- Welcome to another episode of "Weld.com."
We're gonna start a series on pipe-welding in all positions.
We're gonna start out with 2-inch schedule 80,
today is 5G.
My fit-up, or my prep, is to clean the inside of the pipe.
We have removed a little mill scale out here,
dressed up the bevel, and I put
maybe a thirty-second of land on it.
Doesn't need it, I could go with a little heavier land,
gap it open a little bit, there's all kinds of
variations of fit here, so I have
like a one-sixteenth gap, and I'm using
a three thirty-second filler wire.
I'm running off an Everlast 161 STH today.
I have it set to LiveArc, meaning this is electrically hot
all the time, as soon as I touch the grounded material
the gas comes on, amperage comes on.
I have this set at 105, I'm just leaving it.
Not running off a pedal or anything.
So as soon as I strike the arc we're going straight to 105.
And my attempt here, coming off the bottom,
is to strike the arc, lay the filler wire in there.
I kinda like to, since it has a one-sixteenth gap,
which is smaller than the filler wire,
I kinda like to just put that in there and start,
I like to roll the filler wire and kinda feel it,
feel that fluidity in there, and
watch the pool, watch the sides.
If I get in trouble, like a keyhole opens up,
I'll add more wire, try to keep going a little faster,
or maybe weave up onto the pipe while,
but again I'm just wanting to
run this route in here for now.
It goes pretty quick.
I think a lot of times people don't pay attention
to the tungsten angle and the rod angle,
so get yourself comfortable.
There's multiple ways to hold the torch.
Three fingers, two fingers, you can use your thumb.
Personally I kinda like to use my thumb
and come up here 'til I get about three o'clock,
set the cup in there, and walk it the rest of the way.
Let's hook a ground up, I'll get my hood on,
we'll get to it.
(sound of blowtorch, ambient crowd noises)
So, my attempt, you notice how I hooked my ground up here,
you know, I would have tried it without it,
but my attempt here, as a matter of fact,
I will take the ground off for a second
so I can explain this.
I want to come in here and get comfortable
and I'm gonna put two fingers against the pipe.
And when I strike an arc, I'm gonna pause
and get the puddle going a little bit.
Put the wire on the leading edge,
since it's a sixteenth gap, or smaller than the wire,
I can kinda rest it on the leading edge
here at the right angle, and I'm gonna
come up to probably about three o'clock.
The height of my stand is a little tall, but no big deal.
At that point, I am going to probably stop,
adjust, and rest the cup in here,
and wiggle it the rest of the way,
'til I get up here on top, make this tie in up here
on my tack, I'm using two tacks today,
one at the top, one at the bottom.
They're half-inch long tacks,
so things shouldn't move around.
So I wanna heat the leading edge of my,
my tack.
I wanna stay fairly tight, down in the groove,
to make sure that that's hot,
and I'm rolling the wire back and forth so I can feel it.
Pushing on it slightly so I can kinda,
I know that there's filler wire going in.
At that point I'm gonna snap out of it,
I left a little bitty keyhole,
and from here, I'm gonna try to rest the cup in here
and wiggle it the rest of the way.
That's just one of my methods that feels comfortable
for me, and that works for me.
I know there's other hand positions,
I know there's other ways to manipulate the torch.
Okay, I've heated this up, little keyhole there,
(light sound of blowtorch)
Okay, so I'm cruising along here, thinking things are good.
I got to a point where it was a little tight,
and I went to wash it back and forth
to make sure I was breaking down the walls.
Stuck my tungsten, so you know, here's screw-up number one.
How do you fix it?
'Cause I had my wire stuck here,
and so I just stopped, broke the arc,
'cause I didn't have much of a choice at that point.
So now I'm gonna come in here with a cutoff wheel
that's designed to do this kind of work,
and I have a very tight gap, so I'm gonna
lightly clean this mess up that I made,
and feather this back a little bit,
and now that I'm gonna do that,
I am also gonna take care of my start on my tack,
and then I'll have this prepped
and hopefully we can save it.
Again, it's a common mistake,
you guys know me well enough, you know,
I'm coming along here and I just made
the classic shmoo move, and dove right into the bead,
so, hey, it happens.
I'm pretty comfortable with this.
I have feathered this tack up here on the leading edge,
and I've taken care of my tungsten dip down here,
I've feathered it back into the good part of the bead.
This is thinned out too, it's just a burr.
So again, I'm gonna start low into the bead here,
not add any filler wire until I crawl up.
This is gonna heat up and probably open up in a keyhole,
and that's where I'll interject the wire into the groove
and try to keep right on going.
(blowtorch ignites)
So I've restarted my bead, it opened up immediately,
so I'm gonna back up a little bit,
introduce the wire, and kinda washing this keyhole around
to make sure I got a good tie-in on the restart.
(mechanical whirring and clicking)
Coming up on the tack, warming everything up,
back up, add some wire, then keep right on going.
Kept going until I made sure that that was washed in,
I welded past where it jumped together.
I want to make sure that I've got bead blended in there.
So, almost ran out of filler wire.
I got an inch in my fingers here,
things were getting a little hot,
another common things that happen in the field, on the job!
Okay, that concludes the root.
We're gonna clean this up in our next shot with this,
we're gonna do the fill-in cap.
But again, to reiterate and review what we did here
is, again, multiple ways to hang on to the torch.
I personally, and it depends on what's in my way,
if there's anything in my way,
I personally hang on to this, put my thumb against the pipe
'til I come up here a little bit,
and then I rest the cup and gently give it
a bit of a wiggle and a walk all the way up.
You can put your fingers against the pipe,
same way, any way you brace and prop and come up.
Get comfortable, make sure you're not
violating a good torch angle.
You want to keep your torch, you want to
reference the center of the pipe all the time,
leading angle slightly.
Same thing with your filler wire:
you want it on the leading edge of the pool,
you want to be in control.
So again, this is a small bore pipe;
if it starts heating up you may have to do,
you know, the tig fingers or the heat pad,
or something, but again, it's all about comfort.
You guys can do this.
If I was gonna do the other side,
I would just reverse that.
Switch hands to my right hand,
come up here and introduce the filler wire,
probably come up enough, rest the cup in there
on the backside or, if there's room,
might just come back over here and do it this way again.
Multiple methods, some common things though:
the tungsten angle into the center
of the pipe, and the filler wire.
We're trying to put a root in, so we need to have that
good melt, where we're breaking the pipe walls down,
and we're getting that filler wire
so we can get some reinforcement in the pipe.
So this is the portion of the root that I did last,
the rest of it's in there and broken down,
but this is where the repair started,
and I went on up to the top, just using a mirror
and a flashlight to look inside for now.
Really appreciate you watching "Weld.com."
Please subscribe, check us out on Facebook and Instagram.