Many thanks for an excellent live chat. There was a lot of great information, and a lot of things I’m going to pay more attention to, for example, watching for good cleaning action in front of the puddle rather than concentrating solely on the cleaning action at the sides of the puddle.

The personal anecdotes are the icing on the cake, Jody. It’s always interesting to see how you go about trying to identify an unknown workpiece, or at least to rule out certain grades. The more I learn about the metallurgy, the more interesting I find it.

Thanks, Jody. Looking forwards to Part 2.

It might be a simple little project, but it keeps bringing plenty to the conversation, Jody.

Given that this was an old, “mature” piece of aluminium, did you have to set a higher DCEP cleaning action on the AC balance than you might otherwise have done? (It goes without saying you obviously were using square wave).

Thanks, Jody; I’m eagerly anticipating the next phase when Aren sends it back.

DZ DZ, thank you so much for those 2 links; I’m going to get them printed off. I’m of an era where I far prefer to read stuff on paper rather than on a screen. I just received my copy of the 32nd edition of the Hobart Pocket Welding Guide from the USA, but I see there’s no mention of 4943 aluminium filler on Page 122, whereas your first link is up to date and much more comprehensive. Thanks again for going to the trouble of making me aware of these links.

Great video on how to fix a wheel, Matt. Only joking!!! You coukdn’t have made it more clear. A neighbour once asked me if I’d weld his alloy wheel, and I told him under no circumstances would I do so, and for his own safety he should scrap it.

If you haven’t already recorded part 2, would you explain in the video how you would go about trying to identify the specification/composition of the base alloy so you can decide on the correct filler wire you’d use?

Many thanks, Matt.

Hey, Jody,

The high-speed pulse really does make a difference; any idea why that is? Is it possibly that the puddle freezes faster on pulse, though to the naked eye, it doesn’t look like it?

You said you’re never letting the pre-heat fall below 500F; why’s that?

From your intro, this is the sort of job where an understanding of steel alloys and the iron-carbide diagram would certainly help to ensure you ask the right questions before you start. Perhaps you could throw in the odd “down-and-dirty metallurgy” video from time to time, because no matter how good a weld one can lay down, it’s no good if you’ve ruined the metallurgical properties through ignorance?

Padding beads is never boring: it tests your consistency to the limit if it isn’t to look like a horrible mess afterwards. It’s really hard work to make it look even half decent, and a lot more demanding than a single-bead joint!

Great video, Jody; looking forwards to Part 2.

Hey Jody,

You’re wearing a leather pad over the back of your left glove as a heat-protector and low-friction support for your left hand. Would it be overkill to make such a pad from tig-finger material?

I’ve gone over your comments and thought processes about the voltage and wire-feed settings, especially noting how you decide to increase and decrease the voltage depending on how hot you want the next pass to be, and setting the wire speed as a deviation from the norm at that voltage depending on how much weld you want to deposit, bearing in mind the desired thickness of the next (cover) pass. I was interested that you said the increased spatter was due to the wire feed speed being LOWER than normal for the given voltage; would you similarly get more spatter if the wire speed were higher than normal, too? That would possibly suggest that the ideal wire speed not only sounds like frying bacon, but also has the minimum amount of spatter, as well?

Nice to watch that downhill MIG root, especially after you and Aren discussed it on last night’s live chat.

Now, you said that you were going to set the Rebel’s inductance setting a bit higher than recommended. What was the reason for that? Were you aiming to reduce the spatter with a higher inductance?

That cut-and-etch looked perfect to me: great symmetry either side of the centre-line, and a nice shape to the reinforcement and very interesting to see how the etch has brings out the root, fill, and cover passes and the different crystal sizes. You must have been well pleased how that turned out.

Thanks, Jody.

I swear you fellows could turn the instructions on the side of an empty packet of 6010 electrodes into a fascinating 90 minutes’ live chat. This live call did, indeed, throw up plenty of topics, each of which could take up a future full hour.

One thought for a future video is coupon preparation. I think I had a rough picture of what you were talking about when discussing how you could easily fail a test solely by badly preparing the coupon, but I would love to see a demonstration of the mistakes you were talking about, to see exactly what you meant. That phrase you used really summed it up: you can’t make a bad weld better by the preparation of the coupon, but you can certainly ruin a good weld by bad coupon preparation.

One thing you didn’t mention about mirror welding immediately struck me: you have only one shot at it. Get it wrong, and there’s no way you can get a grinder in so you can start again. Or maybe you can get good at mirror grinding, too. 😳

Many thanks.

Hey, Jody,

I love to see the arc force flowing the front of the puddle into the root, and your close-up arc shots show that to perfection.

Now, about melt-through, or nipping the backside. If I saw that in just the odd place, I’d know that it must have been due to a lack of consistency. I noticed at one point you said that you were pushing the wire in to avoid melt-through. If lack of consistency wasn’t the problem and melt-through was in more than the odd spot, I’d look at the following:

Current setting too high.

Arc not tight enough.

Torch angle not equal.

Not enough wire feed.

Lingering too much.

Is there anything else you would add to that list? I haven’t listed increasing the filler wire diameter because that could bring added problems in chilling the puddle too much.

Martin