Welding - how did you get started?

[lufbramatt]

Jan 10, 2017 20:21:07 GMT bstardchild said:

Jan 10, 2017 13:13:14 GMT lufbramatt said:

All good advice above. I bought a second hand portamig in the summer having never held a welding torch in my life and I have just finished welding up the sills and floorpan of my BMW. Really satisfying and another thing ticked off the bucket list.

Look up all the threads started by tonybmw and get reading....

Bloody love my Portamig - it's chalk an cheese compared to cheap box mover welders - I struggled with an SIP for ages thinking I was the problem

Pretty sure it was one of your posts that convinced me to get the portamig! Great bit of kit, and I know it will always be worth at least what I paid for it if I get bored of sticking steel together :-)

[bstardchild]

Jan 10, 2017 21:05:33 GMT lufbramatt said:

Jan 10, 2017 20:21:07 GMT bstardchild said:

Bloody love my Portamig - it's chalk an cheese compared to cheap box mover welders - I struggled with an SIP for ages thinking I was the problem

Pretty sure it was one of your posts that convinced me to get the portamig! Great bit of kit, and I know it will always be worth at least what I paid for it if I get bored of sticking steel together :-)

I think tonybmw likes his too

[skkylinedave]

Jan 10, 2017 13:52:14 GMT fad said:

I'll be honest and say I skipped through this thread so sorry if I am repeating someone else...

Buy the very very BEST welder you can possibly afford (second hand gets you better deals). I use a Clarke 151TE, does me nicely. If you buy a pants welder you will get pants results. Go steady, practice LOADS, use the mig welding forum, put pics up of your welds and ask for critique. Get an auto darkening helmet (saves you no end of bother), buy large bottles of decent gas NOT the little disposable ones, buy big spools of welding wire not small ones (in the long run this will save you a LOT of money), and most of all, enjoy yourself! Start off making random stuff, with a big pile of scrap. Learn what happens when you try to weld painted surfaces, rusty surfaces, thin stuff, thick stuff, and don't assume you've "got it" just cos you lay down one good bead. Test your welds to destruction, grind your test welds flat or right through them to see what's going on underneath, eventually you will learn what to look for, listen for and smell when it's going right. Oh, and log sleeves at all times unless you like sunburn!

I started off laying pidgeon poo and thinking it was fine, and progressed through trial, error and listening to advice and not spitting out my dummy when someone said "That is absolutely rubbish pal".
Sticking two bits of metal together is easy. Getting a good solid weld less so, Preparation is absolutely KEY, make sure you clean to shiny metal every time, be aware of how metal responds when heated especially with thin stuff, and learn different techniques (for example thin stuff you want to do one tiny dot at a time, then do a dot somewhere else, then somewhere else etc as concentrating on one area for ANY length of time warps it badly... Thicker stuff you need to really lay down some heat to get the penetration you need... Fillet welding is different again, as is plug welding, stitching etc).

Here's my welding now after a few years (on and off) of picking up the torch:





It's a far far cry from where I started, but I did exactly as you are about to do... Went and bought one, and just went for it.

Excellent post that's basically all points covered. Also just to make the o. P aware if he it not all ready -you most likely will not be running long beads of weld like above due to the heat either distoring the thin metal on a car body or it Wil blow right through and leave a hole. You have to do one little spot, wait for it to cool for maybe 5 seconds, then do another spot may be overlapping the last one by a third or quarter. On th in metal that gives you something thicker to weld to to take out some of the heat if the weld. By all means go ahead and weld like above when practising as that is the best way.

I think everyone has done a great job with all the advice, good show.

[tonybmw]

Jan 10, 2017 21:22:23 GMT bstardchild said:

Jan 10, 2017 21:05:33 GMT lufbramatt said:

Pretty sure it was one of your posts that convinced me to get the portamig! Great bit of kit, and I know it will always be worth at least what I paid for it if I get bored of sticking steel together :-)

I think tonybmw likes his too

Yes love my Portamig

But also had great results with my Clarke 150

Although as others have said before, I've had poor results with SIP welders

Quite often when I see people struggling with a welder it's due to the set up, wire speed wrong compared with power setting, a couple of adjustments normally improves things massively

Problem is it's only experience that can you tell what's wrong and make the necessary adjustments

And after that it's just practice, practice and more practice

[voodoo57]

At the end of the day (apart from it getting dark) you are either a welder.... or a grinder! What do you wanna be? Go and be that person! (stomach in chest out..shoulders back!)

[bstardchild]

Jan 22, 2017 10:06:47 GMT voodoo57 said:

At the end of the day (apart from it getting dark) you are either a welder.... or a grinder! What do you wanna be? Go and be that person! (stomach in chest out..shoulders back!)

