TIG Welding: The First Day (by alaric)

Today, I took the day off work to take my new TIG welder for a spin.

I started by getting some pure argon shielding gas; prices for this stuff vary widely (10 litres full of gas at 200 bar for £35 plus £15 shipping, or the same for £77.90 including shipping?), but I managed to get a 9 litre cylinder filled for £25 at Target Tools and Supplies in Gloucester. They don't seem to have a web site, but they're here.

With that installed, everything worked fine:

I didn't have to find out how wonderful R-Tech's customer service are, because the thing arrived in full working order and was easy to set up and use 🙂 I ran a few test beads across some scrap steel, and it worked pretty much as I remembered from my TIG course all those years ago, so I set to doing something useful.

First job was to fix up the dodgy welds holding the new steering gear onto the welding trolley. I ground down the two lumpy lines of poor stick welding on either side of the join I actually wanted to weld together (it had bridged in a couple of spots, which was holding it together, but it was far from ideal), and set to it with the TIG. The result was hardly beautiful, as I didn't weld it completely flat so it was a bit irregular to start with, but with no fuss at all I was able to make it bridge the gap. I'm finding TIG much easier to control than stick - I can see what I'm doing far better, so I know where I'm welding, and because it's not constantly depositing metal, if the weld pool hasn't formed where I want it to, I can move it and make sure both sides are melting together before I start putting in filler! As I was welding a 3mm thick flat bar to a 2mm-wall 25mm square tube, getting both sides to melt together wasn't an obvious operation of just applying heat to the middle, so being able to manipulate the arc was a great bonus here.

Next, I cut off some 10mm square tube to weld onto the chassis so as to stop the steering arm from swinging too far from side to side. Originally, it was possible to steer too far, causing one of the front wheels to jam underneath the front of the main body of the trolley, which is no fun; these two stops put a stop to that! However, this was my first experience of welding something that's not horizontal and easily accessible. It was a real squeeze getting to the place they had to be welded, so I kept finding my torch hand or the hand feeding the wire in snagging on things. When attaching one of the stops, I lost track of where the filler wire was while welding; it had caught on something and was being pushed aside of where I was pointing it, outside the area I could see. While I faffed with this, I left the torch pointing at one place for too long and melted the end of one of the stops off! It wasn't a bit that does anything, so I'll probably grind it off and do the same on the other one to make them match again, but still, it wasn't great...

Also, when welding in awkward positions, I couldn't see the arc so well and kept poking the tungsten electrode into the weld pool. This meant re-grinding it, which wasn't ideal as it contains traces of thorium (a radioisotope), and you don't want too much thorium dust getting into your lungs. I decided to practice a bit with the torch in awkward positions on a bit of scrap, and got the tungsten stuck again, and decided not to re-grind it - I nipped out to a nearby welding supply shop and picked up some E3 tungstens, which aren't radioactive. With one of those ground and installed, I set to a little project: making myself a monitor stand for the office (my monitor currently sits on a stack of books).

I started with flat welds to put the top together, which went fine:

Then welded some tubes onto the bottom to make legs:

This was a lot harder. I've not got the correct angle and electrode stick-out yet, so was struggling to see the weld pool, and ended up dipping the tungsten in the metal a lot. Also, heat rises, so I was having to work to get the flat bit I was welding to to melt and form a pool, while the tube sticking up from it was happy to melt and then flop down, making a nice arch. I think I can fix this with better torch positioning - I need to experiment more!

As well as working on my torch holding, I think I also need to pick up some thicker filler rod - I've got a kilogram of 1mm mild steel rod, and 1mm rod seems to just disappear; I struggled to feed it in fast enough and it kept balling up. I think I had the right amperage for the metal (I was using 70 amps on 3mm thick steel with a 1.6mm tungsten), given the penetration and the rate at which the weld pool formed, so I think my rod's just too thin.

Also, I need to figure out which sized ceramic to use. I set the torch up with the smallest one (which has "5" printed on the side; I have a "6" and a "7" as well), assuming that it's best to start small and move up, but during the post-flow stage I'm seeing the surface of the weld pool rippling quite violently, and when it solidifies, it has a correspondingly ripply surface texture. I'm running the gas regulator at 8 litres/minute, an I've been recommended to go from 8 to 12 for most jobs, so I don't think the gas flow rate is too high; I suspect that the narrow ceramic is forcing the gas into a tight stream so it runs faster and blows the weld pool around.

