(sizzling)
- This is one of the best welds I've made in weeks, man.
Months.
Apparently it's hurting his eyes.
I just laid down a beauty, a veritable sparkle show.
Ah it smells like porosity.
Well back we did a video
TIG 101 and it was geared
toward putting everything together,
and getting started in the TIG welding world.
We had a lot of great comments.
Some of those comments centered around,
well how do I set my gas?
What is the proper gas flow for TIG welding?
So before we get back to this beautiful guy here,
we need to go back on the machine and set our gas
and talk about a few things.
The very first thing that I need to do
is to slowly open this, and open it all the way.
My pressure cylinder is open all the way.
Our flow meter is calibrated for argon
and helium, cubic feet per hour.
In order for me to set the gas
with this particular machine,
I need to depress the foot pedal
to energize the gas selenoid.
I can go from five to 50 cubic feet per hour
which is excessive, that's way high.
Since we're in an enclosed shop, no wind, no breeze,
and I'm using standard size components,
collet, collet body, number seven cup,
15 to 20 cubic feet per hour is plenty.
We'll get into using gas lenses
and some of this cubic feet per hour will change slightly
when we're using other components.
The next thing we need to look at is
what's available on the machine to set as far as gas.
And on this particular model machine,
I have everything amperage, everything pulse,
AC and AC balance, I only have post flow
on this particular machine, OK?
Some machines have a pre flow function which means
when you depress the foot pedal,
you can set a timer where you'll get a few seconds,
even a half of a second or a full second
of preflow of gas, this is beneficial on stainless
and some aluminum welding, it's not real critical on steels.
So
I can do that manually by just depressing the foot pedal
and have a little bit of gas coverage in my area,
my weld area, I can pre flood that.
But getting back to this machine,
it only has a post flow setting.
With the three 3/32 sized tungsten that I'm using,
I'm welding at 135 amps,
about five to six seconds is plenty.
It allows my
argon to flow out of the cup
around the tungsten to protect it as it's cooling down.
So I'm gonna set that at about five seconds.
If I don't have enough post flow,
let's say that I'm welding at 135 amps,
and I set my post flow at like two seconds
or one second which is obviously low,
then I should notice my tungsten would turn dark gray
or even it would be a dark color.
Your tungsten should be the original color
after you get through welding and it cools off.
It should stay the original color of the tungsten.
If it turns black, dark gray, some weird color,
then you might wanna turn your post flow up
a few more seconds.
Again, I'm setting this at five.
So this should cover the comment, how to set my gas,
how to set my machine properly.
And I'll show you what this looks like.
Hopefully I can make some good welds.
But then after we get through with that,
we're gonna mess some things up.
We'll go through some scenarios and show you what happens
if we make some adjustments and they're not right.
Hopefully we can show you exactly
how to troubleshoot this step and correct it.
(whirring)
As you can see, we are not getting all that porosity
and the sparkle show, everything is smooth, stable, clean.
Everything is just fine.
It's fine!
Let's talk about post flow for just a second.
As I terminated this weld you'll notice
that I stayed over my weld area.
That's kind of a habit that I get into
long time ago just to help if I'm welding on stainless steel
I always like to leave that post flow
over the top of this weld area.
I do it on carbon steel too.
Again, everything is real clean.
My tungsten has good color to it,
I maintain the (speaking foreign language)
the good grind angle.
So one of the things that we can change here is post flow.
So the first thing we can talk about is
what if I have too much post flow?
What if I have 15 to 20 seconds of post flow?
Is that doing anything?
No, you're just wasting gas really.
This machine goes to 10 seconds.
I could have 10 seconds of post flow.
It's not gonna really do anything.
It's not gonna change the color.
It's not gonna protect the tungsten any more,
as it's cooling off.
But if I have it too low, let's see what that looks like.
I want to adjust this down to
oh we'll go a little above one second.
We'll go in between one and three seconds.
I'll make the same weld, the weld should look
essentially the same, but when I terminate the weld,
we should notice something with the tungsten here
should turn dark, let's see what happens.
