OMG you guys TIG welding is so awesome!
I'm building a cart for my welder so I can move it around with the cylinder attached. I'm using some 1" x 1/8" thick square tubing that I have left over from another project. I have stick welded this stuff before, but I kind of hate it. I feel like I have to move fast to keep from burning through, but at the same time, the joints are only ever 1" at a time, so there's this tiny little target zone that I have to hit. And even with 3/32" electrodes, the resulting joints look like big ugly scars on that little tubing.
To top it all off, the sun was going down, and I had to get out a work light. I just cannot stick weld by work lights. Something about the shadows and depth perception and the halogen constantly setting off my auto-dark hood just adds up to I fall apart. I managed to tack everything up with 6011, and then I switched to 7018 to do the finish, and I just kept sticking the rod again and again. I got one terrible bead done and then hit a standstill. I checked the ground. I checked the tip of the rod for slag. I don't know what was wrong, because it was so dark I couldn't see what I was doing.
So I cussed a lot and then I went to the barn and said twenty Hail Mary's (actually, I was swearing) while grinding the mess I had made back to clean. While I was there, I got to thinking. I had decided to stick weld this project because I barely have an hour under the hood with the TIG torch, while I consider myself to be minimally competent with a stick welder, and I figured I would just make a mess of the thing with TIG. But as bad as things were going, I figured they could hardly get any worse, and if it came down to it, I'd just cut the thing up and use it for practice stock.
What a difference! The small stock was no problem for the TIG torch, of course. And instead of being 14" away from the joint, I was right in there so I could see what I was doing. Instead of having an arc and smoke plume obscuring everything, I could see the puddle forming, and every little thing it was doing. It was just beautiful. If I put in filler too soon, I could see it ball up and sit, and then I could see the puddle form and watch the filler wash in. I could really see the effect of different heat settings on the base metal. Once, I even saw the puddle starting to sag as I nearly burned through. It was just amazing being able to see every little thing that the arc and puddle were doing in the joint.
Wow. TIG is amazing.
A couple of pics are attached, 'cause I'm sure some people will like to see them. As flawed as they are, these are the best of the bunch. The outside corners are a little bit cheating, because I skipped the filler entirely and just used the torch to melt the edge together. On the flat joint, I had a small groove that I ground in with a cutoff wheel and then I basically just laid a 1/16" filler rod in the groove and washed over it with the torch. I still just make a total mess if I try to actually feed wire.
One of the most obvious problems I am having is breaking the arc without leaving a "bubble". I try doing what I've seen Jody do in his videos, where you wash back over the bead slightly while backing off the pedal, but it doesn't fix it.
