|
Gas welding is the oldest welding process. It could also be considered a dying art. It is definitely a skill that has fallen out of fashion as the prices of MIG welders have dropped. It is a good skill to learn, and the technique is similar to TIG welding, so it's good practice for a guy who plans to one day buy a TIG welder. For this demo, we used a No. 0 welding tip, the smallest in our kit, and some ER70-S6 welding rod, the same as we use for TIG welding. We set the regulators to about a 3- to 5-psi flow rate for both oxygen and acetylene and adjust to a neutral flame. Ideally, the flame will be just hot enough to liquefy the metal. Not enough heat makes for wide, sloppy, and uneven welds, while too much heat will obviously burn holes through your work. You'll need to experiment a lot to get your flame dialed in. Like TIG welding, oxyacetylene welding is done right to left. To avoid burning through, begin just inside the edge of your joint. As it liquefies, you can back the torch up to the edge and add the filler rod. Once under way, you need to move pretty quickly with a smooth rhythm of dipping the filler rod and moving the torch to the left. If your travel is too slow, your chances of burn-through increase exponentially. By the time you reach the left edge of your joint, the work could have so much heat in it that a giant hole could seemingly appear out of nowhere. Remember, as you're traveling along the joint, you're pushing heat toward the edge of the piece, and it can only absorb so much heat before it melts. You can control this by using a hot, narrowly focused flame and welding quickly, or you can modulate the temperature by doing a section at a time, pausing to allow the work to cool for several seconds. This is a technique similar to stitch-welding with a MIG machine. View Related Article
|
|