Aluminium

[hypertherm69]

Can you weld aluminium with a Oxford 330 with no option to reverse polarity? Obviously would need spool gun and argon gas, or would it be possible with a special liner. It only has two wheel drive and has 4meter torch on it.

 

[henry Kadzielski]

I will say 'YES' bit carefully

 

[Munkul]

Yes You don't reverse polarity for aluminium, only for flux core.

It's basically the same setup as for steel, except feeding the wire is trickier, and you work in spray transfer always.

You MIGHT struggle with a 2 wheel drive... only way to find out is to buy a small spool of wire and try it. It may "work" with a steel liner, but not for long, and not very well... a proper liner will help a lot. The main advantage of a proper liner, is that you'll trim it long, through the euro conection and right back to the feed rollers themselves. This is REALLY important if you want to have a good time.
You'll also need oversize tips... either the "A" designated ones, or the next size up... both will work. And you'll need a few of them... when they burn back, they're done. Forget about drilling them out, it just won't work.

Feeding aluminium is a game of incremental advantages... everything has to be scrupulously clean and set just right, but the better the feeder design, the easier it is to feed There's nothing more miserable than burning back tips every 300mm of weld!

 

[hotponyshoes]

It would work.
Problem is, its tricky to set up.
Ideally, you want some U groove rollers, a 3m torch (at least an mb25 size), a teflon liner, the correct tips (lots of them), a stainless steel wire brush and a bottle of pure argon and some alloy wire.
You need to fit the liner carefully and set the feed pressure correctly.

The smaller rolls of wire are a lot cheaper but don't feed so well on a 2 roller as the memory coils are tighter. If you have to buy an adaptor for them it may be just as cheap to buy a bigger roll.

Obviously all that lot adds up to a few quid but in my experience, any less and you will have so many problems you will soon give it up as a bad idea and end up wasting whatever money you do spend

 

[hotponyshoes]

Read the manual for your welder as well,
If there are any special parts like feeder tubes for alloy you would want to buy or make those as well.

edit, if you want to weld anything below 3 or 4mm you will also need some copper/stainless/etc offcuts to use as backing bars unless the oxford has pulse?
Above 4-5mm and you should be good without them but the price of the alloy itself gets expensive then

 

[hotponyshoes]

Ref, the spool gun,
That might well workout cheaper than buying the torch/liner/rollers.
I would try and find somebody who has set one up on the same welder as yours and see what sort of results they are getting from it.
You can use the little spools as well then.

 

[hypertherm69]

Suppose you could buy a small reel and some rollers and try that then if that fails get a spool gun and use em with that. Might just get a tig machine their is a Miller dialarc for sale near me for 350ish so that might be a better option

 

[Munkul]

TIG is much more flexible when it comes to aluminium Once you have a MIG and a AC/DC TIG both set up, you can weld practically any metal you ever want.

The dialarc is very old and without square wave and adjustable balance, it won't be as easy to use as a more modern set, but with a bit of practice it's possible to do some very nice work with them.

You'd definitely want TIG for 3mm sheets.

 

[Hood]

Spool gun is going to be better/easier but it will be more expensive, you are probably looking in the region of £700 for one. You do get cheaper spool guns that you can fit to welders but they are just a motor and have no control circuitry so unless your welder has a spool gun socket and internal circuitry then they won't be the best.

The type of spool gun to get is the one from TecArc with the inline control box, it means you can use on any welder that has a euro socket for the torch.

As has been said, for a proper weld in Alu you need to be in spray and that means 3mm upwards for material thickness and if sheet then 3mm is best avoided.

 

[Robert Mullins]

Aluminium with the mig can be/IS temperamental, you WILL need a soft wire liner from the welding contact tube through the euro connector and as close to the wire drive rollers as you can get it; there's a clamp and an '0' ring to be fitted within the screwed sleeve that locates and holds the wire liner: As previously posts have mentioned, 'A' marked, to designate them as aluminium welding contact tubes, or steel welding tubes one size up; the aluminium tubes have an oversized hole to allow for expansion, the one size over steel tip does the same; apparently the aluminium tube are a different alloy, but I don't actually know whether this is the case, but have used steel contact tubes with no adverse issues, maybe a welding engineer would know:
To 'nearly' overcome the issue of 'burning back' onto the tube, you need to trim the end of the welding wire EVERY TIME before you restart welding, not most times, nor sometimes, or if I can be bothered, BUT EVERY TIME!! Why this is so I don't know, but maybe annealing of the wire between the contact tube and weld pool, again, maybe a welding engineer will be able to tell us:
When I last welded aluminium with the mig, pure argon shielding gas, 19 litres a minute:
The lightest(thinnest) aluminium I've welded with the mig is 6/8mm upto 40mn, and it was/is always in spray transfer mode, in all positions: I have seen light sections welded via the mig, but the profile and general appearance is wrong, again, back to the welding engineers:
Personally, I loathe and despise aluminium mig welding, it drives me up the wall:

 

[hotponyshoes]

The tips visually look like the same material, no idea what they are actually made from though.
I'm sure binzel (probably others) offer them in various materials.
I buy the A ones, bags of 50 and I think they are the same price anyway.