Now, when we got a compressor, we decided to name it Compressita Wurst in recognition of the recent Eurovision Song Contest winner. Continuing this tradition, the TIG welder is, of course, called Tigger, meaning that my old stick welder is therefore now called Pooh. If I get a plasma cutter, I'll call it Piglet.

I'm delighted with my welder, and look forward to improving my technique! I've a few new projects in mind - fixing up our barbeques with new legs, welding stainless steel grilles for them, and making myself a better welding bench (I can shorten the legs on my current one and make it into a shelf underneath the new one); but my most urgent project is going to be finishing off the new server chassis!

My only complaint with the R-Tech TIG161 welder is that the power switch is all the way around at the back; to turn it on and off, I have to crouch down to reach under the shelf to the back of the thing. Do other people have a handy switch on the socket it plugs into? Or do they not shove it on a shelf? I don't know.

Ok, one other complaint. The hose that connects the gas regulator to the welder (that looks white in the picture of my welding setup), when it arrived, smelt disgusting. It actually smelt like excrement. Not precisely like excrement - it was clearly the smell of some volatiles outgassing out of new synthetic materials - but that's the closest smell that came to mind. At least this was only apparent when I had my face near it while fiddling with the hose fittings to connect it up, and the smell has subsided after a day's usage. Thank God. That's the smelliest pipe I've ever encountered.

TIG welding (by alaric)

Back in 2008, I took a welding course, in which I fixed the mistake I was making with my stick welding, and had a go at MIG and TIG.

Now, although I learnt to make nice beads with stick welding on flat surfaces, I still struggle with various things. Much of the welding I want to do is on thin metal, so I need to run the welder at a very low current, creating a feeble arc and with a tendency to stick, and still burning through if I'm not quick. I still can't do inside joint welds (the arc sticks to one side, or the other, and rarely both).

Is it my poor technique, or am I being limited by the fact I'm using a ten-year-old arc welder that cost £50 from B&Q? When I borrow a friend's MIG welder, I do much better work, and tinkering with my technique over the past decade has failed to make a huge improvement...

Whether it's me or the welder, I know that stick welding isn't perfect for what I want to do. As well as the issue with thin materials, it can't weld aluminium. I had a stick welder because it was all I could afford at the time, and living in a small flat, I didn't want to be storing compressed gas cylinders!

TIG is widely regarded as hard to learn, because there's so many variables to control - those ten complicated-looking knobs on the welder, the movement of the torch, the fine control of current with a foot pedal, the way you feed the filler metal in. However, when I tried it, I found that I liked all that control. With a MIG, you set the power level and the wire feed speed on the machine, and then pull the trigger to weld - which is great if the settings are all correct and you're doing a long straight uniform bead. But if you're having to change position as you weld, or dealing with varying thickness of metal so the rate of conduction away from the weld varies, it's trickier to have those settings correct. And to get them right, you need to do test welds, adjust, and do more test welds.

With a TIG welder, you can vary the speed at which you move the torch (and the current, with a pedal) and the rate you dab filler metal as you work, based on feedback from how the weld looks. Although there's more to vary, there's less need for trial and error. That suits me better! Back when I did the welding course, I'd really enjoyed TIG, and found it easy to do great welds, but a MIG machine looked a lot more likely to be affordable. So I was slowly saving up for a MIG machine.

And then I found that R-Tech, a local company on the outskirts of Gloucester that make welders and are widely lauded for their quality and good customer service, offered twelve months' interest free credit.

Suddenly, rather than saving up for many months for a MIG welder, I could afford a TIG welder (and quite a good one, too), with the money I'd saved as a deposit and then sixty pounds a month for the next year. THIS CHANGES THINGS...

So, today, my new TIG welder arrived. It can go up to 160 amps, it can do AC or DC (so it can be used for aluminium), it can do pulsed power control, and it has a foot pedal for precise work. So it'll be great for thin stuff. Also, it can do stick welding, but "nicely"; DC, with good current regulation, as opposed to my old AC transformer. That should make it produce much more steady arcs, so I'm looking forward to seeing if I can also improve my stick welding with it - stick welding is worse than TIG in most respects, except that it's faster and doesn't use up shielding gas. I still have a lot of stick welding electrodes to use up, so when I'm doing work on heavier bits of metal, it'd be nice to use them if I can do so and still produce good welds!

