Thoughts on the Lessons

I just finished the practical Tig welding course, and I am super happy with the courses. Today was my first day trying what I learned and I am pretty excited about my first couple of passes. I know they still need lots of work but I thought they would have ended up waay worse. Anyways My one criticism is I would have liked to see more examples of a good weld and bad welds, and what various bad welds look like (such as contamination, torch angle not correct, too much heat etc…) and how to fix them. I don’t remember there really being any examples other than Nigel describing what a good and bad weld should look like.

As far as what I would like to learn about, I bought these courses to teach myself to tig so that I may ultimately start building my own roll cage in my drift car. I think it would be awesome to have a module in the practical tig course, worked examples module that went over basic roll cage fabrication.

Pictures attached are my first passes first on the left and latest on right

Hi Nathan,

Quick look at the welds says that the heat was too high and it looks like you are using too large a diameter tungsten and filler rod for the thickness of material that you are using.

Thanks for the reply! what exactly is the tell tale sign that my tungsten is too large?? currently I only have 2.4mm tungsten but the heat tip makes sense thank you!

Hi Nathan,

The main giveaway for the size of the tungsten/filler rod is the width of the weld, and the heat discoloration. With TIG Welding you should be able to run a weld bead not much thicker than the width of the filler rod (even less with practice and good amperage control), what I see is that you have had to run a higher than optimal current into the tungsten to get the arc, which has used more of the filler and expanded the weld pool to a larger area.

Hi Nathan the last weld (Pic 4) is looking good, are you running a gas lense? The weld looks like its the right size it might just be a little contaminated and judging by the colouring it may be a little slow in the travel speed. What I find is that its sometimes easier to bump up the amps and travel faster once you have found a good motion of filler rod dabbing.