Those of you who know scoot about welding probably all ready know this but I'm a hack and didn't - and maybe someone else can learn from my ignorance.
Here's the set-up:
I had some Stainless Steel to weld and being down to 1 MIG welder (my son and grands have the old Lincoln which I used to have set up for SS) I switched the Eastwood over to SS wire and pure argon shielding gas. All went well on a small SS job I had (exhaust on the Volvo) and there is more SS in my future as I rework the exhaust on Mutt so I wanted to leave the welder set up for SS.
Here comes the learning experience: In between the SS jobs I needed to weld up the mild steel exhaust support bracket for the turbo exhaust on Mutt. I thought that rather than switch the welder back and forth I'd just weld up the bracket with the SS wire and argon. Turns out that this is a REALLY bad idea. I was getting crappy beads (even worse than usual) but I did manage to glue the whole thing together. Eventually I ran out of argon and decided to complete the final welds with oxy/acetylene and that's when I learned the nasty lesson. Thinking "while I'm at it" I decided to touch up the MIG welds with the torch and found out that I had little to no penetration on the MIG welds. As I melted the MIG welds with the torch I could see the edges of what should have been the weld puddle and they were not integrated with the base metal. With the torch I was able to melt the whole thing into a unified hunk.
Bottom line - SS wire in a MIG running argon does not result in a decent weld on mild steel. In the future I'll either change the welder over or just torch weld the whole deal to start with.
No doubt someone with a lot more skill than I have will say that you can MIG mild steel with an SS setup if you JUST......... But I'm not that guy.
Dan
Here's the set-up:
I had some Stainless Steel to weld and being down to 1 MIG welder (my son and grands have the old Lincoln which I used to have set up for SS) I switched the Eastwood over to SS wire and pure argon shielding gas. All went well on a small SS job I had (exhaust on the Volvo) and there is more SS in my future as I rework the exhaust on Mutt so I wanted to leave the welder set up for SS.
Here comes the learning experience: In between the SS jobs I needed to weld up the mild steel exhaust support bracket for the turbo exhaust on Mutt. I thought that rather than switch the welder back and forth I'd just weld up the bracket with the SS wire and argon. Turns out that this is a REALLY bad idea. I was getting crappy beads (even worse than usual) but I did manage to glue the whole thing together. Eventually I ran out of argon and decided to complete the final welds with oxy/acetylene and that's when I learned the nasty lesson. Thinking "while I'm at it" I decided to touch up the MIG welds with the torch and found out that I had little to no penetration on the MIG welds. As I melted the MIG welds with the torch I could see the edges of what should have been the weld puddle and they were not integrated with the base metal. With the torch I was able to melt the whole thing into a unified hunk.
Bottom line - SS wire in a MIG running argon does not result in a decent weld on mild steel. In the future I'll either change the welder over or just torch weld the whole deal to start with.
No doubt someone with a lot more skill than I have will say that you can MIG mild steel with an SS setup if you JUST......... But I'm not that guy.
Dan
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