Hestia [she/her, fae/faer]

  • 46 Posts
  • 3.05K Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: February 19th, 2023

help-circle










  • Also, if you’re welding material with a larger gap between them, you can do a series of tack welds to give yourself more material to work with without burning through the metal. This works better with MIG welding though.

    With stick, it’s bad practice but you can take an electrode, knock off the flux, and use the electrode itself as a filler metal.

    If you’re using flat pieces of metal together and are afraid of it burning though, you can use a backing bar to both draw excess heat away and reduce the chance of blowing through the weld by providing structure for the weld pool to sit on. You need to use metal with different properties than what you’re welding though, otherwise you’ll just end up with a 3rd piece of metal attached to your weld piece. I think I remember using either bronze or brass.





  • Ah, okay. If you take a grinder to the edge of the material to create a little bevel, it can help get a better penetration on the weld and get a bit of a flatter weld. You’d have to lower your heat a bit and change the angle to redirect the heat towards where the metal is thickest though.

    You’re probably fine as is, it doesn’t look like the material is that thick, but with thicker material a small bevel of 1/3-1/2 of the thickness can help a lot.





  • That’s really neat! It’s been a while since I’ve welded, but I did go to school for it. If you have any welds you’re not fully satisfied with and want some constructive criticism, feel free to post some close up shots and I’ll do my best to help you out. (I also just like looking at welds)

    I’m more familiar with MIG welding than stick, I ditched that shit as soon as I could. Props to ya for pulling this off with stick!