ck worldwide just came out with a new product called an easy dabber that might
just help you feed tig wire and they're giving them
away it's a little feed tube that's bendable
and it mounts on one of several holes so there's a lot of possibilities
to get all kinds of different angles no matter if you're right-handed or
left-handed i find it very interesting because i've
i've had a bunch of questions over the years
about the tig pin from people that have some arthritis or some nerve damage and
things like that i'm going to give it a go today so i've
had several questions lately on people asking could you
put some increments on the filler wire so we can see
how much wire is being fed into the puddle
you generally feed more aluminum wire than you do with steel
so i'm putting increments at every half inch here
and we should be able to see each mark going into the puddle we're also going
to see some trash going into the puddle because
of the sharpie not a good idea to weld over
ink marks and things like that it's not the end of the world but you'll
see it float around in the puddle each time one of those sharpie marks
gets in there just a little bit like a bunch of oxide floating around in the
puddle it appears to me i'm adding about 3 8 of
an inch so it's definitely not a full half inch
but more than a quarter and this is 332 2.4 millimeter filler rod that i'm using
here generally speaking you add a whole lot
more aluminum filler than you do on steel and that's why
padding beads on aluminum is such good practice to get your filler rod hand up
to speed let's take a look at that now in
slow motion like half speed and i'll magnify it a little bit too
we can really see that trash floating around each time each time the sharpie
mark enters the molten puddle there's a bunch of crud
floating around in there not the end of the world but definitely
not putting our best foot forward there either
so the same thing will happen if you weld over ink markings on
aluminum so you definitely want your aluminum clean
you want to wipe the ink markings with acetone
wipe your filler rod the cleaner the better
when it comes to tig welding aluminum i thought i would slip it on my thumb
and see what i could do with that feeding it with my first two fingers so
i'm going to bend it around so that i have more room kind of a more
of a stroke you could also remove this thing flip it
around so many options so this is how i
kind of normally feed a lot of times or at least i think i do
kind of like this i pinch it with my thumb and the
palm of my hand while i feed with my first two fingers like i said
i thought that i was feeding it this way if anybody asked me how do you feed rod
normally i would say this but when the hood
dropped i found i was doing something kind of
different and i wouldn't have known it if i wasn't filming this and getting to
watch it later while i'm editing this so now
i'm not feeding it with my first two fingers i'm i'm kind of guiding it with
those but i'm feeding it with my thumb and i didn't really even know that
so i would recommend you know set up your phone
or get somebody to film you maybe as you're learning to feed rod
just get some clips so you can watch it and see what you are doing
what you're actually doing because when that hood drops things are different
that's why you'll often see me taking several dry runs before i light up on
something because i know when i drop the helmet
things things change let's take another quick look at it here
simple little it's a simple little device but i found it had lots of
possibilities i put a couple of hours worth of welding
on this thing and i think i only just scratched the
surface on what could be done with it so if this is
giving you trouble if it's just not getting up to speed like you'd like for
it to if you've got some kind of carpal tunnel issue or an injury you're trying
to work around or arthritis or something like that
maybe this would help i asked art cleppen the founder of ck he is the k
in ck to film a little piece kind of talking about how he came up with this
and how you can get one for free so here's art well i must say
it's a real pleasure for me to be collaborating with jody on this project
thank you jody for doing this with me over the years i've
really admired what you've done for our industry
and to get to do this with you is really special
for me there you are in georgia here i am in arizona
and because of today's technology we get to do this together
so like jody said i'm art cleppen the k and ck worldwide
just a little over 50 years ago jim conley and i started our partnership
wow did that go by fast we decided to separate several years ago and gen
ed jim ended up with a great company in westchester pennsylvania and i
ended up with ck and a wonderful diverse group of folks
who make up our team and a few years ago the american welding society
had a scholarship program that would match
the funds that a member donated so we donated
fifty thousand dollars and the american welding society put in another fifty
thousand so we had a total of a hundred thousand
dollars for tig scholarship and i think it's
always great when you can give back to a great industry like ours the reason
i mention this is because we're gonna do something like that again
only in a different sort of way this time we want to give away
for free our newest product that we're coming out with
and that's what this video is all about and a while ago some of our guys and me
were talking about just how difficult it really
is to learn how to hand feed longer lengths of wire
like the really good tig welders do so my mind starts to go to work
and i came up with a simple device that enables a person to learn
how to feed the wire and it's simple and it works great you can actually even
do this in your own easy chair when you're watching
television to practice it and we call it the easy dabber like i said before
i want to give them away so if you're learning how to tig weld
or already are a tig welder or an instructor
these are available to you no charge postage paid all we ask is that you fill
out a short form so we know where and who they're going
to and if you're not in the united states
we'll provide them to you for a small shipping charge it's as
simple as that so that's my part of the video and
thanks again jody for doing this with me and thanks to all you folks who have
supported ck through all those years so
stay safe and god bless america thanks art hey real quick the easiest
way to order your easy dabber is go to ckworldwide.com
down at the bottom right there's a link for the easy dabber it'll take you to
this page where there's a click here to order
button at the bottom just fill in your shipping information
click submit easy as pie
you