hi guys my name's will i'm from world class down in australia and with me today i've got angus
from firstlightfab g'day mom hey so what is it you guys do down here at firstlight alright so
we do a lot of marine fabrication uh customise and fit out boats yeah um aluminium stainless
all that sort of things awesome yeah a bit of fun stuff yeah you guys mig much aluminium in
the workshop yeah we do plenty of alley migs so bringing alley mig well if it's cool with you
man what i wanted to do today is i want to take some time to talk about mig welding aluminium
now there's a few different ways we can do that and i know it can be a bit tricky for
those starting out for the first time so i was thinking we talked about normal aluminium mig
we'll do a little bit on synergic aluminium mig we'll talk about mig welding with a spool gun
and then we'll wrap it up at the end with a bit of a talk about pulse welding aluminium
we're gonna get started out and do a little bit of mig welding i think it's good that we
start with just basic mig first that'd be the first place to go to yeah all right so
i've got a 200 amp machine here we've got a few things in front of us we're going to go through
how we would set up so even if this is your first time using your mig welder for aluminium
this will be the steps that we need to do where do we start with that angus what's the first
thing we're going to do to set up all right so we'll start with your mig wire all right so
obviously we're going to need some aluminium and then moving on so we got our rollers you
need to swap those out so typically people will be running v-rollers for their mild steel yeah
we need to swap those out to a u-groove so okay the reason being is uh aluminum is quite soft so
it can deform with your v-rollers now when we get down to the gun is we're just putting the gun in
like normal as if we're welding steel or is there something else we're changing here no so we need
to change our liner also so you're going to want to use a teflon liner but there's also graphite
liners all right so we're going to kick off with the first step which is the drive roller yes
how do we get that one started all right so you're going to loosen your tensioner and drop that away
this one's got a little retaining lock on it release that remove your v-groove roller so
take the v-groove roller out yeah and then take your u-groove uh it does say a l on it so that
indicates it's for aluminium all right so we place that in and lock that back in place and um yeah
moving on so now you've also got to match your roller to your wire size now that is an important
step if you have the wrong size roller for the wire that you're running you're going to have slip
issues or you're going to have the same problem where we crush the wire and it gets too thin
what's our next step mate what are we going to do let's put the spool of aluminium wire in there so
um yep retainer tighten that up is there a certain like do we want to go really tight when
we're putting the wire spool on like so is there a spot where it can slip too much i mean you got to
remember that um it's not you don't want to lock it in place right so it needs to spin freely so
you want to just take it firm but no no yeah yeah cool all right so let's set up the gun and
the liner so we've got our gun here yeah i'll give you that end sure we've got our teflon
liner here um so that's what we're going to put in for our aluminium welding so we've got
a few parts to this liner kit sure this is a universal there's different ones out there but
the main thing is that you get something that suits your machine so that might be a universal
teflon kit like the one that we've got here or it might be a brand specific one depending on on the
machine that you've already purchased that'd be something that you take up with the dealer
where you got your machine now they generally give you quite a long length it has to be trimmed down
so keep that in mind take the old liner out yep all the way so what we're doing here is we're
starting to thread the liner back into the base of the mid gun and run it all the way through to
the gun end yes that's right so we're gonna take this take this off yeah apart yep break it down
so we've got our mig gun here start with our shroud which is the outer piece we're
going to take a shroud off all right i'm going to hand you a spanner there you go so
we need to take the tip holder off not just the tip so next one down if you've got mig pliers you
can probably do this with new pliers as well that piece yeah all right i'm going to push this liner
through and there we go you see it come through there so you can see that liner comes out all
right now we take the neckline yeah every machine is going to be slightly different but this one has
a little thread on here we just thread that down onto the liner as many turns as you can get it
so that's nice and firm on there now all right so we send that back down through
the other way i might get you to do that that back in there yep now once we get down close
we'll take our tip holder again put that on the liner and feed in the last little bit with the
tip holder once we've done that shroud back on all right so then we've got this collet
the other end and o-ring so let's bring this collar down would it be fair to say that all
these little things are what's going to make the difference when you're actually welding
yes if you don't get the o-ring right or we get the space wrong at the end is that going
to make a difference in the world yeah definitely i mean you could get some hold up in there and um
yeah affect your weld but um so with this backing nut you want it firm to obviously engage that
collet yeah but don't overdo it you know it's just to hold it there in place um and then trimming
this liner down it's machine specific you know so just check your machine specs and um trim it to
soup a tip for some machines is you take a little bit of that excess and try and tuck it up inside
there so it runs all the way up to where the wire comes off the drive roller and that'll give you a
really smooth feed into your mig gun all the way through to your head yeah all righty plug her in
now we've got to get the wire fed through to the end what's the best way to go about doing that
now we'll just power on the machine okay now some machines will have a
jog feature right this machine doesn't so all we're going to do is i'll basically
straighten out this so it gets a nice smooth run and then i'll get you to pull the trigger and run
some wire through all right comes out of the tip like that and we're ready to go we'll trim this
