I belong to the “top of foot burn from improper foot wear while welding” club. I hold multiple positions within the club as I weld in flip flops, slippers, or anything my ADD can find me wearing. The real problem is easy access to welding equipment…if it wasn’t laying around just outside my front door…wired up and ready to weld…I wouldn’t find myself in these situations. But then that wouldn’t be any fun would it…
@midsfactory saw me in action a few weeks back as I set fire to the dry grass I was welding in…i stop dropped and rolled that shit out. I burn everything lol.
@SidViscous@cyclopath ever hard face tractor buckets? I did that for about a year, was the worst shit you can imagine. It was like welding inside an oven.
Yeahhh buddy. I did a month helping my cousin on his farm running trishield doing main pins and cracked frames. Nothing like dumping 350A into plate while riding a piece of preheated metal lol. I’m happy it wasn’t a full time thing cause I don’t think I’d have hacked it. I’ll keep to my open root tig from here on out
Although I will say as far as “worst thing ever”, I’ll take adding metal over removing it any day. Did two weeks of air-arcing 3/4" welds off when we started building out this factory, good god I can’t believe I can hear still
what’s any secrets…I have acces to inlnert vapors , regulators and hoses. maybe. l00 argon I’m pretty sure …and whatever 2 things go w cutting torch. acetylene maybe and oxygen…all not inert but argon and nitro vapors
Wear your ppe! A welding mask is not designed to protect you from an angle grinder. The gloves and jacket are also to protect you from UV. You can give your self a nasty burn in fairly short order.
Clean your work before welding. It welds better and doesn’t spit at you or try to asphyxiate you.
Welding chrome or galvanized can kill you. Just don’t.
remember that the work piece can still be really $&#@€£¥ing hot after it stops glowing red…
(I’ve burned myself test riding bikes in the past)
I was once welding base plates on 6x6 40 foot steel columns. I had a stack of them to weld. I had tacked them on, had 200 feet of lead run out from my inverter, and had my steel colums grounded to the building structure. I sat on the columns, facing the plate, and would weld the plates 3 sides before rolling them to get the bottom. It was summer. At some point, my sweaty ass sitting on the column become the easiest path to ground as I took a nice shock to my ass and undercarriage…as I was nice and sweaty providing less resistance I suppose. I still managed to make a child…
I still always zap my neck on the sweaty days when I lean on the workpiece and let the filler rest on my neck right when striking an arc lol. Drives me crazy every time I do it because I’ve done it so many times
I know tig guys that can blow you away with their beads.
Laying dimes with a mig is harder than with arc and when you learn tig. I tried tig once and just melted the aluminum and walked away. Yet I can oxy acetylene weld fairly well. You have to have your voltage/amperage (whatever it is) and wire feed set right.
Stainless can be difficult to weld especially if the fabricators used 303 stainless as its much easier to machine but a nightmare to weld compared to 304 and 316l but those two are difficult to machine so either way stainless can be very difficult.
can you put something behind the hole and give yourself some meat to melt?
As a beginner you will have a better chance sealing those holes if you give yourself something to weld against or to absorb that heat that keeps blowing out your hole further.
