Jelly_Sheffield
Member
- Messages
- 129
- Location
- Sheffield, UK
In a continuation of "I really should get that MIG welder going again", I needed to weld some 27mm dia steel tubes to a piece of 40×3mm box section and 30×3mm flat plate and still only have the arc welder going.
I had the workpiece held in a vice, and was welding in PB/2F Horizontal/Vertical position.
Normally with MIG I'd get started at the back, work it about halfway round, then take a step to the side and carry on back to my start in a single fluid motion.
With Arc I was lucky if I could weld ⅓ of the way round before I inevitably cocked up the angle of my stinger and pushed slag into the pool.
Is there a knack to it that I'm missing? Or should I just accept my limitations and confine my Arc welding activities to long straight runs in thick plate where I'm actually vaguely competent.
Not the greatest pic to show the welds, but it highlights that they're messy and there's definitely slag inclusion issues around the restarts and stops.
Several rounds of gouging out sections with a cutting disk and re-welding plus some profiling of the final good welds with a grinder to avoid excessively large fillets sorted them out eventually but turned a job which would have been 15mins with the MIG into 2+ hours of cursing, chipping and reworking.
Admittedly, I probably didn't help myself welding something small and fiddly with 2.4mm electrodes (Magmaweld 6013, 67A, DCEP) but no matter what I tried, or how much I practiced on drops, I just couldn't get a consistent motion going with the stinger to maintain a good lead angle and avoid pushing slag into the weld pool.
I had the workpiece held in a vice, and was welding in PB/2F Horizontal/Vertical position.
Normally with MIG I'd get started at the back, work it about halfway round, then take a step to the side and carry on back to my start in a single fluid motion.
With Arc I was lucky if I could weld ⅓ of the way round before I inevitably cocked up the angle of my stinger and pushed slag into the pool.
Is there a knack to it that I'm missing? Or should I just accept my limitations and confine my Arc welding activities to long straight runs in thick plate where I'm actually vaguely competent.
Not the greatest pic to show the welds, but it highlights that they're messy and there's definitely slag inclusion issues around the restarts and stops.
Several rounds of gouging out sections with a cutting disk and re-welding plus some profiling of the final good welds with a grinder to avoid excessively large fillets sorted them out eventually but turned a job which would have been 15mins with the MIG into 2+ hours of cursing, chipping and reworking.
Admittedly, I probably didn't help myself welding something small and fiddly with 2.4mm electrodes (Magmaweld 6013, 67A, DCEP) but no matter what I tried, or how much I practiced on drops, I just couldn't get a consistent motion going with the stinger to maintain a good lead angle and avoid pushing slag into the weld pool.