hey Jody here with welding tips and tricks' dot com... let's do it... in this video
I'm gonna be comparing a couple of different TIG cups on some aluminum lap
joints and I'll be doing this on an aluminum cube that I made in a previous
video just to get more out of the cube if you want to see the outside corner
welds on the cube that's a whole separate video you can find it pretty
easily just look for this picture right here on YouTube and if you're not on
YouTube I'll try to link it up so I'm just putting them diagonally like this I
like to tack weld using a sharpened electrode and then I let it kind of ball
up however it will but for tack welding I get a little bit more crisp of a start
and also for tack welds I like to use a smaller diameter filler metal so that my
tacks are smaller when I come back over them I can kind of totally weld over
them without telling where they are I'm gonna get a tack weld on all four
corners of this and maybe even one or two more and then just weld it out with
a 3/32 2.4 millimeter 4043 filler metal I'm using a furick number 8 pro a clear
cup here with about 20 cfh of argon and a little bit later I will switch over to
a different cup and we'll compare the different results I've got my amperage
is set to about a hundred and forty on the machine and just using the foot
pedal and I would estimate that I'm somewhere around 120 amps for most of it
of course I'm gonna be it a little bit more when it's cold and I'm trying to
get the heat up and then when I'm getting toward the end of a well but
I'll be backing up to less than that but 120 amps on the average I started
experimenting with clear cups like this number eight here to help me film this
process and you can see it's really helping us all see what's going on here
even on trailing shots or on leading shots you can look through the cup which
is really helpful when you're welding down and into a corner or something like
that I find it just helpful in just helping
me see better overall and of course helps me film something better for us
all to watch and learn from well weld a couple of more with this number eight
cup and again I'm a twenty cfh of argon I've got the AC balance set to 67% I'm
on a dynasty 280 and the AC frequency on a hundred Hertz I'm using the default
soft square wave here again amperage about 120 trying to hold a fairly tight
arc again I'm using a three thirty to forty forty three electrode things are
going okay this is really clean metal I mean this is something I ordered from a
company owned line is all sheared out all cheer to size with with a protective
peel code on one side so basically I just removed the peel coat gave it a
wipe down with acetone and then went to welding now there are certain there are
certain jobs that you might want to go further than that on the cleanliness you
might want to actually go to the extent of a carbide burr or some type of
carbide tool on those edges to get them perfectly clean but it just depends on
what you need sometimes it's not worth going through all that effort sometimes
it is just depends on your customer or code requirements and things like that
now I'm resting a Tig finger right here on this just to kind of demonstrate what
you might do if you're welding on something that you can't spin around on
the benchtop also a flex head torch helps to in a
situation like this to get the right angle that you want now I've got a
different visual perspective on this joint it looks completely different to
me a different line of sight and so I'm trying to weld it at the same amperage
but after it was all done I could tell it's a little bit colder like I'd
probably welded it at about five less amps than I did the previous welds it's
still going in okay I would call it still acceptable it's still flowing into
the root pretty good but you can tell each one of those ripples is definitely
more distinct than it was in some of the previous ones so I'm going to correct
that on the next shot would it be nice if you had a amperage display readout
inside of your welding hood it would really be helpful for things like this
it's coming it'll be here before we know it
I'm doing the same thing here I'm resting on my tick finger I'm trying to
just glide along move the torch ahead about an eighth of an inch at a time
about once per second or so trying to feed the same amount of filler in there
each time so this one's going in a little bit nicer the ripples are sort of
blended together and not quite as distinct just a little bit more amperage
made the difference here notice the the frosty looking area at the toes of each
each weld there that's a nice broad cleaning path there and that's what you
get with the number 8 cup like this where the gas lends if you're looking
for some nice soft yet durable TIG gloves I got them now
I searched a long time I finally found a source for these they're really nice I'm
switching over to the ally 5 kit clear Cup now I'm going to drop my argon down
to about 15 cfh instead of 20 the amount of argon you need is mostly determined
by the diameter or the inside diameter of the cup you're using so you can use a
factor of 2.2 and get right in the ballpark but there are always exceptions
I say 2.2 so this is a 5 Cup if you were to multiply 5 times 2.2 you'd come up
with 11 and it would be enough flow for this little cup but because sometimes I
extend my electrode out a little bit farther for filming I went ahead and
bumped it up to about 15 I didn't change any of the settings on the machine I
didn't change the a/c balance I just put the smaller Cup on and reduce the flow
of argon a little bit and you can see already a much more narrow band of
cleaning action also called cathodic etching that's what breaks up the
aluminum oxide on the surface of the weld and lets you have a clean puddle on
aluminum when you're welding on alternating current so this little cup
does a great job on aluminum it can save you a little bit of gas it just depends
on the application just depends on like if I was welding a dirty casting I
probably wouldn't want to use the number 5 I would I would prefer going to the
number 8 cup on this close-up you can tell there's hardly any cleaning action
reaching out outside the toe of the weld here's the ally five cleaning action
compared to the eight pro a nice frosty look a nice band there again it just
depends on the application depends on what you're doing or sometimes it
depends on the customer requirements here's a shot of a start of a weld and
kind of looking through the cup almost look at where I'm feeding wire another
benefit of a clear cup you don't always need that but sometimes you do sometimes
it's very helpful to be able to look through the cup if you pay attention
here you might notice me raising and lowering the torch I've shown this
several times before but basically I'm just using a really tight arc when I'm
trying to push that metal into the root and then raising as I feel as I feed the
rod and the puddle grows in height so I don't clean electrodes all day long I'm
pretty good at Duffing electrodes so that little technique has has kind of
proved useful for me now I got a lot of lap joints on this cube so I wanted to
show lots of beginnings and ends and different angles trailing shots and
shots like this and whenever I even edit this stuff I learn something like I
didn't realize I was over lapping the corner of the edge quite as much as I
was of course this is magnified a couple of times here too but you know maybe I
don't need to overlap by that much but aluminum beads tend to be a little bit
bigger than you think sometimes another thing on aluminum I had a little bit of
extra rod and swirl as I taper off to prevent a little crater eye which often
times actually is a crack or will turn into a crack so you don't want that
got to come up with a technique to prevent crater cracks on aluminum that's
for sure a lot of times cracks initiate there and will turn out the whole part
will fail eventually all from one little star crack that started off as a crater
dot so it doesn't matter how pretty your weld is if the thing fails because you
left a crater and it cracked one of the best things I've learned about using
these clear cups is they just tend to light up the whole area around the bead
you can see where you're going you can see through the cup I find it very
beneficial for me with my eyes not being quite what they were when I was 21 so
you're the least a little bit interested in learning more about the clear cups as
well as my tig fingers tig gloves and tig accessories
all kinds of stuff visit weld monger dot com that's how I support these videos
thanks so much see you next time
you