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

JODY COLLIER Hey, Jody, I realised I hadn’t asked about the next step after determining that the aluminium alloy you’ve been presented with is indeed weldable. Still knowing nothing about the base alloy composition, how would you go about deciding which grade of filler wire to use? (If you had some scrap of the same grade of base metal, you could at least test the strength of your intended filler, but you can hardly do that on another part of the customer’s forging/casting.). You made a great video not long ago on “basic TIG metal selection”, but, in it, you knew the grade of the base-metal aluminium before you started. In 2 other videos “TIG welding repair & tips and tricks for metal identification.” and “titanium welding fubar” you used a grinder to help identify the base metal. But you can’t do that with AL alloy. Is there perhaps an aluminium equivalent of 309L? How would you choose a filler for the unknown, but weldable, aluminium base metal?

Thanks

Martin

Brad Goodman Many thanks, Brad; I really appreciate that. Martin

Thanks Brad for pointing me to this in the Live Chat with Jody. Makes perfect sense, but I need to understand how you, personally, use the independent EN and EP adjustment.

After watching this video, my conclusion is that this setting is a fine tuning setting. So, if my inverter had this setting, I’d set up AC Balance as usual, and leave the independent setting set at zero or the mid setting. Then, if I needed more penetration, or felt the tungsten was excessively hot, I’d alter the independent setting to reduce EP to the point where the cleaning action was about to be affected.

So, I feel this is a setting that you could easily live without, getting the same effect by juggling about with AC Balance and the main current setting, but if you do have it, it could be a real time-saver, allowing you to give a simple tweak to this independent setting, without having to make any other adjustments. Is that right? If not, how do you set it up? Thanks, Brad.

Martin

Thanks for this. Mine is the 28th edition, and I see that the book’s now in colour, so I’ve ordered a new one from the US

Jody

A question for the Live Call on unfamiliar machines.,

Advanced TIG welding machines have a current-offset setting, allowing you say to set a different AC positive peak to the AC negative trough. So you could have, say 35 amps peak on the positive portion, but, say, 70 amps on the negative portion. But is this overkill; AC Balance already allows you to set the proportions of the duty cycle where the current is positive and negative ? So, you set AC Balance say for 35% cleaning action, as you might for a typical machine where the positive peak and negative troughs are symmetrical about the zero-current axis, and then you mess it up by playing around with current offset, or am I missing something? Is this another occasion where an advanced feature setting can bring more confusion than benefit; is it an unnecessary feature that’s included to justify the high cost of a machine?

Perfection! Thanks, Jody.