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Shop Studies, the joy of creation

The tricky bit was a custom mod to a miller machine setup with a spoolgun to do the toolboxes. Carol built it and hes dead now so no clue. What you saw was a large knob(rheostat?) In a box on the ground side of the work circuit
You could turn it all the way down and make it hiss like a snake, bad axe. That was the hardest comercial work i ever saw, even the boats were ez compared. The weld test at that shop was 48 inch mock up 6 inch wide strips , .100 diamond plate, continuous bead horizontal, with a spoolgun. At that shop, highway products, we only did tig for decoration
 
It's not that I don't believe you, it's that I was never able to get a suitable weld with a stick machine on sheet metal.
The minimum recommended stick welding applications is
18 gauge steel which is about .047" which is much thicker than a tin can and requires a 3/32 rod, good technique as well as fitment.
I believe the recommendation is to use an AC electrode setting instead of electrode positive or negative in DC to prevent burying the slag into the weld.
The best electric machines to learn on are stick welders, because they require good technique and hand to eye coordination,
You could probably teach a monkey how to use a wire feeder, where it requires better skills to weld with a stick.
The most common minimum recommended sheet steel thickness for sound stick welding is 1/16" with a 3/32 rod set at about 40 amps. Expect warp city as the heat control is near impossible with the only control is shoving more electrode into the puddle to cool it, or pulling back out to increase the heat as the arc grows longer. Tube welding will often add the challenges of off position electrode application on the fly, or multiple stop/starts which can lead to weld porosity aka bad welds
Keep in mind that a tack weld is anything less than a full inch too, so sticking metal together doesn't always qualify it as a weld, it only aids in holding material position.
Stick welding is best suited for heavier work where it's penetrating qualities excel, where wire fed machines offer pretty welds with higher transfer rates at the cost of lesser penetration.

Most modern production sheet metal work is done with wire feed machines, either in a metallic inert gas shielded (MIG) or flux cored wire that provides a shield much like a stick electrode.
Flux core machines excel over MIG machines in outdoor settings as the wind can often play a role in blowing the shielding gas away from your puddle on a MIG machine.
Free oxygen is your enemy when electro-arc welding.
The resulting welds aren't nearly as pretty as inert gas shielded ones, but very suitable for strength.
I did a lot of ultra high vacuum chamber work where our TIG welds were leak checked with a quadrapole mass spectrometer with helium used as the test gas, so we weren't just joining stainless tubing to hold it together, our welds had to count.
For the most part, we used a 3/32" thoriated tungsten electrode on .100" wall stainless tubing.
The main advantage to a TIG machine is the ability to alter the amperage on the fly with either a foot pedal of an adjuster on the torch head.
I have seen guys heli-arc weld aluminum beverage cans together, but I never really got good enough on aluminum to accomplish that feat, but I still hope to get there one day.
A good TIG machine can be dialed back to a limiting factor of 2 amperes, and with a 1/32" tungsten sharpened properly can fusion weld as thin as .005" material.

Electrode grind shape has an effect of arc stabilization, often sacrificing durability (too thin) for a more stable arc. The high frequency starter arc was almost powerful enough to do those welds. Those tungstens looked like sewing needles and required them to be about .010 inch or less above the work.
Dip your tungsten and it was start over time at the grinder.
That requires cheater lenses in your hood as well, because if you can see your puddle, you cannot weld properly ;)
 
Thatsa fantastic disertation thank you so much for sharing your craft. You are like Hi_tech or expensives. Thats like aerospace stnd in tolerance n fit. The method desc is fine said.

This unit is my oncle oscar. Its from b4 1960. The modern tech for tig is supposedly square wave. The initial OEM fitment for this item has a water jkt for tig. I nevr had a tig to wrk at home. These things were once common, its from a _______
20210508_160257.jpg
20210508_160257.jpg
 
Thatsa fantastic disertation thank you so much for sharing your craft. You are like Hi_tech or expensives. Thats like aerospace stnd in tolerance n fit. The method desc is fine said.

This unit is my oncle oscar. Its from b4 1960. The modern tech for tig is supposedly square wave. The initial OEM fitment for this item has a water jkt for tig. I nevr had a tig to wrk at home. These things were once common, its from a _______View attachment 67476 View attachment 67476
 
Thatsa fantastic disertation thank you so much for sharing your craft. You are like Hi_tech or expensives. Thats like aerospace stnd in tolerance n fit. The method desc is fine said.

