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Cutting with 6011 at 200 amps AC

I finally got a chance to follow up on a thread from a week or two ago. The discussion was about using 6010 for cutting. Not having DC on my old monster, I wanted to see what would happen with 6011 and AC.

I soaked 1/8" 6011 in water, and set my welder to 200 amps. (The thread talked about using 6010 at 250 amps, but that was using DCEN [? I think?] to avoid burning the rod up so quickly. Since I am using AC, I decided to start out at 200 amps and see what would happen.) I tried cutting some old bed frame, perhaps around .1" thick.

The results were both impressive and unexpected. The arc was actually less exciting than I had expected it to be, and the cut was far smoother than I expected. Note that I did not say "smooth" -- but certainly nowhere near as rough and ragged as I had expected. In fact, at least as far as the edges of the cut are concerned, it was as good as I have gotten with my *very* limited experience with cutting using O/A. I had expected this process to be a matter of melting away the material, leaving a blobby melted edge. For the most part, however, what I got was a relatively clean looking edge. Apparently, this process actually causes the steel to burn, somewhat like cutting with O/A -- or at least I am thinking that is the case, since the steel that dropped onto the table continued to sparkle and burn for a few seconds.

Hmmm ... I recall that the problem with moisture in lo-hy rods is that the hydrogen separates out of the water in the arc and gets deposited into the weld. Could soaking the 6011 in water and then using it for cutting put enough *oxygen* into the process to help the steel burn?

I plan to do some more cutting today; hopefully, with practice, the results might even get better! I will try some different thickness of steel, and also some different amperage settings as well ... anybody got any ideas about that? I'm assuming thicker metal would benefit from higher amps ... ?

Andy

Reply to
Andy Wakefield
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HHmmmm I have never heard of this before....almost like a poor man's Air Arc carbon rod without the Compressed Air....I just may have to try this at work tomorrow! Does anyone (Ernie!!!..over here please!) know the correct parameters? Sounds like it would actually work. Something that could get me out of a quick jam when I forget to check how much O & A I have in the portable tanks on the truck and one or the other is empty!

Reply to
Doobie

Typically, AC power puts half the heat into the rod and half into the weld. There is a limit as to how much power the metal rod can carry.

6011 typically does have a "digging" characteristic, more so than 6013, but less than 6010. The flux cover does tend to focus the arc a bit. As the heat to the rod exceeds what the watersoak>I finally got a chance to follow up on a thread from a week or two
Reply to
Thomas Kendrick

What was discussed, right here, a few weeks ago at the most was the trick of using watersoaked 6010 DCEN at 250 amps (for 1/8", IIRC) to cut with. This evidently lead to the 6011 AC experiment we are currently discussing. I forget what the subject was - as I recall, it was mentioned as an aside, and then questions were asked such as "why not DCEP?" (overheat the rod, arc harder to control) and "what sort of cut do you get?" (tain't a thing of beauty, but better than many expected).

Reply to
Ecnerwal

I wonder if any of you have worked with an old-style arc cutter. My mental model is the first underwater arc cutter described in "Descent into Darkness" ISBN: 0891415890

You should be able to make a system using steel brake tube running something like 20 psi oxygen. Use a few wraps of safety wire around the rod/tube pair and give it a try.

Reply to
frank

Reply to
Thomas Kendrick

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