Chipmonk
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- Teesside
My dad has been encouraging me to learn to weld. So I just bought a Simder 4050 Pro with the idea of building a garden table. I watched hours of reviews of different brands, but this seemed like a good deal, since it has a plasma cutter built in and I already had a compressor*.
* Except I didn't, mine was for airbrushing and, well, it turns out that PSI isn't the only thing you need to check when matching air-pushing requirements! CFM is vital! 65 psi @ 5.5 CFM (or above) is where you should be for plasma cutting.
I bought some mild steel for practicing on, it was covered in mill-scale which I ground off. I searched Amazon for some '0.8mm fluxcore mig wire'. Lots of unpronouncable brands, so I got some Sealey stuff that was on the cheaper side, but not the cheapest. I thought about getting some 3rd party torches, but figured I'd try the ones it came with first.
Sunny Saturday afternoon, I got set up in the garden, got all the PPE and double checked my facts, pressed the button and ZAP! Ignition! Looking good! Spent the entire weekend running beads on some 3mm mild flat bar, but nothing NOTHING worked. Everything I laid down was sitting on top of the bar, like a metal caterpillar. I knew I had to dial it in, so I went from the suggested values to values I'd seen on videos of people doing similar things. I tried values that were way off/too hot just in case. I went up and down the dials, trying to find anything that looked like a decent pool of molten metal, but all I got was big bubbles that just got bigger. So I created a spreadsheet of all the amps (wirefeed is linked, can't be changed separately) and all the volts values, and worked my way through them, doing 10cm runs all over this 1m flat bar, top and bottom, filled the whole thing up, ground bits down and tried again. I started to realise I'd bought a dud, but figured I should exhaust all possibilities first.
100 beads later, I am *absolutely* positive that nothing I'm changing is making anything more than a tiny difference. I've checked electrodes (DCEN, electrode negative - check! - also tried positive, in case it was wired wrong), input power: 13A 240V, check, ground wire connected nearby on clean metal, wire feed clamp pressure: tried loosening it and tightening it, made sure it was slipping under moderate pressure, it was. I cleaned the metal with some new mesh fibre strip discs (so good!), then wiped up with isopropyl, stuff was bright and shiny. I spent 4 or 5 hours perfecting my technique, making sure I was watching the arc length, the movement speed, the distance to the workpiece; it was hard trying to stand still and move deliberately while sweating in 30C, but I felt like I was close enough for the most part.
At 7pm on Sunday evening, I gave up, I just sat watching youtube videos of people doing gasless mig welds and showing bad examples, trying to spot things that looked as bad as mine. All the ones that did suggested things I'd already tried (polarity, mostly). I used AI to give me suggestions, but that just regurgitated the same stuff I'd read on forums like this, and seen on videos already. But one of them suggested I buy better wire. So I did. I bought a kilo of Yeswelder 0.8mm, replaced with Sealey stuff with it (bloomin stuff got loose switching it over, lost about 10m to clumsiness) and then tried another bead.
INSTANT results. The metal gave way like the red sea's slutty sister, my gruelling 48-hour montage of sweat and tears had turned me into a not-quite-completely-useless novice and it was a thing of beauty. I called my dad to tell him I'd solved it and to share my concise and terse views on Sealey's quality control. Whereupon he asked: "are you sure it was fluxcore?". I said 'yes, of course, I searched for '0.8mm fluxcore mig wire' and it was one of the top results. I hadn't even finished the sentence before I was checking the spool I'd taken off.
You guessed it. It wasn't gasless. It was just plain mig wire. Copper coated. Dead giveaway, apparently. FML.
The sky was already blue, so it didn't change much. I'll apologise to the neighbours later. I should have known better, though. [Deleted a lot of obfuscated swearing here - all aimed at Amazon for their lax categorisation]
Oh well, I should have checked. The debugging process taught me more about welding in 48 hours than I would have learned otherwise and I'll be a better, safer welder for it. Mistakes were made, lessons were learned. Got a nice sun-tan on my elbows, too.
Looking forward to this rain stopping so I can get back out there.
