Hi all,
First post here, so forgive me if this has been covered before. I did a bit of searching, but could not find anything on this -
Background - spent many a happy hour decades ago making tables and trailers out of angle iron for fun with a SIP stick welder, but now I’ve bought a cheap Clarke MIG welder and I’m getting the bits ready to do thin metal welding to repair an old motorbike using ‘real’ gas MIG welding, so this is all new to me.
I’ve ‘bought’ a small (2L) Ar/CO2 bottle from Adams, ordered a regulator and now looking at connecting that to the MIG welder. Done a lot of interweb and YouTube browsing and realise that the regulator pressurises its outlet when the gas is not flowing, so when it starts flowing it has an over-pressure bulge to get rid of before the flow settles down. My thought is that with thin plate welding involving many short tack welds that this must lead to excessive gas usage, a surge at every trigger pull, yes? So my thought to minimise this is to make as much of the tube from the regulator to the welder as small as possible, thus storing and using less over-pressure gas. If this makes sense is it something worth doing, 4mm pipe almost all the way? Or would that add too much restriction (bearing in mind that the umbilical tube to the handle must surely be all thin tubing already)? Perhaps I’d have to swap to thicker pipe for thick metal welding, but that would be ok, and I’ve no plans for that right now.
What do you reckon? I think it could save a fair amount of wasted gas… especially as I’ll be doing lots of practice welds as I learn the ropes.
Cheers,
Ian
First post here, so forgive me if this has been covered before. I did a bit of searching, but could not find anything on this -
Background - spent many a happy hour decades ago making tables and trailers out of angle iron for fun with a SIP stick welder, but now I’ve bought a cheap Clarke MIG welder and I’m getting the bits ready to do thin metal welding to repair an old motorbike using ‘real’ gas MIG welding, so this is all new to me.
I’ve ‘bought’ a small (2L) Ar/CO2 bottle from Adams, ordered a regulator and now looking at connecting that to the MIG welder. Done a lot of interweb and YouTube browsing and realise that the regulator pressurises its outlet when the gas is not flowing, so when it starts flowing it has an over-pressure bulge to get rid of before the flow settles down. My thought is that with thin plate welding involving many short tack welds that this must lead to excessive gas usage, a surge at every trigger pull, yes? So my thought to minimise this is to make as much of the tube from the regulator to the welder as small as possible, thus storing and using less over-pressure gas. If this makes sense is it something worth doing, 4mm pipe almost all the way? Or would that add too much restriction (bearing in mind that the umbilical tube to the handle must surely be all thin tubing already)? Perhaps I’d have to swap to thicker pipe for thick metal welding, but that would be ok, and I’ve no plans for that right now.
What do you reckon? I think it could save a fair amount of wasted gas… especially as I’ll be doing lots of practice welds as I learn the ropes.
Cheers,
Ian