First mig welds - please can I get some feedback :)

[rossdagley]

Hi guys.

Thanks for all your assistance so far. I'm finally at the point where I can get some wire down on some sheet to practice and I'd love some feedback.

I've had a play with the settings on my mig, but it's very basic being a Sealey 100 (non-turbo) model. Just Hi/Low and Max/Min for either of those.

I really want to learn so am going on a course in October but I want to get a head start. I have a BOC Y argoshield light bottle, with the recommended dual gauge reg, all plumbed in. It's working well. So - all the gear, no idea now, hence needing your expert comments to help me improve!

Here are some photos showing my first real attempts. I tested on a scrap just to setup the line feed and gas flow, but these are the first actual beads I've tried to run ever so please don't be too harsh!

The runs were done from the outside edge of the plate towards in inside in order of attempts, so my first one is closest to the outside. I experimented only really with hand speed, keeping other settings the same, other than on run 4 where I went to max power. 5 I came back to the setting I'd used before. I noticed a LOT of heat going into the panel on that run - enough to turn the plate orange hot.

The only other thing I'd like advice on is I can sometimes see a "ball" of weld sort of climbing back up the wire every couple of seconds. It soon reattaches to the weld (kinda drops back when it reaches critical size) but it causes the only "cracking" noise in an otherwise quite smooth sounding weld. Is this caused by a setting, or something I'm doing?

thanks for reading this far - your input is greatly valued!

Weld on the right was first ever, leftmost the last attempt.

Trying to show weld height

Rear of plate.

Thanks all!

 

[madkayaker]

Seen a lot worse! Travel speed is maybe a bit slow as there seams to be decent penetration but they look alittle high but getting there

 

[ChrisJohnsSculpture]

Certainly not terrible for a first go. It looks like the main issue is that the power is a bit low so the weld isn;t hot enough to flow and penetrate properly. Notice how several of the beads are sort of sitting on the surface rather than lying flat on it.

This could also be caused by too much gas flow cooling the weld prematurely, about 10 LPM is a good starting point for MIG and adjust according to your results.

I also suspect that your wire speed may not be quite high enough, both from the welds themselves and your description of the wire burning back. If you can feel the wire pushing back on the torch the feed is too high, if it starts to burn back it's too low. When it;s spot on you should be able to hear a constant 'sizzling' like bacon frying. On some machines it needs quite a delicate adjustment to get it spot on.

Also when you practice it's good to have a few diffent pieces of scrap of the same thickness to work with, if you keep using the same piece it will get hotter and hotter which will affect the behaviours of the weld, making it harder to be consistent (you can see on teh back side that the later welds are getting much hotter than the earlier ones. . Use a few pieces and alternate to give each of them time to cool.

 

[rossdagley]

Thank you both - much appreciated.

I have been running about 10l/min on the gas, so suspect it's wire speed as you suggest. I'll have a fiddle again tomorrow. I think I might have had the wire speed low and the power down a bit, and been compensating by moving slower. I'll try speeding everything up a bit tomorrow.

Thanks for the advice regarding a few different test pieces too. I hope to post something better for you in the next few days!

 

[Wozzaaah]

God awful photos but from what I can see the welds look half decent.
The 'ball' climbing back up the wire means you're in that horrible globular transfer phase, most likely it is hissing when it does it?
As Chris says, your wire feed speed is too low. Try upping the wire feed speed until you just feel the torch being pushed away then back it off slowly until it stops. That should be the optimum wire feed speed for any of the voltage settings.