welcome to weld.com i'm paul your host and today we'll be talking about mig welding 10
gauge material i will demonstrate on 14 gauge carbon steel for those of you that will ask
how thick is 14 gauge well 14 gauge is 0.075 of an inch in decimals and 5 64 in fractions
which in my book in my past experiences is thin gauge material i consider any material eighth
inch which is 0.125 of an inch thick or you can go through the 14 16 18 20 all the way up to 24 gauge
thin material i'm used to welding heavy wall steam headers and power plants refineries that
material is up to six inch thick so when welding thin game material you have to use different
consumables smaller diameter wire tips rollers along with all the changing your welding technique
i will talk more about the technique during the demonstrations on three welding joints a lap joint
a corner joint and a t-joint and i'm not talking about making these code textbook picture perfect
welds like on a quarter inch thick and thicker material steel or stainless or something this is
thin carbon steel material is a different animal when it comes to welding thin gauge material you
need to stock up on the truckload of patients because you're definitely going to need them
so like i mentioned earlier in the video you know techniques a lot different than welding some
thick structural steel like this you know just consistently welding on the piece and welding on
the piece thin gauge material you know if you don't have a good fit up then you know you're
gonna experience a lot of warping blow through melting just all sorts of headaches so you know
getting a good fit up doesn't guarantee you good welding results all the time so if you don't take
your time make sure your tacks are close together while welding your piece make sure you're jumping
around the piece so you're not putting all the heat in one area you know then of course letting
the piece cool off in between your tacks you know thin gauge materials using a lot of different
varieties of stuff like ornamental iron barbecue grills replacement panels and cars and trucks
patch holes and skin casing you know which i call a band-aid you know mainly things that don't hold
a lot of weight or pressure that's what we used to engage material for so first i'll demonstrate
a corn joint so we're using the everlast storm 215c and it's a very universal machine it does
flux corn stick and plasma cutting so we're using it for the 75 25 solid core wire so we'll go we'll
go to the wire what we're going to use today and it's the vulcan from harbor freight believe it
or not some good stuff and of course you know 11 pounds full 70 s6 solid core wire .025 diameter
what we're going to do now we're going to go through the settings we're going to use the power
set settings to see how it comes up and i'll start out with them and if it welds good i'll leave them
there if not i'll tweak the perimeters go up or down and see what we need to do so you know when
you're welding this thin material you know you need to watch your perimeters and not well too hot
because you will get blow food it's fixable but it's a lot easier to have your perimeter set right
on a practice piece before you do any kind of blow through or melt through like you see here
so we got set on 14 gauge which we have 14 gauge material and it says we're gonna have 16.8 volts
at 155 inches per minute so we'll get started there and of course it's set on wire diameter
it doesn't have it's got a 0.23 setting and an 030 setting so we'll start at the o23
even though we're burning o25 today and see how it welds and for the gas mixture we're
going to be using 75 25 today so as you see we have the corner joint prepped and tacked up
so i got four tacks on it and you can use this as an example if this thing was just
six inches long or two foot long you could put the tacks a lot closer together but since this is new
material i figured i'd try them you know an inch inch and a half apart so when i weld this i first
hit it with the tiger paw and knock off the high spots on the tacks and then i'll start here then i
go all the way to the end and then i'll come back to the middle and that'll help any distortion or
any warping so hopefully this helps you guys out there because i know somebody in america right now
has got an everlast machine i don't know about the harbor freight wire in it if they have that but i
know they're using 75 25 at home trying to weld some sheet metal it's go everybody does it you
know you use this for an example too for replacing panels on your car and stuff if i was replacing
panels on the car i'd have my tacks about a half inch apart so when you weld it you only weld a
half inch at a time and then you skip around whatever you're welding you don't stay right
in the same area that'll keep it from warping and distorting and all that so let's get started
so
so as you can see i showed you what the well looks like with a nice fit up and it come out really
nice nice and consistent even though i stopped twice so now we're going to show you a bad fit
up and weld it out so just a little side joke you know i'm in the pipe fitting and all that pipe
welding mainly and you usually have a fitter so i bought this hood right here with the eyeball on it