This unit is my oncle oscar. Its from b4 1960. The modern tech for tig is supposedly square wave. The initial OEM fitment for this item has a water jkt for tig. I nevr had a tig to wrk at home. These things were once common, its from a _______View attachment 67476 View attachment 67476
Any power supply that has enough amperage to weld metal can be used in a TIG setting.
The method is called scratch start, which can make suitable welds if one is careful. Tungsten contamination is an ongoing battle on a scratch start machine.
Base or filler metal aka dipping the electrode on a tungsten makes for a very unstable arc which in turn makes your puddle either dance or go where it wants to, either of which makes for poor uncontrolled (ugly and weak) welds .
Most modern TIG machines have a high frequency starter arc and can control which side of the AC wave, as in positive or negative is sustained longer for better cleaning or penetration on aluminum alloys.
Lots of them offer variable pulse settings between higher and lower amperage which allow you to better control the DC settings. This all adds up when you are running against the clock.
 
My new Lincoln 180 amp wire feed machine:
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It will single pass 3/16" steel on .025 hardwire
or single pass 1/2 inch steel on .035 flux core.
The duty cycle is 30% when running it at full amperage, so it's not too shabby for a portable machine.
The running gear looks very substantial plus I bought a better floating ball style flow regulator for the shielding gas.
The whip is a ten footer.
The 50' 8/3 ga. extension cord should arrive in the next few days along with the appropriate socket to wire it into a disconnect.

I got an older Snap-On tool cart that served as a welder station in a previous life that already has the hole cut in the top for my S bottle (42" tall 120 cubic foot) of shielding gas.
I took the wheels off it, scrubbed it down and will prep it for a fresh coat of paint in the next few days.
The rig will either accept 2 pound spools of wire, or a ten pounder and has the capability of running a Lincoln spool gun for aluminum.
The polarity of the machine can be flipped with simple wing nuts on the cabling.
I made up a pigtail with the appropriate socket attached to a three pronged 30 amp electric dryer plug and actually got to run some wire with her on Sunday .
She ran smooth, produced very pretty welds and should better suit my needs for a field portable piece of equipment with the increased amperage over my 110 volt units.

Who doesn't like cool toys :cool:
 
Shes a beauty nitro. I hope it works well for you, i have a licoln wire feed, its very versatile. On rereading your last, i saw something
Dual shield is what i used for structural steel. Thats flux cored wire with shielding gas and a much larger machine than either of us has.
The one i ran used 1/8 wire from a 25 lb roll on a feeder. It would lay down a 1/4 inch fillet in a single pass, and looks like smooth and pretty.
No one i know of tries using stick for light sheet work anymore, as you pointed out, tig is much better.
Have you ever ran a stud welder? Its a monster. Welds 5/8 inch thick headed pins for concrete imbeds onto beams. Works like a spot welder kinda, it uses consumable ceramic cups for each pin
 
Thank you, I'm pleased so far and still have a 3 year warranty on it.
I'm very familiar with a dual shield process.
We sometimes used it when seal welding stainless water vessels.
Most of that work was checked with red dye and a developer as it held no pressure but had to be water tight.
That was from my time spent in the pressure cabinet washer industry where we sometimes built units that were as big inside as a 2 car garage. The soap tanks were heated and at times held several hundred gallons of water based wash solutions. One memorable machine that was designed and sold was basically a 100 horsepower dishwasher for for cleaning the traction units from diesel-electro locomotives prior to rebuild teardowns. There were several hundred pressure washer styled nozzles all aimed in strategic locations to clean the parts from all angles. It required a tractor I designed just to move the load across the rails on a small railcar onto the turntable that rotated the parts being washed.
I named the custom tractor the Pro-Tow for invoicing purposes, simply because it WAS a prototype :p

The biggest mig machine I ran, a Miller unit, only spewed out 3/32" wire, but it too could lay down some serious wire and nice beads in a jiffy.

The largest stud welder I used would only attach 5/16 studs.
It was a capacitance impulse process that required a special stud on the attachment face to initiate the welding kernel.
 
@Nitro you might enjoy learning about fire suppression technology. There is one well known outfit from oregon I am familiar with called cascade fire.

The technology involves alot of your stated interests. Automotive science, custom mill work(monitor) heavy chassis vehicles. It's a very lucrative business. There may be more manufacturing done now, not sure, but at one time there were very few ppl making trucks.
 
Any thoughts on this concept? Why are all the YouTube forges have the burner on top pointing down? If it's only a box that is 8x8x16 how far away is the tank? Is it a stupid idea trying to build a propane forge?
 

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