down to size and we'll see how normal mig welding works and we'll get angus to put down a weld
so we're all set up here now guys we're kicking off our first world with just our basic mig so
what we're doing here is we're balancing our volts and our wire speed settings this is o4o
5356 grade aluminium wire we're running pure argon gas and we're welding with 1 8 aluminium 5005
welding coupons yeah so quite a nice weld good penetration probably a slight bit hot so we could
turn down the voltage a little bit yup so we've just done our basic mig weld and
i think what would be a really good step now is we're using the exact same machine setup but we're
going to have a look at synergic yeah so synergic or automatic is where the machine is just going
to do those settings for us so instead of playing around with the volts and the wire speed we just
tell it that we're working with this thickness of material what wire we've got in our gas type this
guy takes care of the rest all right so you can see here there's a little improvement on that um
darkening around the outside and so it's so yeah that's definitely like it it's helped but the
thing i like about it is we didn't need to play around with any of the settings i just pressed
like two or three buttons so that really makes it easier if i'm at home and i've never done synergic
welding or i've never done aluminium welding before and i've got a machine like that it's
really click bang oh yeah it's easy that's that's probably one of the easiest ways to get set up
the only downside to that one is we're still going to have to change our rollers and our drive liners
versus the spool gun but we'll have a look at the spool gun in a moment and we'll see how that
changes the world as well yep so another thing with these manual machines we don't have any
adjustments in the start and the finish so when you're looking at that weld you'll see that right
at the start of the world we look a little bit colder a little bit more raised up off the job
not quite as much penetration and then when we get towards the end of the world we're getting that
stereotypical kind of crater and we've got to muck around with how we're holding our gun and what
we're doing with the wire to fill that crate up but as we move in towards our pulse machine yeah
we're going to get a lot of settings that we can play around with and the pulse action itself that
will help stop those little problems from creeping into the job so we've just had a look at the two
first forms of aluminium mig welding we've done the basic mig weld where we set the settings
ourselves and we've done the synergic mig weld or the automatic if you will where it's done all the
settings for us now another extension of this is the spool gun this is like the manual world where
we have to change the settings to suit but the beauty of the spool gun is it gives us a bit of
distance and we don't have to worry about those liners and rollers is that pretty fair would you
say yeah i mean uh instances where we use it is whether we're going to get inside a boat or we're
good you know can't get a machine into the area that we're welding so we can have that advantage
of the longer lead and everything like that we've got this pretty much the same settings we were
just running before but we've swipped swapped over to a smaller roll of wire and a spool gun
yeah do you notice much difference between this and the normal manual
uh i mean it's a bit more cumbersome on the the gun itself but um no it's very similar you know
so we've got the pulse mig out now this machine really does so much more than the other ones
we're just going to use its automatic settings so again this is synergic and we're going to have a
look at how it welds now compared to the other modes so nice nice very nice yeah so so what
are the some some of the things coming off like with a pulse machine that you like against normal
welding types uh so it's obviously a lot easier to control the heat much better finish in the world
um it seems to break up that oxide layer a lot easier um and yeah just a much nicer finish and
and consistent weld um so the heat can be a really big thing with aluminium unlike steel aluminium
doesn't really like to give us any warning when it's getting too hot that are pretty fair yeah
you can sum it up yeah certainly so um steel has a nice tendency to go red and you know that you're
starting to get to that point where you could have a whole blow through on thinner jobs or blow
out a corner but with aluminium you kind of you notice it when it starts already falling through
so there are some little signs to stick out for but it's nice to have a machine like this that
fills in the blanks now that we've got double pulse on it'll sound a bit different as well
if we can just cap off angus just roughly where do you reckon single pulse really sits in the
market like what kind of job would you do with that most jobs i mean you know uh you're
still going to get a really aesthetically nice looking weld you got your heat control benefit
of the poles um so it suits you know most applications with the double pulse where
would we see that so if you really want to hone in that yeah weld and get it looking really sharp
it really comes in its own when for those super detailed welds and aesthetically pleasing wells
yeah it definitely shows me like you can you can see between the two how the double pulse just
it looks nice yeah it's nice and consistent and pretty so all right so we've done a fair bit of
mucking around with different types of welding today just to cover off on what we've done here
we've done some basic aluminium mig welding where we've just changed over the rollers and the liner
thrown a roll of aluminium wire in and we're off and racing we've done spool gun setup for someone
that wants a little bit more distance between the machine and the job and doesn't really want to
play around with changing liners and rollers we've done some synergic welding for somebody with a
more advanced machine that'll do the settings for them and we've also also covered off on the pulse
mig for somebody that really wants to get into it with a bit more fancy on the machine so it's
been really good to get a chance to go through all this and thanks angus for lending us the workshop
and giving a chance to show some guys how to get into aluminium welding yeah no it's been
great well thanks for having me and uh it was yeah great playing around with the machines and awesome
well thanks guys i really appreciate your time have fun doing it at home i'll see you next time