Tig Welding Stainless Steel

[hotrodder]

Alan, stop weaving and concentrate on practicing maintaining a SHORT arc length. Ideally no longer than the dia of the tungsten

Arc length is covered in the tutorials, also look at these threads http://www.mig-welding.co.uk/forum/threads/arc-length.7862/ & http://www.mig-welding.co.uk/forum/threads/tig-welding-stainless-manifold-help.23592/



With the correct arc length and no weaving you'd have one small weldpool at the point where the two parts meet instead of a large void bridged with filler metal (red arrow). Heat input would be lower for a given amperage too and the weldpool will much easier to control

FWIW this is 3" dia 1.5mm wall welded with 1 or 1.2mm filler wire after brushing the colour off (no point on exhaust stuff, this was for something else)

 

[Mr shiney]

Alan, stop weaving and concentrate on practicing maintaining a SHORT arc length. Ideally no longer than the dia of the tungsten

Arc length is covered in the tutorials, also look at these threads http://www.mig-welding.co.uk/forum/threads/arc-length.7862/ & http://www.mig-welding.co.uk/forum/threads/tig-welding-stainless-manifold-help.23592/

View attachment 71010

With the correct arc length and no weaving you'd have one small weldpool at the point where the two parts meet instead of a large void bridged with filler metal (red arrow). Heat input would be lower for a given amperage too and the weldpool will much easier to control

FWIW this is 3" dia 1.5mm wall welded with 1 or 1.2mm filler wire after brushing the colour off (no point on exhaust stuff, this was for something else)
View attachment 71011

I have a bit of a "touch on".......

 

[Richard.]

A close up on a fillet joint 1mm gage ss. This is the shiney surface finish you should be aiming for and purging on the back side helps this further. As hr said no need to remove heat tint on an exhaust because as soon as you thrash the knickers off it the tint is only gonna come back. On other fabs particularly if they are gonna be used outside or in hygiene/food etc then the tinted area/oxides/colours should be removed.

 

[AlanRT]

The problem I had was that the larger diameter part was approx 4-5mm in diameter larger than the inner part, so had a gap all the way around which I had to fill, in hind sight I should have tried to close this up a bit to aid the welding. I'll get a bit more practice in before stripping it back down and rebuilding it. Thank you for the help guys, it's really appreciated.