I've been using MIG (and to a much lesser extent MMA) for about 30yrs now, mainly on motorcyle, car and general light fabrication jobs for myself and friends. At work we only have MIG in the welding shop. I am working on a project for our lab which requires the fabrication of several fixtures produced in thin wall aluminium tube, so I priced up outsourcing this work. The quotes were pretty steep, and although I can weld >2.5mm ali sheet and tube ok with the MIG, it's always hit and miss affair on weld quality and the finish is never great. I wouldn't fancy MIG on such thin tube, at least not with my limited skiil levels. I spoke to our welding supplies firm and explained the task and they brought over a Selco Genesis 200Amp AC/DC inverter TIG set to do a demo. I'd never touched a TIG set before yesterday, but within a hour or so of instruction and practice on some scrap, I found I could actually produce some acceptable welds on these ali tubes, even the 8mm diameter 1.5mm wall thickness type. I switched over to DC mode and had a play with some 0.8mm steel sheet boxes where I had to weld the corner seams. Even with no filler rod it was 'relatively' easy to get a nice clean weld. I did find the steel much easier to weld than the ali though. I'm sure that I will have many, many hours of practice and failures ahead of me, but I *really* enjoyed my hour or two with TIG. I think I'm going to do doing a lot more reading up on the theory and techniques involved in TIG welding. Bottom line is that I think I can easily justify to my boss the outright purchase of this set and doing the job myself, as it is less than a fifth the cost of outsourcing, even allowing for extra time and scrap material etc. Also the TIG set can then be used by our maintenance and production guys too. Any recommendations on good beginners books? Thanks, JB
- posted
17 years ago