How To Weld

If you are looking for tips on the finer points of welding high-carbon steel, or the correct amperage for 5mm aluminium butt joint, then just click through as you have been dragged here my some mindless search engine and are being led astray.  No, this is an account of a total plonker who always thought welding would be a good idea but never got round to it until later in life.  More of a story of how not to do welding.

Very important is choice of welder to suit your needs.  Careful research is required as there is a surprisingly diverse range of capacities and applications.  Is gas shielding required? Is aluminium fabrication essential?  Of course price has to be factored in the equation and an analysis of probable frequency of use of high-end capacity must be closely scrutinised.   What I did…… Got a rush of blood to the head in the hardware store when a shiny yellow box was on sale.  It came with face shield, small bag of rods, and a CD on how to weld.  I should have guessed this was not quality gear when I saw the plastic rod clamp.  Arc temps are several thousands of degrees, melting point of plastics are at best a couple of hundred degrees.  Even the less technically minded of my dear readers can probably guess the outcome of this mismatch.  Yes, the rod holder melts to a blob.  I also found that the shiny yellow paint did nothing to aid welding.

The second most important requirement to get into the field of welding is to get expert tuition from experienced welders in a controlled environment of graduated steps to build up one’s skills.  What I did……. found there were no TAFE courses, only bookkeeping and macramé seemed to be on offer.  So I resorted to the bundled CD.  It had been translated from Japanese via Mandarin, or perhaps the other way round, and visually showed multiple scenes of blinding light.   From it I garnered only one useful pointer, look at the pool, not the arc.  It would take some time before I realised the CD actually did have 5 seconds of usefulness.

Thirdly is the preparation of a safe work place to practice this new skill, paying particular attention to eye safety, fire safety, avoidance of burns and protection from the intense UV given off by the arc.  What I did…… set up in my woodwork shop where the floor has not been seen for a decade because of accumulated wood shavings, the benches are all wood, and combustible material crowds every corner.  Here is a tip I learned early on and pass on to you; don’t weld in gum boots.  Red-hot slag drops from the job and into them leaving you hopping round the workshop like a bunny on steroids.  Keep a bucket of water on hand to put out the subsidiary fires.  I also discovered the UV is not the way to get a tan.  All of the red and none of the brown.

Now we come to the nitty-gritty bits about actual welding, ‘striking the arc’.  All you have to do is make an electrical contact between the rod and the job to melt the materials to be welded and add the material in the rod to make a perfect fusion as though it had been one piece in the first place.  What I did…… Got all the gear ready grabbed the mask and found I couldn’t see anything.  This has got to be a mistake! How can I weld if I can’t see the job?  I sort of peeped round the edge of mask and blinded my self several times.  I reasoned that if I ever did manage to make an arc, I would then be able to see.  Then followed a long session of making a tiny flash, not enough to see by, followed by an angry buzz from the welder as I have stuck the rod to the job, accompanied by an even louder and angrier buzz from me cursing into the mask as I wrench the rod back and forth to get it unstuck.  Then I had a long, slow cup of tea.  Then another longer, louder session as described above, but with the same results.  Next day I was in a calmer mood and armed with a steely determination.  Get the rod close to the job without the mask, but not so close I give myself a flash.  Freeze the hand, move the head behind the mask and give a little scratch and pull back about 5mm.   Yipee! An arc! The try and keep the arc constant as the rod melts away.  I was glowing with pride after I burnt my first 5cm of rod.  I was also glowing with arc-burn from the previous day.  None of the above was trying to actually join 2 bits of steel, I was just trying to lay some blobs on a flat plate.  I thought I would rest on my laurels for the day, before things took a turn for the worse.

My first job was to build a sauna stove out of a flat sheet of 5 mm steel 4 ft by 6 ft.  A bit ambitious for a first job I will conceded.  I soon found that my toy welder that boasts 100 amps (and it probably is just a boast) just doesn’t have the balls to weld the corner of an ‘L’ joint.  Even cranked up to max, it simple hasn’t the heat to melt both bits of steel as the thick metal easily conducts the heat away.  No melt, no weld.  Bugger!  After a lot of experiment, I found I could just get a weld if I just touched the inside corners of the material in the ‘L’, rather than lapping one plate over the other.  That way I could attack the exposed corners of the steel.   Much later I proudly told an experienced welder of my ground-breaking discovery and he gave me a scathing look and said “That’s the way you are supposed to do it”.  He nobly restrained himself from adding “you numbskull”.

Step by painful step, I overcame the difficulties of immense ignorance and super-cheap equipment.  I still have problems with thick metal and bubblegum welds, slag inclusions and setting the workshop of fire, but hey! I get the job done.  I have some triumphs such as welding pipes that have to withstand very high pressure pulses without leaking (on the ram pump) and the sauna stove now looks as though it will rust away before it collapses into its component parts.  I now enjoy welding but have no plans to up-grade my gear as I would then probably run into difficulties with the stand-alone power system I rely on here.  I much prefer the little welder chucking in the towel with thermal overload after 10 rods, rather than the power system crashing.  I also get an enforced smoko as the little device sulks for an hour.  But if you are thinking of leaning to weld, now you know how not to do it.  And you can get welding glass that are like some sunglasses that go instantly dark in strong light.  I think that would make life a lot easier.  Then again it might amuse you to ‘discover’ welding by a process of exhausting every possible unworkable technique.