Home Alone - Day 3

     It is very quiet in the house! I half expect them to come busting in the door any minute. It's been a while since I have had this much time to myself. I needed this little break. If only to take off the Dad shoulder pads for a few days and just take care of me.

Part of this year’s ambitions has been to design and build a stainless steel solar arch for the Omarsea. It is a big undertaking for me. I have not done any serious welding in years and this is more an art than a science. I began by bending the 1.25" tube to the shapes I needed. Then I spent nearly every evening last week online searching out all the tips and tricks I could find on how to weld this metal.

 I started my first series of test welds. What a humbling experience! Burned metal everywhere. There are so many variables to TIG welding. I spent all Monday morning blowing holes in test pieces before I finally made two of them stick together. But the weld was really knarly. I went back online and found more hints and ideas. So Tuesday morning I started out by making numerous welds and showed huge improvement. But they were still so poor in quality that I began to think I was not going to be able to make this arch.

 Last night I managed to find several discussion groups online that were talking about newbie welder’s mistakes and how they could improve their techniques. Among the hints were several sage pearls that applied to me. I was contaminating my welds in several ways and did not realize it at first. I was using too much heat. Lastly I was grinding the point on the tungsten wrong.

So about 0600 this morning I started before the heat of the day. I set out to eliminate as many of these problems as I could. The contamination was the easiest. I just needed to keep the filler rod in the gas stream and allow the gas to flow over the weld after the arc was turned off cooling the metal without oxygen getting to the hot weld. This sounds really complex but it's very simple really. The weld is liquid at ~ 1400 degrees. When the gas in this case Argon, shields the weld, it can't combine with oxygen in the air. Oxygen combining with the weld makes it porous and brittle- not good!

Turning down the heat is really simple as well. There is a knob on the machine. I set it to 60amps and that seems to give me just the right heat to create the "puddle" welders so often speak of.

Grinding the tungsten is the really trick part. I am so unpracticed at welding that I often drop the end of the tungsten electrode into the puddle. It is then contaminated and has to be ground to a fine point yet again. I use a grinding wheel dedicated to tungsten. My first points were just like the suggested ones I found online. They look like a shiny pencil point but smaller than a real pencil. I have found through trial and error that if I don't dull the point but leave it sharp I get a smaller arc and a more concentrated weld.

It was after spending three hours this morning experimenting that I was able to get my first so-so weld!  Yea!!!!!  Ugly as it is it is. It is shiny and shows good adhesion or penetration as welders call it. Anyway it's a huge step forward. 

The picture here is what  I hope to be doing in the coming weeks. Right now it's not even close to this.