Bought myself a TIG welder, any tig masters out there who want to give a crash course?

[J0RD0]

Yeah I already got everything

[drift kid]

Yeah sick, I would come give you a hand but kinda like 1500 km's away from you lol, try some thick stainless, like 3mm sheet doing a fillet weld, it's nice and thick so you don't have to worry about blowing through and you can go nice and slow to get a feel for the style, I recomend stainless because I fi d it's much easier than normal mild steel and flows much nicer, use a 2.4mm thoriated tungsten with I'd say a number 8 shroud to be safe and use a 2.4mm stainless filler. I find doing these sorts of welds a great practice exercise.

[J0RD0]

yeah i got to go and get some stainless sheets. 2.4 thoriated stick are already on their way in the mail. I heard alloy was good to practice on, but I guess ill be practicing a lot on both

[drift kid]

Yeah but alloy is very different, you need to practice both because one will not help much with the other, alloy is more about waiting for the pool to be ready. You'll get the hang of it, it's great fun to tinker with, once you have the hang of it, have a fiddle with the pulse settings, but read the manual for that side of things, because it gets confusing with the down and up slope etc..

[J0RD0]

ok cheers for the advice

[fantapants]

anything you really need to know can be found on welders tips and tricks... its a yanky site so they do things a bit different in technique and how they hold a torch, but the basics for getting started including a bunch of tafe quality demo vids with exercises...

also, your mig welding looks a lot like stop start welding??? any reason?

[blinded]

"Stack o' dimes"

'looks' better...so they say.

[J0RD0]

Its not stop starting, more like overlapping. Covers more area and yeah looks better

[fantapants]

yeah i know how the effect is done. stop start is the worst way to do it. the xtfab method is better, but still usually requires the welder to be set much colder than would be normally done for a "normal" run.

sorry, im another one that cant help due to location, but if you need any specific help on stainless steel tubing or pipe welding hit me up...