so that eyeball is constantly watching that fitter and you know what
i'ma fire the helmet because the eyeball wasn't watching that fit that's a bad fit
so when i proceed with this i got attack on each end as you seen
and what i'm gonna do to fix it i'll try to get tacks i get every half inch apart and then weld
in between the tacks so that's how i'll fix it i'm sure the audience has got three five ten
different ways how to fix it but i'm just going to show you how i do it the easiest way that i know
so as you can see i got the attacks very very close to one another
and the bigger the gap got the closer i put the tacks and i don't even have to mess with
the heat so now i'm going to continue to finish this off
so i got them both done got the second one polished up with the grinder which took
three times as long but i got them both side by side here and you can tell the knives fit up
one because i left the i didn't grind the weld or anything you don't have to and it come out really
nice tight tied in the tie-ins are really good so the second one here the eyeball on the hood
got fired i had to run him off so i had to weld this thing up and i wasn't real happy with it but
just to go to show you if you take your time and just like i said earlier in this video if you got
a boatload of patients because you're going to need them messing with this stuff with gaps if
you don't get good fit up but you can't achieve a very good quality looking weld well you don't even
see the weld anymore because i had to grind it off but you can achieve really nice quality stuff
you know even though if you have a bad fit up take your time let it cool between the tacks
when you're welding it and then of course you're gonna have to grind it because it looks
ugly and you guys out there know a good fit up goes a long way because it's a lot easier to weld
so the next joint we're going to do as you can see it's called a lap joint and this is my favorite
joint to weld because it's flat and it's easy so everybody out there likes easy and so do i and
another thing is too the eyeball was watching the fitter on this one so that's why there's a
good fit up so what i'll do is i'll tack it up and like i did before i put four or five tacks
on it and then i weld in between the tacks so we started out with the preset on the corner joint
which i didn't like it wasn't hot enough so we jacked it up a little bit kept the same wire speed
which was 155 inches per minute and jacked the bolts up to 18 volts so now we got the lap joint
and i turned it up to 18.5 volts at 170 inches per minute on wire speed and i readjusted the
thickness on the metal thickness so i went to eighth inch so let's get to welding it out
so i said a few minutes ago that i was gonna weld this segment i'm gonna go ahead and weld this end
segment to keep the heat the heat transfer down so you have to worry about warping and all that
stuff so i should have did that in the first place and told you that but anyway i made the
mistake this time so anyway i'm gonna do this last segment and then go back here and then do that
as you can see in the in the camera there when i was welding i was using that little whip motion
quick and quick and fast quick and fast so hopefully that helps you guys out your little tips
and you know it depends on the angle of the gun you know you don't you don't want to tilt
it back too far you kind of want to angle it in and just use quick little whips to uh
tie it into the other piece of metal and you see it's uh i mean just like i said in the
beginning of the video i don't expect to get a picture-perfect x-ray looking well you know
but i'm doing the best i can what i got so now we're going to go to the t-joint
and then we'll close this thing out as you can see i got the t-joint tacked up
so i got four tacks on this and the t-joint holds the heat pretty good because you can turn it up a
little bit more and you got somewhere to push that metal up on to you know what i'm saying so you can
spread it out a little bit compared to a lap joint you don't really have you know their lips only the
thickness of the material so you have nowhere really to wash it up on this is what i did for
the lap joint and and i want some more heat so in order to turn it up more i could go through all
them settings but i'm just going to keep it simple just turn the power set off i'm going to go to 19
and a half and go to about 180 inches a minute so we'll see how that runs
all right so you you'll see in in the video on the arc shots when i start this i don't start on
my tag i'll start back here make sure that wire's hot and drag it into that tack because i didn't
i didn't prep the tack and knock it down or anything so i'm just tying into the existing tack
without knocking it knocking the height off of it or anything or knocking the thickness out of it
so hopefully it'll tie in good and we'll check it out
so as you can see all four pieces come out pretty good to me especially
you know me welding thin thin material that i'm not used to welding but i'm getting more
used to it thanks for watching the video i hope you enjoyed it as much as i did i had fun doing it
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