This evening, I unpacked it, ground a tungsten, put everything together, and rearranged some shelves in the workshop to set it up. I made a hook to hang the torch on by my welding bench, checked that the right things appear on the display when I turn it on, and then sadly bade it goodnight, as I'm not getting the shielding gas cylinder for it until tomorrow.

My plan is to start running test beads along a bit of scrap steel until I seem to have got the hang of it, then do a few easy jobs - such as re-doing some of the shoddy welds I messed up with the stick welder, and adding a steering stop to the festival trolley, and fixing a bit of my welding bench that snapped off after the bottom rusted.

Once I'm confident, I'm going to finish my current big project - a custom server case for love.warhead.org.uk, which hosts this site and many others! I've been taking it to my friend's workshop to use his MIG on it, which only happens when we're both free (less than once a month), and involves folding all the seats down in the car and lugging a significant weight of steel through the house. Did I mention that this thing's 1.2 meters high, and made of 1.6mm thick steel plate?

But I'm so incredibly stoked I'm going to have a TIG welder. I'd all but given up on the dream!

Creativiti Tea – Summer (by sarah)

This weekend we hosted the second ever Creativiti Tea which was quiet frankly epic - though the actual event was on the Sunday the first person arrived Friday evening all the way from London! Two more arrived on Saturday when the BBQ ended up being cooked under the grill whilst Alaric did various bits of his programming projects and began work once again on the furnace.

We played board games and Jeany got an early birthday present which was Dr Who Monopoly!

I baked cakes (they are never as good as Al's ones and I was a bit out of practice with the icing!) - including mini vegan banana bread with red currents (these are from my parents garden I planted a red current stem when I was 13 and now they have taken over the garden - I am attempting to find more things to do with them than make jelly!).

Then at 10 am Creativi Tea began properly. Mainly we were writing - I personally wrote about 3000 words, we had people working on novels, poetry, short stories and more!

In the kitchen glueing and sticking were a foot.

Along with bead work - ankle bracelets seemed to be the thing.

Then there was sewing - mainly cat nip mice from old cloths - the cat nip was home grown by our friend Charlee.

Tom puss at least loves the cat nip mouse!

And I mean he really loves it!

A teddy bear was cut out and partially sewn together and the beginnings of a ball were started.

Music crept in with the odd bit of laptop composing and the Hammond Organ getting switched on 🙂

I sold £15 worth of books for Shelter (the books will be there until Christmas if anybody else is interested).

And we showed Charlee how to make sushi.

We geeked and created and played games and laughed and drank lots of tea 🙂 I am looking forward to organising the Autumn Creativi Tea which will also be my book launch! And also my friend Claire gave me the most beautiful roses 🙂

Oh and Jean's butterfly garden produced a butterfly 🙂

We had lots of fun and Alaric seems to have gotten one of our friends into learning Lojban - which had us all thinking about actual meanings of our names - turns out there is an older meaning for Sarah than princess - essence or core, pure centre... etc. I love finding out new things 🙂

Day 4 of making the ladder (by alaric)

I wasn't scheduled another project day until later in the month, but I had some spare time and the opportunity to grab a volunteer (my father in law, Len) to help, so yesterday I mounted the ladder on the wall!

(Background: Days 1, 2 and 3).

The first step was drilling the holes. I held the ladder up against the wall, and checked it with a spirit level, while Len pencilled the holes in.

Then it was time to drill. I'm very fond of my SDS+ drill (as I have mentioned previously) so it was good to have an excuse to get Vera out again:

Without further ado, I started to drill:

However, disaster struck on one of the holes - the bit suddenly went sideways, into some kind of void inside the concrete blocks of the wall. Doh! I fitted a smaller drill bit and managed to drill back into the route the hole was supposed to take, then drill that out so the bolt could go in straight, but now it was in the middle of a much larger hole than intended so it would just rattle around and not hold anything.

Thankfully, I over-engineered the design so that it had far more mountings to the wall than it really needed, so none of them were all that critical. What I did was to jam a piece of wooden dowel into the misaligned part of the hole to fill much of the space, then squirt a load of fine mortar (2 parts sand to 1 part cement) into the rest. More on that later.

