Idle wishes of a shipyard production welder

I am still way down the learning curve for MIG welding, but it sounds like the setup for the various positions would be pretty involved and always changing. The only automated welding setup I have worked with is orbital TIG and changing tube diameters and weld fittings requires a new program.

Would a wire speed up/down and a voltage up/down rocker on the gun solve the problem?

BobH

What machines are you running?

BobH

It would help, sure.

Welding along a bevel groove joint in the flat, transitioning to a bevel groove vertical then to overhead, having the ability to dial up and down your wire speed and voltage at the gun would be very nice.

I spend a lot of time each day in really cramped up, screwy positions where I can barely see one edge of the puddle. Many of my welds are accomplished by dialing in my machine on a piece of scrap and once I get into position I pull the trigger and with careful motion and lots of practice (read: hope) I can produce a weld that hardly requires any grinding. The biggest pain in the rump is having to weld 20 inches, haul my butt out and change settings, weld 10 inches up, back out again, readjust settings, dive in and weld overhead for 60 inches. Then break out the weld gages, nukie grinder and burr motor and retrace my path cleaning and VT'ing as I go, unless I need additional layers to bring the weld up to size....

The ability to adjust settings on the fly at the mig gun would save me lots of bumps and bruises.

I was told of MIG/Pulse sets where there is a switch on the torch to select between two preset conditions of your own free choosing.

Never seen one myself, but sounds useful.

There is one I thought of, which we'd call a "Russian welder".

In a gang of Russians, they always welded with the MIG set high, torch on 2-way latch - "on" while trigger squeezed, "off" when released. They go along the joint burning until a pool is formed, coming off the power to let it solidify, burning again... You'd give them a beautiful V-prep which would go continuous weld and they "Russian weld" anyway. Now, a welding metallurgist I know said when they encountered this they stopped, had a think, did some tests and found they were actually not willing to have this on their pipelines, as there were some metallurgical issues such as gas (hydrogen?) pickup. But for many purposes, it would be plenty good enough. So the "Russian welder" would be a MIG machine where the burn-to-pause is proportional to how far in the trigger is squeezed. Fully in is continuous burn. Barely in is a short burn and a long pause. Mid-position is obviously something like 50/50 burn and pause. Gas flow would be continuous and the machine optimised for this method. The Russians did all positions on the same machine settings, varying only the burn-to-pause... A friend tells me they learned this because in the middle of nowhere they'd open the cases of supplies it had been seen fit to send them and they'd find say 1.6mm MIG wire to weld a root, 5mm stick to weld a root, etc, etc.

Rich S

Tin Lizzie DL wrote in sci.engr.joining.welding on Sun, 17 Apr 2011 18:45:15 -0700:

Sounds like it would be worth it to have someone stationed at the welder(s) that you could contact via radio to make adjustments on demand. One assistant could serve two dozen welders I'd guess.

Have you checked out the Miller Axcess power supplies. They are able to be controlled via bluetooth, and are impressively advanced power supplies.

Lincoln V350 Pro power sources running Lincoln LN-15 and LN-25 machines.

We dial in our process and one or two parameters on the power source (ie: pulse steel .045 in. wire / Pulses per second (I run most things at

Then I load up my wire in whichever feeder is closest to my job site and set my wire speed (usually around 180 to 190 ipm) and guesstimate my initial voltage since that number does not appear on the feeder for some reason. I light off on some scrap and using the other hand dial in my voltage till I get that smooth-running spatter-free little fan of molten steel off the wire into the puddle.

Typical settings are 145 pulses, 21.5 volts and 185-190 wire speed. I can weld any position with those, depending on material thickness.

For spray I'll set the power source for spray then set my feeder for 300 to 325 ipm and about 26.5 to 27 volts.

If I know I'll do nothing but one position I'll fine tune for that and increase or decrease settings as needed to achieve the maximum speed that I can still produce a VT-sat weld at.

Ooooh! I would love to try one of the 450 or 675 models. With the fed gov's budget crisis though, we have a difficult time getting consumables right now, much less dropping around 10 grand on a single new blue system. Our Code 138 weld engineers would have to play with it for a year or two before us knuckle-draggers would see one, too.