I don't usually cut the wire back but then i do have post flow on the gas.
If you do not have post flow then maybe the hot wire would be oxidizing at the end of a weld. When you come to restart the poor contact might not arc so quickly causing the wire to heat so it then drops back to the tip once the arc strikes?
Or maybe the heat travels back up the wire once it stops moving causing it to expand and jam in the tip?
Whatever it is, post flow seems to stop it.
The only time I cut the end off is if the welder has not been used for a while then I remove the exposed bit before starting.

I don't actually mind the welding itself, it's the extra cleaning and the feed issues that annoy me!

 

[Hood]

....
Personally, I loathe and despise aluminium mig welding, it drives me up the wall:

That is all I use a MIG for and liked welding it but nowadays with the pulse mig I love doing it

 

[henry Kadzielski]

Unfortunately the right equipment makes all the difference. I have a Fronius TPS320i with a water cooled torch. I can weld 2m fillet runs (no stops) with the machine turned up from the normal 5mm synergic setting to improve travel speed, do start / stops and during the past boat build, completed the boat build with one tip and no feed issues. What can I say I love welding alli, especially now with "Francis"

 

[Robert Mullins]

We were building aluminium landing craft at VT at the Woolston yard in Southampton, we were trialed a fronius aluminium mig fitted with a push/pull wire drive system, the wire drive unit drive rollers pushed the wire, whilst the 'huge' torch incorporated another set of air driven (I think?) Drive rollers pulling the wire, the torch cable must have been about 35/40 ' long, you could have tied knots in that lead, coiled it in hoops and it would still feed with no issues whatsoever:
To-date, that welding plant has been the best piece of aluminium mig welding kit I have ever used

 

[hotponyshoes]

If the OP looks up the price of a fronius push-pull water-cooled torch you guys will put him off for life!
The guy was asking if you can use a oxford 330!

My basic answer, yes you can.
You won't get on very well if you just change the gas and wire so there is a bit of investment needed.

If you want to do any serious amount of it, do long runs or, alloy thinner than 3-4mm then tig or a more dedicated mig may be needed.

What jobs are you planning on doing OP?

 

[Hood]

I have been welding aluminium with Mig for more years than I care to remember, probably more than 30.
At first I just used a teflon liner and the welder was a Sterling 180. It worked ok for the most part but birds nests were common and frustrating and happened if you didn't keep the torch dead straight. The Sterling packed up but was under warranty so I took it to the repair place and they loaned me an Arcos 400 Amp with a separate wire feed unit, that was great for me as I didn't need to get the welder craned onto the boats, I could just take the wire feed unit. I traded in the Sterling for the Arcos and used that for many a year, still had the birds nests problem so then bought a spool gun, it came with a control board that you fitted inside the wire feed unit, it was a revelation and made life much easier especially as I never suffered the birds nests again but also because I had 8m of reach from the wire feed unit.
The Arcos eventually packed in and I bought a second hand Kemppi but that just lasted a few days before it blew up so I then bought a new Esab 405 which again had a separate wire feed unit, I also bought a new spool gun and this time it was the TecArc one with the inline control unit. I used the Esab up until about 5 years ago, that was when I bought the R-Tech MTS255S, I was getting older and the Esab was getting heavier (or so it seemed ) and the R-Tech was relatively light in comparison. It was supposed to be synergic but in reality the synergic lines were useless but in manual mode it was a nice wee welder.

My next move was on to a second hand EWM Phoenix pulse mig, fully synergic (and really worked) and a push-pull torch, the welder itself was what they call a compact, wire in machine and, although it wasn't as heavy as the Esab it was still a lump so I decided to get myself a new EWM Phoenix with a separate wire feed unit, it is what I use now and it is an amazing machine, it cost much more than I have ever spent on a machine but was worth it. I have now just bought a push-pull torch with control buttons and LCD screen at the torch, it cost getting on for half of what I paid for the whole welder but as I get more decrepit it becomes more useful.

Well after this long post with a load of crap I suppose what I am saying is I started off with a standard mig and a teflon liner and managed for at least 5 years to weld aluminium, it had its frustrations but it was doable but the spool gun changed things dramatically. So give it a go with the teflon liner and preferably U groove rollers and see how you get on. If you decide it is going to be worth it then get a spool gun.

 

[MCKDAVID]

agree with all of the above, a spool gun is definitely a better option. I bought @Hood old one, a tecarc SGS360. Great tool, used it for months, then had a problem with the batteries in the unit not recharging (old age), so sent it back to tecarc for a service, they replaced the batteries, and modified the unit with a push putton to recharge them directly which is really handy if you don't use it regularly. Price was very reasonable, and turn around excellent, so only praise for tecarc from me..

not necessarily cheap, but if you can find one second hand, it definitely makes life easier.

 

[fire hazzard]

Not long brought a rtech spool gun for little mtb jobs, used with a rtech mig 180. Paid £150 used from ebay it does everything I need it to do, but it its a lot of trial and error getting used to the settings. Pretty much like learning to weld all over again.

 

[Hood]

Not long brought a rtech spool gun for little mtb jobs, used with a rtech mig 180. Paid £150 used from ebay it does everything I need it to do, but it its a lot of trial and error getting used to the settings. Pretty much like learning to weld all over again.

I think the R-Tech have a socket for a spool gun which means they have inbuilt spool gun control circuitry and thus the cheaper spool guns work fine on them.