My First Welds (gasless mig)

[Agent]

Yea I like the look of stick welding. Ideally I'll go in to tig one day but we'll see.
Should have a scrap bonnet to practice on soon so I'll post any pics up when I do some on that as that will be thin so I'll try playing with the settings some more. Definitely felt that super short blasts on the torch were the only way it was not going to put a hole in it though.
If you were doing car sills for example would you tack the length of it and stitch weld between them?
I ask because on of my dads cars have rusty sills he's on about getting done, obviously I'd need a long stretch of the right metal thickness but wasnt sure if that's how you'd go about it?

 

[brokenbiker]

sills are the one thing I don't do with gasless. its not a technical thing, just personal.

but it can be done. yes I would tack every 20mm or so then use the back stepping method or the weld n skip method.

the back stepping method means you start at the last set of tacks, weld between them, then move back and weld to where your previous weld starts, then move back again, and so on. this reduces heat input and greatly reduces the chance of blowing through.

the weld n skip method is quite simply. if you have a load of tacks, and label each bit that needs welding as 1,2,3,4,5 etc you just weld 1,3,5,7,9 and then when you hit the end, go back and fill in the rest.

if you just start at the beginning and stitch the whole way in one go, you will have a fair bit of heat in the steel by the end, and this increases the chance of blowing through.

 

[Agent]

Thanks mate, valuable info there for me, another thing I'll be copy and pasting in to my notes.
I'm assuming its not going to look overly neat using that method but It's out of the way and can be smoothed and painted anyway.
Next weekend I'll give this method a crack then and see how I get on, ordered the anti spatter so I'll try that too

 

[brokenbiker]

it wont look neat with gasless, can make it look neat with a normal mig, but for sills if you are patching a part in I would prefer to grind it all back before painting it anyway.

I haven't seen many gasless welds that look 'neat'

 

[Agent]

Yea that's what I thought, the beads won't be showing and any raised parts can be grinder back like you said.

 

[hairymel]

hey sean thats cheating the top weld is mine!

l/h side blob is where i set the wire speed and then did a run on sean's doorstep in the rain. (feeble excuse i know)

first time i have used gasless wire and it was ultra splattery.

bottom 3 look much better with constant travel speed and not too fast


inside fillet joint is always trickier to get anywhere near right.

outside joint is a bit wrong in my eyes - but not sure how to explain it

considering you have only done 7 beads of weld it all looks very promising


i will drop of some more offcuts when i get a chance but am a bit tied up with disaster at the moment so it might be a while

 

[Agent]

Alright mel, lol yea I was gonna explain about your bead but thought I was making a mountain out of explaining it as it was.

Oh dear, it wasnt you in that fire at one of the units near the forest the other day was it?

Yea I'm not convinced that outside weld was a fillet one after doing some more research, because I didn't leave a groove so it was kind of just two bits of metal that were parallel on a corner lol, probs not how it's supposed to be done I'm sure.

Yea inside one seemed hard. No worries on the metal, if you do get a chance that'd be great but I've still got room on the other bits you gave me.

Take it easy mate

Sean

 

[hairymel]

unfortunately that fire spread to my workshop and we have lost everything.

i was at the other end of the country but apparently the smoke was visible for miles

 

[Agent]

Oh mate sorry to hear that, yea I saw it from the other side of the airport, thought BP was on fire at first, when I got there it was still miles away from that