As you can see everything is set essentially the same.
Nothing's gonna happen here.
This was an adjustment in post flow.
So gas coverage is essentially the same over the weld.
It's only when I terminate the weld,
and the tip of our tungsten got black.
Is it foul to the point of not using it?
Not necessarily and on a non critical weld,
we can light right back up, reset the post flow, keep going.
Critical application, I would change this tungsten out.
So there's two examples of nothing,
the only adjustment we made was the post flow,
one normal at five to six seconds and one at one second
or one and a half seconds.
The welds look essentially the same.
The only thing that happened was
it turned the tungsten black.
On steels it's not that big of a deal, OK?
On stainless steel, nickel based alloys
and some exotic metals, it's nice to have some post flow
and leave your torch down around there to help
blanket the material as it's cooling off.
Now we'll do a couple of samples here where
let's just turn the gas all the way up.
You know I never have.
Seriously, I have never turned the gas all the way up
to the top of a post flow so this is gonna be,
it'll be a little fun for me.
I'm gonna crank it up to 55, whatever it'll go to.
Again, we're running standard components,
and a number seven cup so let's experiment.
Pedal to the metal, crank 'er all the way up!
Whoo, she ridin' up on top there,
55, 50 cubic feet an hour, plus.
Anybody heard of a Venturi effect of gas?
I can sure hear the gas runnin' out of there hard.
I notice my weld is smaller.
Venturi effect is where it would be rushing out of the cup
so fast that it draws in air behind the weld.
The pool looked a little funny to me as I was weldin' it.
But it looks fine visually afterwards.
I thought I noticed a little spit thing in there.
One thing I do notice is the edges of my weld
are nice and black for some reason.
You know really all I'm doing is wasting gas.
It's coming out of there so fast,
all this excess gas is not doing anything.
So essentially I'm wasting gas.
All right so the next thing we could do
is turn our gas from our normal 15, 20
and turn it way down so we don't have enough gas.
Let's see what that does.
In this weld we have too low a gas coverage.
It acts like it wants to weld.
But it's getting little bubble riser in there, I see it.
I know there's porosity coming out on the back side.
Lovely.
I've labored to produce a weld with a bunch of 'oles in it.
'Oles, oh there's that old brown manky stuff
that I tried to get in one of my videos
when I said it leaves this orange brown crap
on your weld plate, didn't get enough gas coverage.
That's a beauty.
Got a nice little riser on the end there.
I'd call that somethin' but I don't want to offend anybody.
Camera guy is kinda verbally sensitive these days.
So you know here's the deal, we went through
the post flow settings, we don't notice hardly any change
whatsoever, we turn the gas all the way up
which is essentially wasting gas just like
having too many seconds of post flow, just wasting argon.
And then the obvious thing here of
created this beautiful visual aid here
of not enough gas period.
You're just gonna get porosity.
Once it starts you really can't correct it.
Is this repairable? Sure.
Grind it out, grind it down to good clean base metal,
turn your gas back to where it's supposed to be
and weld it properly and you'd be fine.
So this porosity problem here was caused
by not enough gas coverage, I had it set way too low.
Let's get back to that beauty I laid down for you
at the beginning of this video with everything set properly,
I still got porosity pretty bad.
Which leads us back to the viewer question,
question revolved around what do I do with my tungsten?
How far do I stick the tungsten out?
Do I have it real close to the cup?
That particular weld I had it way out there.
Even though I had my gas set correctly,
my tungsten is so far out there that
my gas argon envelope was not around this weld pool,
didn't have a chance.
OK, so let's reproduce that scenario.
I've got a number seven cup on here and I'm out like
one, two, three times as far as what I should be.
I'm out here a good inch and a half and that's,
my gas coverage is not gonna be around this weld pool.
So here's how I produce the beauty for you.
See if we can do another one.
There's some more of that brown orangey crap on there.
You know what that reminded me of was
gasless flux core wire that was set incorrectly,
she loaded with porosity.
Too much tungsten stickout.
Got no chance, no coverage.
Well some of you may be thinking to yourselves saying, self,
how do I correct that?
