On Friday 01 August 2014 07:32:31 Ed did opine And Gene did reply: > On 07/31/2014 09:42 PM, Dave Cole wrote: > > If you weld with mig with gas (CO2/Argon mixture usually) there is no > > The impurities in and on the wire along with oxides on the material > will leave a very light slag. In rotary build up work it is needed to > chip this slag off after about two passes, maybe three if you are > using 200Amps or more to burn through it. This insulating slag will > make the arc dodge around and give a lumpy finish. > > > slag.. > > > > The cored flux wire will leave slag just like a stick welder. > > > > Dave > > Some flux cored welds are self cleaning if the amps are set just right, > the slag will peel up behind the arc into a nice curl. This works best > in rotary build up work. > > > Ed.
And some wire welders are miss-configured for polarity in the as shipped state. So wannabe greenhorn welders get very poor, almost unusable welds and it winds up on the yard sale table I bought a small one, a Hobart 125, aka the farm hand, several years ago. I've limited experience with a stick, but extensive experience with oxy- acetylene stuff. The control over your weld with the latter far exceeds the control you can get with a stick and a box of every variety of stick on the shelf. But the gas tools you can buy today are junk out of the case, mostly from poor regulators. Not to mention the purchase price of a set of tanks that are actually big enough to run a #9 tip. So that priced me out of the game until I started seeing sub $200 wire rigs on the shelf. Getting weld quality with it using the flux cored wire that it came with that could only be described as horrible on its best day, I eventually bought the gas kit for it, and when installing it you need to change the polarity when you switch to solid wire, and it was at that point I found it was not set at the factory to the proper polarity for flux cored wire! Curious George here, reversed it for fluxed wire & gave it a try, getting much better results but still way too slaggy. So I put it back to plain wire polarity & have used the gas ever since, at a flow rate that is probably insufficient if the wind is blowing. I get decent results now, but haven't used it enough to gain any real proficiency with it, still on the first gas bottle. Bottle refills are $135 which I consider a total ripoff. Some of the welds strength comes from the CO2 content of the gas, but if you want to weld alu, you need pure argon and that simply is not available locally. The wire may be, but with the carbon contamination you get from the mixed gas, it won't be pretty or strong. Welding tip polarity is even discussed in the wiki, so if you are using fluxed wire and getting really crappy looking results, check the polarity. Cheers, Gene Heskett -- "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) Genes Web page <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene> US V Castleman, SCOTUS, Mar 2014 is grounds for Impeaching SCOTUS ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Want fast and easy access to all the code in your enterprise? Index and search up to 200,000 lines of code with a free copy of Black Duck Code Sight - the same software that powers the world's largest code search on Ohloh, the Black Duck Open Hub! Try it now. http://p.sf.net/sfu/bds _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
