Tig Welding Video - A review of a Video on Tig Welding an outside corner joint

Tig welding video - Carbon steel

A Tig Welder with 35 years experience demonstrates an outside corner joint on mild carbon steel using a miller syncrowave 300. He likes to refer to tig welding as gas welding with an electric torch and after watching the demonstration you will learn why. He does a good job of describing what is going on and gives some down and dirty advice on torch angle that I really appreciate and agree with. What he says is dont get all hung up on proper torch angle being critical. Sometimes in the real world, you gotta do what you gotta do and use whatever torch angle you need to make it happen.

But there are 2 things that I noticed immediately about this tig welding steel demo that kind of bug me:

1. The arc length in the video appears to be like 1/4" . That is a problem. That is why the filler rod balls up and blobs into the puddle instead of feeding precisely into the puddle like it would if the arc length were closer to 3/32" or less. Its obvious from listening to the guy that he equates tig welding and gas welding on many levels. When you hold a long arc like that, Tig welding IS like gas welding. (And it ends up looking like Fido's Ass instead of a stack of dimes.)

2. A corner joint should be roughly 90 degrees. Why does he have this one tacked together like at a 45 degree angle? Its almost an edge weld.A 90 degree outside corner joint is very commonly used in the fabrication of tanks of all sorts so it would be a good idea for anyone learning to weld to practice a true 90 degree outside corner weld instead of the one displayed in this video.

All in all , the guy in this tig welding video has a ton of experience and I dont want to ding him too badly, but seriously, the weld is pretty incriminating. The high spots are due to the filler rod blobbing into the puddle instead of feeding. All because of too long an arc.

Let me boil it down. The whole benefit of tig welding vs gas welding is concentrated heat and more precision. But when you use a long arc, you lose that benefit, In fact the weld in the video even looks like a gas weld. I am sure its strong but so is a gorilla. enough said

remember, a tip for anyone learning to tig weld is to work on holding a tight arc length. no more than the size of your tungsten. Happiness is a tight arc. or something like that.