hey everyone I thought I'd show you how I weld aluminum so today I'm going to try welding you kans together is a bit of a challenge and I'll probably mess up terribly on camera but I have done this before successfully so let me show you first how I set up the torch so here's the torch setup that I like to use it's a large gas lens and I know some of you're thinking oh that's ridiculous you don't need that but I'll show you why I particularly like this in a minute it's mostly just to hang on to it because I hold the torch very close to the tip and I also do stainless steel welding I always had problems with the stainless steel oxidizing and these large gas lenses really help so I just leave it on the torch all the time so it's set up with a little adapter and so I'll put in the call at first and then screw in the gas lens I also like using a really thick electrode this is a 3/32 rare-earth electrode I think it's a blend I got this from arc zone or something and they just call it a rare earth blend or something like that so put that on and this is a it doesn't even have the size on there but you can see it's pretty big it's like a 3/4 inch large gas lens there this all fits together and one of the other nice things about these large gas lenses is that the electrodes stick out can be quite far because this is going to make a nice huge cone of get of gas out here and you can get this thing way out there almost like that even so if you're welding into a corner this is how I hold the torch by the way too I'll show you in a minute but I grab it right here and if you're welding into a corner you can really get that electrode sticking out far and it's easy to see what's going on okay so let's check out the machine setup okay the machine is a really low cost 200 amp ac/dc inverter machine and I got this off of ebay awhile back and picked it up locally from a guy in San Mateo I mean it was a business and importer and I currently have it set up to do AC auto gas so that when I step on the pedal the gas will star a TIG welding no pulse I'll talk about the pulse later which actually turned out to be not nearly as useful as I thought no down slope and up slopes so as soon as I step on the pedal I get exactly the amount of current relative to that pedal position and clean with area this determines how how much of the cycle the electrode is positive versus negative I usually keep this almost all the way over into the the weld as opposed to clean so in this machine only goes from about 20% to 80% and I would almost prefer to go even further most of the metal that I weld is pretty clean and it really doesn't need much cleaning action so I usually keep that one pretty far over you can change the pulse frequency with this machine but you can't change the the AC cycle which i think is 60 so this this control doesn't do anything unless we're using the the pulse feature the arc force is also a silly setting this is only good for a stick welding but if you turn this knob up and you're TIG welding the machine will behave strangely it will actually put out too much current when you initiate the arc and so always keep this down unless you're doing stick welding I've got a pedal control there and there's a knob on the back of the pedal which determines how much current you get when the pedal is floored so confusingly the knob on the front of the machine actually doesn't do anything when you're using the pedal it's I've tried turning it up and down and it makes no difference so when the pedal is plugged in you set the maximum current with that knob that's on the front and since I'm going to be welding aluminum cans I really don't need that much current so I've only set it to maybe 25% full-scale so when the pedal is floored I'll have 50 amps and it'll taper down almost to zero like a few amps when I just barely get on the pedal I'm using pure argon and this is the stock regulator that came with that import welder and it is just this part of it is just a pressure regulator and I think it came with this flow regulator originally and I added these two flow regulators through manifold and this is pretty helpful because a lot of times you want purge gas for the back of the weld and then you also want purge gas for some other part of the work that might be heating up like you're doing a tea joint you want purge gas for the back of the tea the underside of the tea and then the weld gas from from the part that you're actually welding so it's been very useful to have three flow regulators I also keep in mind that this one is calibrated in litres per minute not cubic feet per hour so I usually set this for about five to ten liters per minute which should be 10 to 20 cubic feet an hour double-check that I'm not sure off the top of my head but we can test this by pushing the gas test valve on the welder so a gas is flowing out and you can just verify that there's it was the appropriate flow and use the knob to adjust it I usually weld on my table saw table it's heavy cast-iron and I've got the grounding clamp on the far side there and for something like this that's low current you know just having the parts lay on the table is good enough I guess if I were doing really high current welding I would make a better effort to ground the parts specifically so what I'm going to do here is tack those cans together Oh first let me show you the prep so to prep aluminum parts I've got a stainless steel brush that's only for aluminum I don't use this on anything other than cleaning aluminum prior to welding so what I'm going to do is scratch these up really well to make sure there's no oxide coating and these cans probably have another you know lacquer weird coating or something on there do that and then I do not use acetone or paper towels anymore