hey everyone welcome back to well calm so the other day we had one of our one of our viewers
submitted questions to our new website well calm fancy name right just makes sense and he wanted
to know he had so he was um he's building a welding cart and wants to know if he can use
flux core versus solid water mig to finish out his welding cart and there seems to be a lot of
myths around flux core I went ahead answer this question but I wanted to go ahead and bring the
topic up to everybody there's a lot of myths regarding flux core and that it's an inferior
process when actually it's not especially for you home hobbyists you know if you don't have
the ability to run anything other than flux core on your machine or you don't have access to a
gas bottle there's just a lot of stuff that flux core has benefits over versus solid water Meg or
even stick for that matter I mean I ran miles of this stuff when I did structural steel it's a lot
faster you get better deposition rates compared to a regular stick weld but it seems like a lot
of people have a hard time running it so today we're gonna go through a couple of the common
problems that you would run into with flux core hopefully that gets you a bit more accustomed
to using flux core and using that over another process especially if that's all you have at your
shop so let's go and get into it alright today we're on the ISA rebel 235 I'm gonna run about
180 inches a minute on the wire feed speed 17 volts I have some 35 select arc 701 it's a 71 T
11 this is something you can't pick up this exact spool but you can get some t11 at your local big
box store they some with one-pound spools and then you get like 12 pound spools we're gonna go ahead
and run a 35 because that's pretty much what's common when you can pick up at those stores like
I said it's a bigger spool it's a 25 pound spool but you can get them in about 12 12 and a half
pound spools alright so the first misconception is you're gonna get a lot of weld spatter and a
high Roby bead profile now you can see you know as I'm welding here I'm getting a crap ton of
spatter right it's all over the place and I have a very small puddle it's a very narrow bead profile
you're if you're running into this problem you shouldn't be it's most likely your polarity so
right now I'm running on dc+ I'm running the same settings but I'm on dc+ whereas I should be on dc-
is very common especially if you're new to welding you're just getting into it you know
for you to set your machine up just as you would for most stick processes and all of solid water
MIG processes so running on dc+ that's exactly what we got here you can tell we got a bunch of
spatter on here I mean it's like horse crap an Amish town it's everywhere we got the high rope
EB profile didn't tie into the side so that's another misconception is you don't get enough
penetration we're gonna discuss that a little bit more in depth later and for those of you who think
that that's just sprinkled on there we went ahead and hit it with a wire wheel on the backside we
did another weld clean it with a wire wheel all this stuff is really caked on pretty strong the
problem is with dc+ I have about 70% of my heat on my wire 30% of heat on the base metal that's
a lot of current to be running through that small wire because remember it's hollow and is packed
with flux right there's granulated flux inside that wire right so I'm putting about 70% of my
amperage on the on the wire whereas I should have it on my base metal all right so with this we can
alleviate all that trash just by switching our polarity you'll you'll notice that when I was
running the the previous pass on DC positive I'm only averaging about a hundred and five and
we're gonna go ahead switch the polarity we'll get an arc shot of the amps as well as the the
weld and the final product and we'll show you exactly what we're talking about so now I'm just
gonna switch this is my this is the power to my gun or my work or my electrode and this is to my
workpiece clamp or grounding clamp I'm gonna go ahead and switch this to the positive and
this electrode of the electrode I'm gonna put into the negative so now I'm on DC negative or
straight polarity okay we'll go back run another test weld we'll get some information off of here
I'm not gonna change any of the settings I ran 180 inches a minute and 17 volts when I was on
DC positive I'm gonna do the same thing now that we're on DC negative alright so as you can see
just by switching out my polarity did DC negative I'm getting a much smoother bead appearance so
that spatter is virtually gone the weld is spreading out much wider I'm getting better
penetration here I've got better wedding into the toes and as you be able to see on the the
flash screen there I went from 105 amps now I'm running at 105 146 and that's roughly you know
that's just by switching my polarity okay that's actual 71 percent difference between the two so
now I have 70% of my Heat in the base metal 30% on the electrode just by switching the polarity
alright let's go ahead and clean this up we'll take a look at the final well alright
so there's no spatter left on here I hit it with a wire wheel didn't have to do any additional
grinding or anything like that to get rid of the spatter and I have overall smooth clean
uniform beat appearance right good waiting into the toes there's the hole the hydro PB
profiles pretty much gone or it's practically it's completely gone and it's a much smoother
weld we're gonna go ahead we'll cut one of these apart and we'll show you the actual
depth of penetration too because that's another common misconception is you don't get the same
penetration with flux core as you do with the other processes when in fact we're probably
gonna get more if not the same all right so that brings us to the misconception number two which
is lack of penetration or short-circuit meg would penetrate better than flux core so down here I've
got the flux core piece that we did we also ran a solid wire Meg both of them right around 140
amps we're gonna go ahead cut polish and etch these and check out the penetration profile all
right so we've turned this in a previous video but we're gonna go ahead we're just
going to go up in different grits on these pieces until we get like a relatively decent
polish doesn't have to be mirrored polished closer you can get it to a shower mirror the
better off you're gonna be but we're just gonna polish them up and then we're gonna use some 10%