Let's go turn the gas all the way up again.
Let's go crank it all the way up plus
have our tungsten stuck out here so we can see.
(gas blowing)
Mm, yummy.
This is a yummy specimen.
Oh I definitely have gas flow 'cause I can hear it.
'Bout the only thing that I noticed that doing is
it threw my sparkles and my good stuff.
It was high velocity because of the gas flow behind it.
It still left a mess.
Sticking your tungsten out too far
is not gonna help you do anything
as far as a quality weld pool out here in the flat plate.
Out in the open, gas coverage it just goes away.
So I'm gonna get a fresh bullet here.
There's one more thing we can do here
and that's run the tungsten
way up in the cup or flush with it.
I set the gas back to normal,
back to about 15 cubic feet per hour
where we made our beautiful welds with.
So what do you think's gonna happen here?
I like to set mine, whatever the exit diameter of the cup is
that's about where I like to start.
And on this one, I have set it pretty much flush
with the end of the cup.
I stuck it out there just a little bit so I can see it.
I don't think anything is gonna happen
as far as the weld pool.
I don't think we're gonna create a really bad weld pool.
What's gonna happen is, I'm not gonna be able to see
the end of the tungsten to judge where I'm at.
It pretty much forces me
to weld with a long arc.
Well I can't drag the cup physically on the plate.
I can't get my filler wire down here
where I can get underneath it so what's gonna happen is
I'll have plenty of gas coverage
'cause it's right there at the end of the cup,
but I've got my tungsten recessed up in here
about a 16th, I can't see the end of it.
Gonna be hard for me to judge this.
Again, this is not something I normally do
so this'll be like a first time for me.
But these are all based on viewer questions,
viewer comments and helping people out.
They're saying well this is what I'm doing
and it's not working out or something's not working out
and we find out what it is and so
here we go, let's see what happens.
(chuckling) I had to put the cup clearly
right down on the material in order to make
the high frequency, start the arc.
I could not see the end of my tungsten,
I was guessing the whole time.
Actually to me visually it looked like
the arc was coming out off center
in the nozzle here, in the cup.
Did it make a good weld? Yeah.
There's nothing wrong with the weld as far as porosity,
the width is OK.
Got that weird black haze on the side of the start of it but
you know again, there's so many options here.
Got that window and that rule of thumb.
Anyway, we went through gas setup, proper flow,
post flow and we showed some welds
where we changed the post flow to nothing
and we got little dark color on the end of the tungsten.
Didn't affect the weld.
Post flow has nothing to do with the gas flow
while you're welding, it's just when you terminate.
If you don't have enough time set,
this thing cools off and it oxidizes, it turns black.
Hopefully we showed that well enough.
And then we had a little fun there at the end
and cranked that tungsten out there
about an inch and a half or so.
We got no gas coverage 'cause it was way out there too far.
We even turned the gas up trying to correct it.
It's not gonna happen OK?
This good envelope of shielding gas is right around
this end of the tungsten here.
Again the rule of thumb is whatever the opening is,
that's about how far you stick your tungsten out.
And I keep saying about, you know?
We can stick this out a little bit further than it is.
We can go out a little past half, 5/8 of an inch
and we'll be fine.
The last thing we did was shove the tungsten
up inside the cup, that was a little learning experience
for me I had a hard time getting the arc lit because
it's up inside there, forces you to long arc.
You don't know where you're at.
It's hard to get the filler wire
on the leading edge of the pool as well.
So I hope that answered the viewer's questions and concerns
about proper gas flow, trying to link a couple
of issues here together and create some scenarios
of what happens if you violate
the envelopes, the window of opportunity for success here.
So I sure hope this helps.
I learned a little bit, I hope you did too.
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Lady standing behind me, she ran into the back of me
with her bag and she goes uh oh, I'm really sorry.
I said that's all right,
I just thought Dabs Wellington was on this plane.
There's so much gas blowin' outta here
I can hear it echoing through my brain cavity.
(loud, erratic gas escaping)
Now that's some serious gas flow.
Nice! (laughing)