- Ready?
- Wanna do the intro?
- Huh?
- Wanna do the intro?
Do it man, do it.
- Alright.
Welcome back YouTube, it's Jason Becker with weld.com
here with Bob Moffett.
Today, we're gonna talk a little bit
about RapidArc and RapidX, the differences
between the two and the advantages of both.
So, let's get started Bob.
- Okay.
- [Jason] So we'll start off with some RapidArc,
it's a hybrid between pulse and short circuit,
you see.
- Okay.
- Best of both worlds.
- Okay.
- [Bob] What gas we're gonna run today?
- We're gonna run some 90/10.
- Okay.
- [Jason] And probably right around 40 CFH.
- Run it up there a little higher than normal then
- Right
- Because of fast travel speeds
- A lot faster travel speed
- You wanna outrun your gas envelope
- Right
- Okay.
- So you know as compared to traditional pulse
that a lot of people are familiar with
with RapidArc we can get 40 percent faster travel speeds
and about 15 percent less weld spatter
So production goes up and the cleanup,
the post-weld cleanup goes down.
- That's a big deal, no labor in clean up.
Gotta question for you,
- Yessir
- Man we've got all these programs in there
so you just go to your material type
your wire size, and we've got values
that automatically pop up.
- Right, so if we walk through that.
So if I go, I can go to a search mode.
So say I want to do RapidArc but I'm stuck over here
on SMAW for low hydrogen electrode,
so I go in here to the weld search mode,
click on begin, I know I wanna do some
gas metal arc welding or metal inert gas
depending on what part of the country you're from
and I know that the material we're working on today
we're doing some two by eight,
three sixteenths coupons, carbon steel.
- Could you say coupons?
- I said coupons.
- You're good man,
- Weld coupons
- Welcome to the world.
(laughing)
That's good stuff right there.
- Run, we're gonna run some
035 diameter, 70S6 series wire
and then we'll go back and select our wave forms,
so I can run it through here,
I can do constant voltage, regular CV
and then I can input my own wire feed speed
and voltage, dependent on what I like
or what the welding procedure specification calls for.
So we'll go back here to the RapidArc,
we'll get that dialed in.
Now you'll notice the wire feed speed
is a heck of a lot faster than you'll see
with pulse or short circuit.
- [Bob] Man oh man,
800 inches a minute.
- [Jason] So we're gonna run 800 inches a minute
with a trim value of 1.
So when we set this up depending on the wire feed speed
that we want to use to weld on these coupons here,
we'll, the voltage is already pretty set.
So we've got some little elf running around in there,
as soon as I put 800 inches a minute
he goes over there and he bumps the voltage up
I'm guessing around 24 volts,
25 volts if I had to take a guess.
But then we have our trim value here,
and that's going to allow us to play
with our arc length a little bit more.
- And trim value relates to that voltage.
- Exactly, its just a more fine tune adjustment for that,
so if I want a little bit longer arc length,
probably going to give me a little bit wider of a puddle
a little bit more wettening on the size,
and if I want to shorten that up,
especially on thinner materials or tight spots,
if I want to narrow up my weld profile,
I can go ahead and drop that down.
- Okay, so
- Especially getting out of positions.
- Plus number on the trim value on this machine
gives you more arc voltage.
- More arc length
- More arc voltage, more arc length.
- Right.
- But you can also, it brought it up here
and it just gave you these standard values
- Right
- 800 inches a minute, and we're defaulted
at 1.0 across there for your trim value or that.
But you could still play with both of them.
- Yeah, we could and every welder's going to weld
just a little bit different,
you're probably gonna like something a little bit different
than I do.
Typically I mean, when it hits one,
that's usually what I run,
unless I'm getting out of position.
- Okay.
- Then I start playing around with those trim values
a little bit more just a little bit more unforgiving
out of position than it is flat.
- Sure.
All right, I think we're ready to make weld.
- All right man, lets hit it.
(Laser zapping)
- Now notice your profile on this first run here,
acceptable but you can notice that it's got
a little peak to it.
So on the second run you put in here,
you softened up that wire feed speed a little bit
by about 25 inches a minute
and that made a pretty big difference.
