through to find what I want.

My apologies for the sideways photos. Not sure why they show up that way on the post, they are correctly oriented on my computer...

I was about to say, that sideways rack won't hold much, lol! Looks good!

Good deal, it's a new year so time to shape up!! figuratively you got rid of the crutches in your life and moving forward free from its bondage...

Oscar wrote:I was about to say, that sideways rack won't hold much, lol! Looks good!

Thank you!

And yes, I found the house is much easier to live in now that I turned it back with the floors on the bottom!

LtBadd wrote:Good deal, it's a new year so time to shape up!! figuratively you got rid of the crutches in your life and moving forward free from its bondage...

That's why I like coming to this forum. So much profound life insight from just a simple welding project!

And thanks. This is just another small step in a general clean up thing I have been on. My job for the past 8+ years had me traveling a lot so my shop in particular would get very out of control during the times I was at home. I'm not a super neatnick to start with, but this made it much worse. A few months back I changed jobs to something much less demanding and no travel. So I have been working towards getting things a bit better managed. Baby steps.

Lookin good, Mr. And the terms "recycle" and "baby steps" certainly comes into all of our lives. Keep on keepin on.

I watched a netflix thing yesterday called The Minimalists... It was about how getting rid of all your stuff would make you happier. LMAO. I watched with an open mind, then concluded there's no way a person who likes to do as much stuff as I do, can ever get rid of all the 'stuff'.

The rack looks great to me. And ifyou're not happy with the look of the welds close up, aluminum is really easy to go back and fix up. If it was dirty, spray it with water from a squirt bottle and use a carbide burr to remove most of the weld metal along with ALL of the dirt that boiled out, then go back and lay a bead over it again.

If you're dipping in the puddle (more likely you were touching the filler to the tungsten), use less stick-out. Less stick out will give you a wider puddle and smoother finish. From what it looks in the pic, you might have benefited from not 'quite' as tight an arc. I know everyone always says 'keep a tight arc', but there's a limit.

If you are sharpening the tungsten more or less to a point, it makes it nearly impossible to see the end of it and know where you are. So you should really blunt that if you're doing aluminum and want to stay in close. Especially for inside corners which was 90% of what you were doing. With aluminum you tend to add way more filler, so I like to say "The tide is going in and out more often". Meaning, the puddle gets shallow then deeper a lot more than with steel. So if you're too close, when the tide comes in, you're more likely to dip. And that's especially true if you don't have a nicely balled tungsten.

BugHunter, thanks for the detailed reply.

Yeah, I don't get the whole "minimalist" thing really. I understand there are people that who hoard actual rubbish and all that, but getting rid of everything you have just for the sake of doing so seems odd to me.

I imagine I am a lot like most people here, I tend be interested in lots of different things. So I have a fair amount of stuff to support those interests. It works for me. My stuff does not stress me out, I very much enjoy it!

As for the rack, it's plenty fine for what it needs to be. The welds are actually pretty strong, they are not at all pretty though. The biggest issue with the welds is that they just show a lack of developed skill on my part. Part of the reason I used that material is that it was an excuse to practice some. The material was cleaned well (an aluminum only flap disk and then acetone wipe) and actually looked pretty OK when I ran a few test beads down the side on some scrap tube. It's the funny torch angles you get into doing the fishmouth joints that kept messing with me.

You are correct, it was maybe 50/50 actually dipping the tungsten and jabbing it with the filler. My electrode was pointed, but a pretty shallow point angle. Sounds like I should experiment some more with that. I did have the tungsten sticking out a fair bit, perhaps I'll try a bit less as you advise.

I need to get a refill on my argon bottle, once I get that I will use up the rest of the scraps of that tubing trying out some of what you suggest. I had not done much welding for a while so am pretty out of the groove.

I really appreciate you (and the other replies) taking the time to send such a detailed reply, it's most helpful.

Keep in mind that using old aluminum can be very difficult.

I'll give you an example. Billy Dee stopped by my shop with some very old aluminum square tubing. I'm talking stuff that had set outside for some years. It didn't look overly dirty, but it was heavily oxidized. He asked me to give it a try because he was unable to weld the stuff. On certain places it looked like it could puddle up but for the most part it would just melt away the tubing before you would ever get it to wet the surface.

I bet we messed with it for nearly a half hour that I wasn't even certain it was a weldable alloy. I used brushes and acid cleaner and all kinds of stuff before finally using a fiber wheel at which point it finally cleaned up and mechanically removed the surface so it would wet out and we could butt weld two pieces lengthwise.

It was the first time that I could even remember welding aluminum that had been exposed to weather for a long time. I weld loads of aluminum but it's all reasonably new material or something that was stored indoors. This was 3/4 inch 16 gauge square material that would have been a slam dunk to weld if it was new stuff, but certainly not easy when it had sat out doors so long.

We did some ugly welds on that stuff till we figured out how much cleaning it actually needed.

Thank you BugHunter, I really appreciate all of the commentary and input.

hey buggy,,,,that material was also exposed to some LN2 and essence of bull manure. haven't used it for much of anything since I had it out there.

Well, I know it had both of us scratching our heads wondering, what IS this stuff! I've never seen anything like it. Whatever was on the surface, it contaminated deep.