Greetings

[Dave3066]

Hi everyone

I'm Dave and I live in the Scottish Borders town of Stow. I've joined the forum to learn about welding. I drive a 1972 Rover P6 as my everyday car and sooner or later (probably sooner ) it's going to need some welding work done on it. I did some welding at college many years ago, both electric arc and oxy/acetelene but I've "borrowed" my dad's MIG welder to have a go. It's a rather old Sealy MIG 100XT Turbo II and my dad said he could never get the hang of it. So I'll be checking out the tutorials and getting myself some sheet steel to practise with. Hopefully before long I'll be producing some decent welds.

Cheers all

Dave

 

[Iain Westland]

Hi and welcome Dave, just shout up for advice, plenty here will happily help!!

 

[Freshfabrications]

Hi Dave,

I just joined too,

the main things you need to get to know for a mig begginer are;

1 How the whole wire feed mechanism works and is adjusted and wire size in roller Vee's, this is so you can untangle/reassemble and adjust for the best feed of the wire, even the best machines have tangles and jams happen if things are set wrong.

2 You need to know how to set the voltage and the amps/wire feed speed,
Volts is in the most simple explination how hot things get in the arc ie low volts = lower heat and high volts lots of heat, match your volts to metal thickness, low volts thin metal high volts thick metal

You will have to experiment with volts and thicknesses its the onlyway you will learn

Then you have to tune the amps/wire feed speed to get the right sound, in simple terms this is like the sound of bacon sizzling in the pan, if it crackles too loud you will get lots of excess filler material spattering all over the work so turn it down slightly and keep checking untill it gives a nice low spatter weld.

If the amps are too low the weld will build up like a bird poop sitting on top of the parent metal and the edge of the weld metal will not blend with a smothe transition into the perant materials your joining.

3 If you have the amps all the way down and your burning holes through the metal or its hard to controll the moltern metal then turn your volts down a little retuning your amps each time untill it sounds/looks right.

If your amps are all the way up and its looking like its not blending in or melting with the parent metal turn the volts up a little.

Every time you adjust the volts re-tune the amps to make it right again.

4 Gas co2 argon mix for steel, pure tecnical argon for aluminiums and magnesium, set between 8 cfh and 15 cfh for average of .5mm to about 5mm

Thicker metal needs more heat (volts) and apropreately tuned amps and therefore more gas to sheald the metal while its hot

5 Mig is a general term for Metal inert gas but in actuality, Mag - Metal Active Gas (a tiny bit of oxygen or hydrogen) is for feritic, steels etc.
MIG is for none feritic, Aluminium, ally-magnesiun, ally-zinc etc and exotic metals

6 Always keep the torch cable un-twisted/un-looped and in as straight a line as possible so as not to impeed the filler wires travel through to the torch head.

7 Point the torch in the direction you are welding towards for thinner material
and some times drag the torch with it facing where you came from if its thick material or the machine is at the max setting and not welding hot enough.

There are also some great how-to's on youtube but most of all just practice and practice and play with settings then do some welding, then come back to ask questions, I hope this is basic enough to follow, best of luck.

 

[Sparkey]

Impressive reply Jon!

Only a few little things i would like to add:
I'm not sure Dave has that many options for his settings....if i'm correct he only has 2 power settings (1 and 2) and wire speed...
And as for shielding gas, for DIY use he will be fine around 10 liter per minute, too much gas flow won't help either!
Keep it simple, someone who has never used a mig welder doesn't know all the terms yet!
Welcome to the forum Dave! Be sure to let us know how you get on and do post some pics!!

 

[Dave3066]

Impressive reply Jon!

Only a few little things i would like to add:
I'm not sure Dave has that many options for his settings....if i'm correct he only has 2 power settings (1 and 2) and wire speed...
And as for shielding gas, for DIY use he will be fine around 10 liter per minute, too much gas flow won't help either!
Keep it simple, someone who has never used a mig welder doesn't know all the terms yet!
Welcome to the forum Dave! Be sure to let us know how you get on and do post some pics!!

Yes thanks for that rather impressive reply. As you correctly stated the Mighty Mig 100XT Turbo has only a min/max and 1/2 switch. Anyway I've had a go, followed all the advice and this was what I achieved on my first attempt:

Pretty poor. But a little bit of investigation showed that the welder had been sat around for too long and needed some tlc. So I bought some new tips, a new reel of 0.8mm wire and a new torch shroud. Gave everything a good clean and set up and tried again, setting was Min and 1 so probably the lowest:

Better this time and I was getting all the good sizzling noises etc. Feeling brave I had a go at joining 2 plates with a lap joint:

Again not bad I thought and the other side showed some reasonable penetration:

This is where it all started to go a bit awry. I then had a go at welding a panel to the car. Bearing in mind all the advice I'd read here about making sure the metal was clean and bright and with not too much of an overlap this is what I achieved:

Grinding back with the flap wheel didn't make it look any better either.....



I think my biggest problem is that I'm having difficulty seeing what I'm doing. I've been using the crap hand held screen (I've ordered a proper visor from the weldequip shop). The other problem I'm having is trying to weld 1mm metal to a thicker section of the car (because that's where I've cut back to to remove all the rotten metal) and it's just not happening. When I was practising I was having to move the torch pretty fast to prevent blowing holes (as you can see in my practise pics). I read the advice on welding different thickness metal but couldn't get a decent weld pool to form. Again I think this comes back to not being able to see what's happening. All of this hasn't been helped by the fact that the longest joint is underneath so I'm welding upside down. Also because of where this hole is I found it very difficult to get any sort of clamp on the panel so I struggled to get the metal close enough. Even the tack welds didn't always hold. I persevered for a couple of hours, grinding back after every attempt but never really got anywhere. I went back to the practise metal and ran a few pretty decent beads again so I think the machine is set up ok.

Any further advice would be much appreciated but I think I'm going to leave it for now until I get my new visor.

Cheers

Dave