because after scratching this up if you get in there with a paper towel and acetone there's a good chance you'll leave fragments of paper towel in there and those will create a problem for the weld so just scratch it up really well and and call it and sometimes if I'm feeling really picky y'all clean the rod with with a wife of acetone since this is smooth and it won't catch particles of paper towel it's not I don't I don't think it's that critical okay I think I fixed the machine finally it's been a day or two since I started this video the first problem was that this riser card here sticking off the board had a bad solder joint typical in cheap electronics that they just put too much weight on that solder joint and eventually broke free but as with all good problems this one was compound so in addition to that this machine has a spark gap I know it's hard to see inside there and when I step on the pedal the spark gap lights up sorry you're not able to see that there it is and that spark gap had become too large so instead of a nice high audio frequency or you know some tens of kilohertz or something I was only getting a spark every you know a few times a second or something so the torch wouldn't light so I got it all straightened out and I'm gonna give the cans another shot so here we go okay so I've got the cans set up on my welding table and first I'm just going to describe what I'm going to do and then I'm going to change the camera shutter so hopefully you'll be able to see this with the art going so one thing to keep in mind with TIG welding is that the direction of the torch has a very big impact on where the heat is going to go so I'm going to start by tacking these cans together and the way to do that is to initiate a puddle on one can so I want the torch to be aiming pretty much at one can first and I'm going to get it really close get the electrode as close as possible to the base metal and as soon as the aluminum turns shiny that is one that you want you want to add filler rod so I'll describe this as I'm welding and it will make a little bit more sense but if I wanted to actually weld these cans after I've already got a tack weld in place I would want the torch pretty even aiming like this so that the heat is distributed right on the joint but to get started if I if I had the torch aimed like this it would be very difficult to get a tax started because the arc would kind of wander around in the crack down there and for welding something as thin as these cans that's going to be a problem another little hint when doing low-power welding using thin rod is quite helpful if I had a really fat fill rod like this eighth inch look at how difficult it is to get the rod into the puddle so this electrode needs to stay close to the surface in order to get a tight arc and control where the current is going and so if I'm welding like this as soon as the puddle as soon as the base metal starts to liquefy it's very difficult to physically get the weld rod into the puddle because it's just so big so using a thinner rod you can sort of sneak into the into the puddle and keep the electrode close probably the biggest trick with TIG welding is just keeping the electrode as close as possible to the work without actually dipping in if you dip in and you're doing a good weld I mean you really care about the weld you really have to re grind the tungsten all the books say it and they're actually right on this case if you have a contaminated tungsten you're almost guaranteed to spoil the weld if you're just hacking you know steel together and you don't care maybe it won't matter but regrinding you know especially for aluminum regrinding really is necessary okay so I'm going to put on some gloves and try this weld I should ask the the I'm shooting this with a really bright light over the top of the weld table the idea being that you'll be able to see the base metal and the arc almost at the same time I don't know how well that's exactly working out because I can't keep track of the camera and keep track of all this welding stuff at the same time so we'll see how that goes try the same thing here just about turn shiny put a little bit of the rod in now I'm going to redirect the torch so that it's aiming at the other can baseball shiny put in some rod a little bit more heat let it back up so so far so good we'll do three or four tacks and that way if I do four tax always have three solid ones when I'm finishing the weld and going all the way around same deal start with the can towards me turn the torch towards the other can oops that was a touch and you can see what happens see I just spoiled myself so if you can see that on the camera the tip of the tungsten is covered with aluminum that's what I get for for dipping the tongue for dipping the tungsten so I'm going to regrind that wire brush the base metal and try to fix it okay so we got the tack welds in and now I'm going to stitch weld it meaning I'm going to weld from here maybe halfway between these tacks and then weld from the next tack rotate the cans and rotate from the next tack halfway to the next tack and go sort of halfway around so what's what that does is it spreads out the heat so if I tried to weld from here to here in one pass there's a good chance that so much heat would accumulate in this area that we would have a problem with the cans overheating and I don't know maybe I'll try it and kind of see how it's going as I'm going along but another trick is that after putting in the tacks there's a little bit of oxidation and junk that kind of accumulated from starting and stopping the arc and there wasn't shield gas present so I like to give it another little brush with the stainless steel brush to make sure that we're as clean as possible you you