First couple of fillet welds

[Abbadon]

Finally sorted out my mig setup last week after owning the actual welder for a year... Young babies tend to slow the best of us down a bit!

Got my gas (was the last thing I was missing) and a week without the missus or little one around has given me enough time to finally have a bash at melting things! This is my first foray in to the world of welding, apart from one go at dc arc a guy at work let me have a go on about 2 years ago for 10 minutes.

My welds on bits of flat sheet went well so I havnt bothered posting those, I have read enough on here in the last year that I mamaged to tweak settings on 1.5mm and 2.5mm sheet to my satisfaction of weld quality and penetration.

I have hence moved on to butt welds and fillet welds, in different positions.

The butt welds also went well, but not taken photo's of those, but I will do that later today and post them.

What I really wanted to post was a couple of fillet weld pic's.

I was really pleased with the appearance of this pair of weld beads in the first picture, what do you think?

The third image is of the the back, the bead seems to have penetrated through to the other side, maybe could do with a tiny bit more penetration but its pretty much there I think? Its not fused the corner at the root, but deffo penetrated further up. Comments?

The second is my first attempt at a vertical weld fillet. Not quite as tidy! How can I improve this?
For all these fillets I had increased the wire speed by about 1 notch from flat and butt welding so it was on about setting 7 on the dial (130 amp clarke, running on 5% CO2 and argon mix, 0.8mm wire, power setting 2 of 4).

I was trying to do the christmas tree movement that some one else mentioned but not sure I was doing it right!

Andy

 

[malcolm]

That does look very neat - you've not used MIG before? For the fillet welds you look low on wire speed. The weld curves towards the plate and the heat is concentrated well away from the joint. Normally you'd try to end up with a flat weld profile running 45% to the two sheets. Penetration is fine - you'll never penetrate through to the outside of the joint, the idea is for the thickness of weld at any point to be at least as thick as the two bits of metal so there's no loss of strength. Less side to side movement of the torch maybe as well.

I see you are welding upwards for the vertical joint. Again a higher wire speed, possibly more power and move faster. Apart from that I'm not much good at neat upwards welds either so will wait for someone else to comment.

 

[Hitch]

The ones that youve done on the flat look nice. Penetration looks pretty good, a tiny bit more wire perhaps.

Try doing the same settings, but instead of weavingback and forth, move slighty slower in a straight line.

The vertical one, i assume you were trying to go upwards?

Have a go downwards, you might need to lower settings slightly to stop the weld overtaking your torch. Should be very easy to get a nice neat weld like that. Point the torch upwards about 30 degrees, go straight down, dont worry about weaving.

If you are only going up to 2-3mm, moving downward will be adequate. Uphill is stronger on thicker material, but for thinner stuff you can happily burn into it nicely.

 

[Paul.]

Yes as Hitch says, on thinner materials vertical down is the way to go, you will tend to move a bit faster and therefore reduce the heat input, and minimise distortion, on inside corner fillets your not looking to penetrate through the material, just into the corner, vertical up and weaving are for thicker materials.