First attempt, but can't get good penetration.

[YorkshireKev]

Hi,

I finally got to have a practice with my mig welder

As you can see from the pics below, the weld does not go fully through to the other side. I've tried it on full power and just holding the torch in one place.

The sheet metal is 2mm thick and I was using co2 gas and 0.6mm wire.
My welder is a Clarke 151TE.
Most of the welds were done with the welder set to max-2 and wire speed 5.

Any idea's as to what I'm doing wrong?

Any advice would be gratefully appreciated.

Thanks,
Kev.

Front:

Back:

 

[madkayaker]

you need more gas on the weld to prevent the brown stain and O2 getting into the weld pool. the penatration looks OK on a couple of the welds how good a condition is the earth clamp?

 

[shenion]

Straight CO2 does not like fast wire speeds. With 0.6mm wire, the speed will need to be high on 2mm steel.

Argon/CO2 mix will allow a higher current/wire speed.

Simplest will be to use 0.8mm wire. You will get about twice the current/heat input.

 

[ian of fev]

looks to me like your wire feed is to slow try to up the feed this might help

 

[YorkshireKev]

Thanks for the feedback.

I did try faster wire speeds up to 7 but this just seemed to make it spatter a fair bit (hmm, maybe I was going too slow?).

So tomorrow I'll try 0.8mm wire and a bit more gas...

 

[YorkshireKev]

Have changed the wire to 0.8, but not had chance to have another practice (I have to empty the garage first!)

But while I was changing the wire I put a volt meter on the earth and torch because I'd read on another post that the power settings in the clarke manuals could be wrong...

My test confirms that the manual for my model is indeed wrong in saying the order is min 1, min2, min3, max1, max2, max3.

My tests show:
min 1 - 19.0v
max 1 - 21.0v
min 2 - 23.3v
max 2 - 26.0v
min 3 - 29.9v
max 3 - 34.6v

This is for a Clarke 151TE, in case that helps anyone.

Kev.