There is also a logic in there that you possibly didn't mean

The better welds you are the less you need to grind

[voodoo57]

Exactly !! Good fella!

[elmotheewokking]

I got a job at my uncles engineering firm and was asked to do a job that had no money in it. Given a crash course in welding and let loose.
Couple of years later I bought a Triumph that was full of holes. Bought a welder and pinched some scrap and mucked about until it stuck together properly.
Then got stuck into the car. Some repairs have held up better than others...
A guiding eye helps hugely, but a basic understanding of the process and practice repeatedly will get you there.

[fad]

Jan 22, 2017 23:06:28 GMT elmotheewokking said:

I got a job at my uncles engineering firm and was asked to do a job that had no money in it. Given a crash course in welding and let loose.
Couple of years later I bought a Triumph that was full of holes. Bought a welder and pinched some scrap and mucked about until it stuck together properly.
Then got stuck into the car. Some repairs have held up better than others...
A guiding eye helps hugely, but a basic understanding of the process and practice repeatedly will get you there.

Aye, someone there to say "More heat, hold there, slow down with your torch, up your gas a touch, that noise means your wire feed is too slow... What the F have you done???" - that sort of thing. I used to give arc welding lessons on the ship I worked on, that took patience of a saint! How many times?? "Feed the arc, keep feeding the rod into it, you tell the arc where it needs to go, don't let it decide! No, FEED THE ARC! Ok you lost it again..." LOL

[Rebel]

Just found this thread, bit of a late comer with regards to giving advice. So instead of repeating what's already been said,
I started welding over 20yrs a go. After getting sick of having to pester mates who could weld to do some for me, of course they never had enough time to finish a job.
I went to machine mart ( there are other welding supply shops ), told them I wanted to start welding and that was it. They told me that when I could sign my name on a car wing with the torch without burning any holes, I was ready to start on my car.
They sold me a gasless mig as I was welding outdoors, a Clarke 150, loved it once I started using it.
would really love to be able to gas weld, never been able to get away with arc welding and just about to teach myself tig welding.

It'll be great to see some pics of your progress

[darrenh]

i learned while doing my 2nd astra gte. if i'm honest i now look back at those fledgling attempts and cringe how bad they are (compared to my current skill set) the trouble is you cant really spend years leaning BEFORE you attempt fixing your car.

my only advice is don't get a cheapo 100 amp gasless clarke thinking oh i'll only do a couple of patches. trust me it ALWAYS escalates, and when you get half decent at welding you will naturally want do more welding ! save up, spend a few hundred on a high end hobby welder as this will make learning infinitely easier. a skilled welder can get good results from a cheap machine, an unskilled welder can get passable results on good machine, but an unskilled welder with a cheap machine will blame bad results on himself and most likely give up. give yourself a fighting chance and spend extra, plus more expensive machine will last you lifetime of hobby welding.

second advice is buy a auto dimming solar powered face mask, you will need both hands to weld

third advice, upgrade from disposable gas bottles as quickly as possible. this is because you'll empty them between 3 and 5 minutes of continuous welding, probably not notice, then start blaming yourself or machine for bad results again. there are hobby bottles available which hold 20 times the contents but only cost 3 times as much

"welding" is actually 90% angle grinder, tin snips, hammers and swearing, 5% setting up, 5% pulling the trigger on a mig set. this is the reason you struggle to pay a professional welder to patch up old cars, you think you are paying for the 5%, but they will naturally charge you for the 95% or just quote high to NOT get the work

[nomad]

Hi, I've put fairly detailed info into a few similar threads in the past but can't remember which ones.
The search below (if it works) should give you plenty of background reading and lots of good info
retrorides.proboards.com/search/results?captcha_id=captcha_search&where_thread_title=welding&who_only_made_by=0&display_as=1&search=Search

Hope you get sorted, I managed for a lot of years without having a welder - now don't know how I would survive without it!

[datsundrew]

I started as my grandad gave me an arc welder.......it was a big transformer in oil, housed in an old galvanised water tank about 2ft square! To adjust the output there were 4 outlets made of copper tube that you pushed the cable into, it worked well as long as you didn't touch it as the casing could go a bit 'live' at times. I actually welded a floor pan into the family mk2 escort........it wasn't good, but it held it.
From there I went onto a gasless mig.......better than the stick, but curse word. I then tried a mig that a friend had, and after being used to gasless.......it was an absolute doddle. It's not difficult, you just need patience and practice. It's like riding a bike once you've Sussed it.