ferric chloride on there and kind of expose the well little weld nugget we got going on
all right so as you can see on your left we have the the short-circuit MIG sample and then
on the right the flux core sample so with the short-circuit meg you know it's prone to lack
of fusion is still good for quarter-inch plate which is what we have here the you can tell on
the vertical leg over here on the short-circuit side that you have a little bit less penetration
than you do with the flux core also you know you can see that we you got a little bit more punch
with that flux core so if you if you're using flux core at the house you shouldn't have any
hesitation about using that you know on thicker materials whereas like with short-circuit meg
you know five sixteenths is gonna be your your capacity on that with flux core though I mean
you can go much thicker material and still not have any worries about getting good penetration
in there alright so the next misconception that's often associated with flux core especially self
shielded flux core is porosity so the biggest thing that can contribute to your porosity is
number one obviously improperly stored electrodes we did a video on that a while ago you can check
that one out but the next main culprit of that is your contact tip to work distance so the
wire we're using today this 71 t - 11 in the O 35 diameter it's recommended for 3/8 to 1/2
inch stick out now I'm gonna show you if you get too close what's actually going to happen so by
to close I mean anything less than 3/8 if I get that you know start bearing that contact tip in
there I'm most likely gonna get porosity we're gonna go ahead and run through I'll put a weld
on the backside of this and show you exactly you should get porosity alright so as you can see we
had that contact tip right up there right next to the puddle lift that contact it organist is
really short didn't even have a nozzle on there with self fielded you don't really need a nozzle
but with this I wanted to try to get as close as possible or replicate some of the stuff that
I've seen in the past I've seen students do this could be something you're running into
at the house because you know you're not familiar with the process hopefully we're gonna go ahead
and take the all the slag off the wire wheel and we should expose some porosity under there
okay so I got a couple good ones in here there's some speckled right up in here I've got a good
piece right here cluster porosity here there's about three or four of them just in that one
little pocket little here and then definitely one right here and then one on the end where we
terminated so what's going to help you prevent that is maintaining that proper contact tip to
work distance the problem is the flux on the inside of that tube it has to preheat before
it interacts with the weld pool in order for it to do its job so think about firing up your oven you
can't just fire the oven up throw a pizza in there and come back thirty minutes later it's not gonna
work you want to preheat the oven to the proper temperature in order for it to cook efficiently
same thing with the flux you want to heat that flux up by maintaining that contact tip to work
distance so it's preheated before it joins that molten metal pool not really a misconception but
what I've seen a lot of people face issue or have issues with when dealing with flux core
is wire feeding issues and a lot of that comes back to the drive rules so usually when I open
the Machine up they have the improper driver all selected for what they're doing so these
right here on your left hand side are V grooves okay these are great for solid water applications
however when we get into a flux core or metal core where you just have an exterior sheathing
of metal and the interiors filled with either granulated flux or a crushed iron powder you
want to have some sort of grip on there to be able to grip that wire if you use the v-groove
what you're going to doing is crushing that wire and you're gonna get feeding issues throughout
the liner the knurled rolls here on your right hand side these are adequate for your flux core
applications because they they have a little bit of grip so they'll be able to grab the wire and
pull it through another thing you want to make sure is your wire tension isn't too tight if
it's too tight you're gonna crush the line in there regard that you're gonna crush the wire
in there regardless so make sure you have the appropriate diameter so if we're using a 35
or o 45 wire make sure you have the appropriate Drive roll selected for that as well as the type
of Drive roll be it knurled or a V groove one other thing if you are getting a lot of spatter
and you know you have your settings down correct you know you're using the right polarity all that
good stuff but you're still getting a lot of spatter one thing you can do to kind of protect
your table I know that with hard facing if you ever have to do hard facing so not just the table
but the material you're working on if you take some anti spatter and spray that on the surface
once you get done welding you can take a lot of those bb's and just wipe them right off the table
it's going to provide a nice protective finish on there you'll be able to wipe the table back
off similarly the material that you're working on if you're developing a lot of spatter on that
you spray this in the welding area you'll be able to wipe the bb's right off when you're done it's
gonna save you a lot of time and prevent you having to do any additional grinding on there
all right so you can see in this area where we did all our weld demos we should have a bunch
of spatter on here but because we use the anti spatter we're just able to wipe all that stuff
off so we don't have to go back through and grind anything down on the table all right hopefully we
were able to debunk some of the myths surrounded by flux core self shielded Kevin I hopefully hope
that answers your question probably little bit more thoroughly than you were looking for but
hopefully you were able to get something out of it if you guys have questions comments concerns you
need help with the weld you want to post pictures get some feedback go ahead and post it up on weld
comm there's going to be a link in the description down below and we'll help you out to the best of
our ability hope you guys enjoy the show until next time make every well better than your last