With that done, I could fit the anchor bolts to the ladder. The anchor bolts consist of a normal-seeming bolt that goes through the ladder, into a sleeve that goes into the wall. The sleeve is a metal tube, but at the far end is a conical nut that the bolt screws into. When the bolt is tightened the conical nut is pulled into the metal sleeve, forcing it to expand to tightly squeeze against the surrounding masonry.

So to start with, I put all the bolts through the ladder and screwed the sleeves on a few turns to hold them in place:

Then we lifted it up and guided the bolts into the holes and wiggled it into place. Of course, as it's nearly impossible to drill holes into masonry accurately, the holes were a few millimetres out from where the holes in the ladder are, so beyond a certain point the bolts started to chafe against the masonry and had to be tapped into place with a mallet:

All except the hole packed with mortar, of course, which the bolt just slid into squelchily.

Then we tightened the bolts - all except the one in the wet mortar; I'm going to give that a few days for the mortar to cure before I tighten it, otherwise there's no resistance to the expanding sleeve and it'll just squeeze the mortar out.

And then it was time for a test.

After gingerly doing a few pull-ups on the ladder, I climbed onto it. And then to check it's really secure, I put as much strain on it as I could by stretching myself out to get the maximum torque:

This failed to tear it out of the wall, so the next step was to actually climb up to the roof:

See how the top rung protects the gutter? That's careful design, that is! 🙂

However, it was cold, damp, and slimy up there, so I climbed back down and had some lunch. After lunch, I put some sealant around the edges of the mounting flanges, to prevent water getting in behind them where it might soak into the wall through the bolt hole, or lurk around and make the flanges rust. Also, I like sealant and will use it whenever I can:

This stuff is "frame sealant", which is specifically designed to join metal, wood and masonry outdoors, as opposed to the stuff you use in your bathroom. It's extra sticky to bond to awkward surfaces and extra stretchy to account for thermal expansion differences.

I also cut some small cubes of wood and pressed them into the open ends at the top of the ladder, packed with plenty of sealant. I tapped them in with a hammer to about a centimetre below the open end and squeezed more sealant in on top, and domed it slightly to keep rain from pooling.

Now that ladder is done, as soon as I get some time I'm going up there to secure part of the plastic sheet that's flapping up, and have a general poke around to see if I can find any holes to seal. With more sealant! Yay!

Also, I need to touch up the paint on the ladder in a few spots where I dinged it moving it around. Whoops!

Day 3 of making the ladder (by alaric)

Well, after two days of prior work on the ladder, yesterday I settled down to another day.

I started by welding together the second side of the ladder, to match the first. With that done, I now had the two sides of the ladder, ready to join them together with the rungs:

With that done, I carefully aligned everything on the welding bench and ground the welds on the inward sides down so that the rungs could fit on nicely:

I set the rungs back half a centimetre where they were attached at the same point as a spacer, so they were welded both to the uprights and to the spacers, as I felt this would be stronger. The pieces of wood you can see under the rungs are maintaining that spacing.

Now, as I mentioned before, I'm not very good at welding; I can make things structurally sound, but not pretty, because my welds often go wrong and I have to go over them again. This usually leads to big, messy, welds, and on a couple of occasions with this job, I actually melted a hole in the metal and had to patch it up. Here's one particularly terrible weld:

I ground the lumps around the edge of the hole down:

Then welded a metal plate over it:

This, in contrast, is I think the neatest weld I've ever made:

With all that done, the ladder was actually a ladder:

I sanded it down to get the weld gunk off, then washed it thoroughly in white spirit to remove the grease the metal came covered in, and laid it out in the kitchen to paint:

Then I gave it a priming coat and left it to dry overnight (I did it in the kitchen so it would be warm and dry overnight, rather than the cold and damp of the workshop):

It'll need another couple of coats of paint, and I need to cap the open ends of the uprights at the top, then I can mount it on the wall.

Part of welding that I always find quite profound is the way that a bunch of bits of metal, initially held together with clamps, and gingerly handled in case it comes undone, slowly transforms into a structure made of solid steel. This was driven home with the ladder project when, finishing the welds on the rungs, I found the best way was to lay it on its back like in the last photos and sit on it so the welds were flat (the best orientation, as molten metal likes to run away when the weld is vertical) and comfortable to reach; it didn't even flex!

I can't wait to be using it to get up on the roof. There's a flap of plastic sheeting lifting up in the wind and letting rain in, and I can't reach it in any other way...

Continue to day 4...