TLDR/CliffNotes: "Asked for Fluxcore, sold MIG wire, didn't notice until after 12 hours of welding and experimentation. Lessons learned almost made it worth it."
* Except I didn't, mine was for airbrushing and, well, it turns out that PSI isn't the only thing you need to check when matching air-pushing requirements! CFM is vital! 65 psi @ 5.5 CFM (or above) is where you should be for plasma cutting.
I bought some mild steel for practicing on, it was covered in mill-scale which I ground off. I searched Amazon for some '0.8mm fluxcore mig wire'. Lots of unpronouncable brands, so I got some Sealey stuff that was on the cheaper side, but not the cheapest. I thought about getting some 3rd party torches, but figured I'd try the ones it came with first.
Sunny Saturday afternoon, I got set up in the garden, got all the PPE and double checked my facts, pressed the button and ZAP! Ignition! Looking good! Spent the entire weekend running beads on some 3mm mild flat bar, but nothing NOTHING worked. Everything I laid down was sitting on top of the bar, like a metal caterpillar. I knew I had to dial it in, so I went from the suggested values to values I'd seen on videos of people doing similar things. I tried values that were way off/too hot just in case. I went up and down the dials, trying to find anything that looked like a decent pool of molten metal, but all I got was big bubbles that just got bigger. So I created a spreadsheet of all the amps (wirefeed is linked, can't be changed separately) and all the volts values, and worked my way through them, doing 10cm runs all over this 1m flat bar, top and bottom, filled the whole thing up, ground bits down and tried again. I started to realise I'd bought a dud, but figured I should exhaust all possibilities first.
100 beads later, I am *absolutely* positive that nothing I'm changing is making anything more than a tiny difference. I've checked electrodes (DCEN, electrode negative - check! - also tried positive, in case it was wired wrong), input power: 13A 240V, check, ground wire connected nearby on clean metal, wire feed clamp pressure: tried loosening it and tightening it, made sure it was slipping under moderate pressure, it was. I cleaned the metal with some new mesh fibre strip discs (so good!), then wiped up with isopropyl, stuff was bright and shiny. I spent 4 or 5 hours perfecting my technique, making sure I was watching the arc length, the movement speed, the distance to the workpiece; it was hard trying to stand still and move deliberately while sweating in 30C, but I felt like I was close enough for the most part.
At 7pm on Sunday evening, I gave up, I just sat watching youtube videos of people doing gasless mig welds and showing bad examples, trying to spot things that looked as bad as mine. All the ones that did suggested things I'd already tried (polarity, mostly). I used AI to give me suggestions, but that just regurgitated the same stuff I'd read on forums like this, and seen on videos already. But one of them suggested I buy better wire. So I did. I bought a kilo of Yeswelder 0.8mm, replaced with Sealey stuff with it (bloomin stuff got loose switching it over, lost about 10m to clumsiness) and then tried another bead.
INSTANT results. The metal gave way like the red sea's slutty sister, my gruelling 48-hour montage of sweat and tears had turned me into a not-quite-completely-useless novice and it was a thing of beauty. I called my dad to tell him I'd solved it and to share my concise and terse views on Sealey's quality control. Whereupon he asked: "are you sure it was fluxcore?". I said 'yes, of course, I searched for '0.8mm fluxcore mig wire' and it was one of the top results. I hadn't even finished the sentence before I was checking the spool I'd taken off.
You guessed it. It wasn't gasless. It was just plain mig wire. Copper coated. Dead giveaway, apparently. FML.
The sky was already blue, so it didn't change much. I'll apologise to the neighbours later. I should have known better, though. [Deleted a lot of obfuscated swearing here - all aimed at Amazon for their lax categorisation]
Oh well, I should have checked. The debugging process taught me more about welding in 48 hours than I would have learned otherwise and I'll be a better, safer welder for it. Mistakes were made, lessons were learned. Got a nice sun-tan on my elbows, too.
Looking forward to this rain stopping so I can get back out there.
TLDR/CliffNotes: "Asked for Fluxcore, sold MIG wire, didn't notice until after 12 hours of welding and experimentation. Lessons learned almost made it worth it."
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