Stick welding Sheet Metal

Wrong newsgroup.

Check out

sci.engr.joining.welding

Your best rod for sheet metal will be 6013. Low penetration and very ductile welds.

If you need to run vertical beads, run them downhill fast.

What gauge sheet metal?

I used to build custom electrical switchboards, control consoles etc minimum 16 gauge steel. Used 12 gauge rods on low amperage and always positioned the job so that you welded downhill 30 to 45 degrees down from horizontal.

As you said no gaps, tack the joint every 3" or so. The down angle makes it fast, you sort of drag the beed down, the rod at about 45 degrees from the bottom side underneath the bead, you vary the stick angle to keep the weld flowing without too much build up.

Worked for me in the days before MIG!

Glenn

Try this website.

I use 3/32 dia E7014 (iron powder in the coating) at about 90 Amps AC to weld 16 Ga. or less sheet metal. Practice by first laying beads on top of .06" sheet steel without burning holes in it. Next exercise is to close any holes that you did burn thru. After mastering this repeat the exercise on .03" thick sheet metal. Learn from the results of moving too fast or too slow, also when using a short arc and what happens with a long arc. HTH.

I'm not sure what gauge metal I'm working with. It's a hood off a late 90's Buick Skylark (guess what color :-( ). That's my practice piece. Got it for $10 at a junk yard.

I am able to lay a bead on the clean metal, no problem. I can do it repeatedly without burning any holes. (30amps, 6013 stick, AC) But, as I work on joints, that's where I'm having trouble.

Overlapping joints - I could get some spots to stick, but most other spots ended up looking like a saw-tooth, with burn-through on the top piece.

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dag, don't forget ASCII art only works with proportional fonts (Courier,etc)

You mean mono-space (*non*-proportional), and yes, Courier is an example.

Based on *this* image, he *did* use a mono-space font, as it looks fine to me, and I only read news with mono-space fonts. If he had used a proportional-space font, I would expect the right-edge to be jagged, where the text replaced the spaces with different widths.

Are you perhaps trying to read it with a proportional font? After all, both ends have to agree, and with proportional space fonts, there are differences between the same named font on different machines, That is why the fixed-space fonts are the proper choice -- they work on

He even resisted the urge to use tabs, which don't always work between systems, and are certainly screwed up by the ">" quoting marks as people reply to the article.

Enjoy, DoN.

Sorry for the confusion, but I was commenting on my own work. I did mean to say to view it with a non-proportional font (Courier).