Advice on welds

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Hi everyone, I had to make a custom crash bar the other day to sit an intercooler properly on a car.. I'm just seeking some advice and to what people think about my welds I use a sealey mig 180/1 on a heat setting of 2 and wire speed on 9.. I also use steel square tubing on the project Some feedback and advice would be nice..I'd also like to say that the wire feed motor on this machine is old and wire speed of 9 may sound quick it isn't Sent from my SM-G920F using Tapatalk
Reply:In the top pic, there's a chance that the bottom toe of the bottom bead didn't burn into the base metal all that well. Bad gun angle and a cold machine setting.The bottom pic looks like it burned in there pretty well, considering that the tube is pretty thin walled.Either one may or may not fail...kind of a gamble. I think that they'll probably be OK, but I'd personally want to be absolutely sure.Just be careful...you need more practice. Welding on vehicles, etc. can be risky, in your case...Rich
Reply:Thanks Rich, I don't have one of them useful sheets to hand, them sheets that tell you what settings to have for differen't types of metals.. Maybe there's one I could source online? I'm not sure what to google to find :/ As for the cold machine settings I get a little worried if I go too hot ill start metaling holes into the metals which is something I don't want ;O?
Reply:The wirefeed looks to be too quick or your travel is too slow. Your heat may also be too low. Use some of your scrap to do a few practice runs on to get your settings just right. Only change one variable at a time to narrow your problem. For your welds, my opinion would be to turn the Wire Feed Speed down some. 14 gauge is what I work with primarily and it's thin enough to drive you insane. The line between a good weld and blowing through your material is pretty thin. There is a diagram a little down on this page to give you some good examples and there are some generally good tips in the article. http://www.weldersuniverse.com/welding_parameters.html
Reply:Looking at the example pictures between a good and bad weld.. my opinion would be WFS was too fast and my voltage was too low? It's hard to say in my eye's because I haven't got the experience to give myself an opinion -_-, I guess I have some scrap metal I could use practice on. I don't work with heavy gauge materials it's usually all thin stuff. But there will be a time we're I'd need to use thick materials for engine mounts and what not.. but for now I mean I only use it for replacing sills and the odd bit of custom work to make it fit on to the car.Is there any sort of cheat sheets for specifications available for the materials i.e WFS and Voltage = certain material, I really don't no If I'm explain that very well!
Reply:You don't need a cheat sheet to get your machine dialed in. Just run some practice beads to get it dialed in, and so you know what a good bead looks like. As has already been said, the pictures you've posted look too cold. There are a couple things that could be causing this. Either you're traveling too fast down the weld joint, your wire speed is too high, or your voltage is too low. That being said, only change one variable at a time. If you change all three at once, you'll have no idea what, if anything, worked. Your voltage and wire speed MUST be adjusted together. There are ranges in which they work well together. You can't simply adjust one and keep cranking it up or down and leave the other one alone. Amperage is adjusted automatically up or down by the machine as your increase or decrease wire speed. Amperage = heat. Too little heat, and you'll have a tall rope-like bead that doesn't fuse well to the base metal. Too much, and it's going to be a huge bead that overheats your work piece.Voltage helps your bead "wet out," as it were. Too low, and it'll sound (and look) sputtery and it will be struggling to keep an arc established. Too high, and it'll be a wide flat bead. In the ideal range, it should sound like bacon sizzling with little to no spatter.Because your machine doesn't have actual IPM numbers on it, I would take some time to figure it out. Start at the lowest wire feed speed, hold the trigger down to run wire out for 6 seconds, measure how much wire came out, and multiply it by 10. That's your inches per minute for the lowest wire speed setting. Write it on the machine with a permanent marker or paint marker. Repeat the process for every wire speed setting. That will help you get close when you get ready to weld something. Then you should only need to adjust voltage. A good baseline for wire speeds:1/8" material = 250 IPM 1/4" material = 350 IPM3/8" material = 450 IPM1/2"+ material = 525 IPMDon't fool around with the "one amp per thousandth material thickness." That should be left to the amateurs who don't know how to read a puddle and who don't know what a good weld looks like. For volts, it's kind of a crap shoot because your machine doesn't tell you what settings you're at. You would be best off to use the proper electrician's tools to read the voltage and write it down, too.
Reply:Okay, Thanks for all the advice Ill do some playing around and come back with some results. As for the IPM I like the idea of that so Ill also spend some time figuring out the IPM. Thanks hillbilly
Reply:I've been playing around with the settings and the only I can find that seems decent enough is wire speed 6 heat 1.. this is thin metal The rest of it is just a mess.. from playing with heat and wire feed settings Thoughts on the first picture? Sent from my SM-G920F using Tapatalk
Reply:Originally Posted by jdilkes95Thoughts on the first picture?
Reply:I got incredibley bored lol Sent from my SM-G920F using Tapatalk