- [Jason] Yeah it made that puddle a little more manageable,
when you pull that trigger you've gotta go quick.
- [Bob] Yeah, might want to have an idea
of where you're going before you ever pull the trigger
'cause it's gonna blow out some material in a hurry.
- Oh yeah, mhm.
- I can understand why you'd want to run,
or I'm sorry,
I understand why you'd wanna run 40 cubic feed per hour,
'cause I'm watching your weld
and you're red way out here about an inch behind your nozzle
so you need to flood that area.
- [Jason] It's all about the gas coverage.
- [Bob] Speed, high speed spark stream is a lot smaller,
we're not getting anything stuck to the material.
So we're not worked up because of our travel speeds.
- [Jason] Yeah and I mean you've got less heat.
- [Bob] Also traveling quite a bit too.
- [Jason] So I mean you get less heat input
because you're increasing your travel time
although you're increasing your AMPs, your voltage
you know, you're decreasing
you're increasing that wire feed speed
so you get a lot less heat input,
a lot less joules as they would say.
And overall it's a real fast welding process,
it's really good for hard automation and robotics,
things of that nature.
I don't think man was meant to go that fast
with that much consistency.
So it does really well in the robotic applications.
- Interesting process, so this was RapidArc
- Right
- And we've got another one we want to showcase
which is RapidX?
- Got one more we're going to showcase,
it's RapidX process.
So it's very similar to the RapidArc,
RapidX I guess what kind of born out of the RapidArc,
so they came out with RapidArc,
which is basically a hybrid between short circuit
and pulse spray.
So you know they redefined that waveform a little bit
and they developed RapidX,
which is going to give us a little bit less travel speed
but a lot less spatter,
so instead of 50 percent increase in travel speed
with RapidX we're only going to have about
a 40 percent increase in travel speed
as compared to traditional pulse.
But the upside is we're gonna have about 30 percent
less spatter, so its even less spatter
than the RapidArc process.
- [Bob] So this is RapidX.
(Laser Zapping)
- [Jason] Typically with both of these processes
you want to keep about a three quarter inch contact
tip to work distance.
- [Bob] Kind of like a traditional spray
- [Jason] Yes
- [Bob] Pull it back there and let it happen.
Okay.
Between the two of them when you switched over
and pulled the trigger, I noticed a tone change.
RapidX is like higher pitch.
- [Jason] Much higher like I always refer to it
as a pissed off hornet.
- [Bob] Yeah, weed eater on steroids.
- [Jason] Oh yeah, you can definitely tell
just in the volume of it.
- [Bob] I also noticed that there was a lot
smaller of a spark stream.
I'm kind of watching what's going on
in and around your weld pool,
I'm watching the spark shower coming off of there
if you will.
But between the tone change and the sparks,
- [Jason] RapidArc's I think about ten inches faster
than the Rapid X, but I mean this one's sound,
the pitch is definitely a lot higher
and I think that's just because of the pulsing current.
- The weld pool freeze faster a little bit
on RapidX?
- [Jason] I think it freezes a little bit faster
on the RapidArc myself.
- [Bob] Okay, I'm just trying to notice,
I still notice you're nice and hot behind your gas nozzle
as you're going down through there.
- [Jason] Yeah it's leaving a hot trail behind it.
- [Bob] Which one do you like better?
- [Jason] I'm a bigger fan of RapidArc
than I am of RapidX.
I think its just a user preference.
We run a lot of RapidArc on the robot
when we're running that,
just seems like an easier process to run,
a little bit smoother.
Easier to get dialed in.
- [Bob] Get those values and that arc length trimmed down
- [Jason] Yeah I've kind of got everything
sorted out on that
I mean I probably need to play around with RapidX
a little bit more.
- I appreciate you having me in today
and showing me the different programs and values
and talking with us on camera and explaining it
to the viewers about what some of these programs will do.
- Yeah man, I'm glad to have you out here,
I'm glad I could be of help.
- Appreciate it.
- So this is Jason Becker with weld.com
here with Bob Moffett,
thank you guys for watching,
hope you guys enjoyed the video as much as we did making it.
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