hey Jody here with welding tips and tricks' calm with another weekly video you're going to notice a little different look in the in the video today and the final weld especially and let me explain that I met a new friend a few years ago I was giving a talk down in Florida about TIG welding 4130 chromoly tubing is it a Sun and fun a fly-in thing for airplane folks and a lot of airplane you know kit builders and things like that Experimental Aircraft Association people they're doing their own planes and they're interested in TIG welding 41:30 tubing so I was giving a little talk on 4130 chromoly tubing and and while I was at the booth Roy Crum Rhine and his girlfriend who's now his fiancee came up and I met him and we got to know each other we kept in touch now we're good friends so now we are kind of collaborating tag-teaming if you will on some videos and the reason why is I just want to bring better videos I can only do so much on my own all I got so much time so I've kind of tag teaming with Roy he's welding some and I'm doing some of the arc shots and the final product is going to look a lot better than anything I've ever done and I don't want to take credit for that that's Roy so Matt I needed to get that out here up front so I'm going to be bringing you lots of these videos it's regular regular joints like like you would do in school like regular lap joints and flat and vertical and overhead outside corner joints T joints butt joints all that stuff and we'll just see where this goes so today is a lap joint a two F flap joint two F means horizontal fill it weld and so let's dive in our here are the basic settings you can hit the pause button here if you want to look at some of this but I'm just going to move on here this is 11 gauge cold rolled steel sanded clean to clean bright metal and wipe with acetone we're just fusion tack welding in a few places here just to make it quick doesn't really require any filler rod for tack welds you can also just fuse well the very ends instead of the corners here if you want it to do it that way if you do want to use filler rod it looks something like this just holding a pretty tight arc make sure both members get puddle a little bit shovel a little filler rod in there to bridge the gap we're just getting at least one tack on every corner and for the purposes of just practicing lap joints that's just fine and we're ready to get started I'm going to position the your hand and position the piece in a position that's comfortable to you which is usually sort of tilted where you're welding toward yourself a little bit that gives you a better line of sight on the puddle than a straight sideways type weld get all position and initiate the arc and we're ready to start and we're trying to for most of this little video here not quite melt all the way up to the corner of the piece we're trying to keep it about 3/4 of the way if you're not careful if you use too much amperage or too long an arc or hang around in one place it'll definitely wander up there like you can see here even though I'm going fairly quickly I'm not careful the top of the puddle wanders up to the top and then makes it sort of uneven it's not really a defect or a problem it's just an observation it's just if you want to have a nice tight bead down in there if your if your project or requirements of the job don't require you to weld all the way up to the edge and you want a small bead with little Distortion and this is the way to do it just you know that's why we're using small wire right now just to keep the beads small and keep it from going completely up to the edge now some jobs are better off done with the bead completely filling the corner in other words the leg size of the weld completely going up to the corner of the metal and we'll do a little bit of that in just a minute all right another look at it here taking a few dry runs before we get started you notice also this piece is wiggling around just a little bit it'll be better if we put a little weight on it or clamped it down to the table or something and we'll show that again later too once again we're trying it right now to keep the top of the bead down below the corner keep it from melting all the way to the top and so that does require a tight arc it requires a fairly quick travel speed and some accurate placement of the filler rod in order to keep that bead that small here I'm just going a little slower and feeding a little more wire in there and taking it all the way up to the corner and here I've increased the size of the filler rod which makes if you need to go all the way up to the corner and makes it a little bit easier you don't have to feed quite as much rod just depends on the requirements of the job and whether or not you know welding a small bead would help in preventing distortion we're showing you a lot of options here because there are a lot of different requirements on different jobs okay let's go back to the the small bead now another look on that pre flow with the foot pedal scratch with the tip before we press the foot pedal and then light up when we take just about three seconds to get that puddle going and get your filler wire aimed and then you can see we're dipping at just about once per second and that gives us I guess a medium travel speed certainly not what I would call slow here and you can see again the bead is just going a little more than halfway up the 11 gauge material we're going to continue this one all the way out with a little different look at it here you can see how the angle of the electrode kind of increases as you get toward the end of weld and that's not necessarily bad but just something you want to pay attention to you want it not to get too much of an angle toward the end even though the tendency is to twist your wrist as you as you travel and we're holding the post flow on the very end of the weld there that's a very good habit to get into and here this is putting a little aluminum chill bar on the top to keep it from moving around as we add filler I wire in there and push it around and it's just a good practice if you have something like this also really pulls the heat out and really helps the the weld as far as discoloration goes okay so that's what weld looks like when you do everything right you clean the metal you hold a good tight arc you keep the tip of the rod shielded now let's look at what happens when you don't do those things right the three things that most people do wrong that screws up a lap joint like this too much arc length too much torch angle and not shielding the hot tip of the filler rod with argon taking it in and out of the argon and getting it oxidizing and introducing oxides into the puddle and it makes it flow like crap and just makes it look like crap now I'm using a hundred amps here that's actually enough but with a long arc and too much torch angle it's not enough see I've got a boomerang shaped puddle it's fusing into one member and the other but the metal is not flowing into the root of the joint down into the bottom of the joint like it should now here all I've done differently is tighten up the arc tighten up the angle and keep the tip of that rod shield and you see how much things go way better with the same exact amperage same everything all I did is cure those three things so that's something to remember and be thinking about when you're learning how to do lap joints t-joints butt joints it doesn't really matter same things apply to just about just about any application when it comes to TIG welding you get this if you don't do those things right and you get a lot better looking weld if you do well hey thanks very much for watching if you hadn't hit that subscribe button yet feel free to do that so you won't miss any of these I make a video every single week also visit the weld monger store at weld monger com you