Thread: Lesson 1: Not even a grinder and paint could make me a welder

Hello All,

This YouTube clip shows the same welder as mine, an actual pre-Mark II, 182 Viper. Accessed 3rd March, 2024 from, Unimig Viper 182 | How to feed the wire on - YouTube

I am still trying to work out the difference between my welder and the later Mark II version? All the components seem the same on face value.


The first minutes of the clip are taken up by the bloke walking his dog next to a freeway. Anyway, unlike the Unimig company videos, this one shows the taking off of the gas shroud. I must have tightened mine too tight when I first assembled the welder months ago. This caused the little spring that secures the shroud to the Benzel Style Tip Holder to deform. Lesson learnt. This clip also clearly shows the direction of rotation to take the shroud off. None of the other videos show this step. Because I had over tightened the shroud it took me a while to work out the correct direction of rotation. I should have watched this video before attempting to weld. Isn't hindsight a wonderful thing!

Oh, I have sent an email to one of the local Men's Sheds to inquire about whether they can give some assistance with my welding skills. As an ex-TAFE Teacher I aware that before I left in the 1990s there used to be Adult Community Education or 'ACE' courses offered at TAFE. Courses offered right here in Bundaberg. These taught things like how to MIG weld, make stained glass or leadlight, or learn how to machine sew, or gardening - things like hydroponics. The ACE courses used to work on the philosophy of feed a person a fish and they have one meal. Teach a person how to fish and they can feed their family for their whole life. All for reasonable prices when the word 'community' meant something. Australia lost so much with the demise of the ACE courses.

I just went online and TAFE do offer a Basic MIG welding course - in Brisbane or on the Sunshine Coast - on campus mode. For the cost of $355, starting in April 2024. Wednesday nights for 10 weeks. Add travel and overnight accommodation ... starts to be a pretty costly exercise. Accessed 4th March 2024 from, Basic MIG Welding | TAFE Queensland Campus: closest to me is Nambour and hours 5.00 pm - 8.00 pm.

Fingers crossed Men's Sheds comes through.

Kind regards
Lionel

Teach a guy to fish and he’ll sit in a boat drinking all day

Hello All,

I thought I would check the settings described on the inside face of the door panel on my welder. I remember going to look at the panel and I could not recall any particular settings for 0.6 mm diameter wire. This is the diameter recommended by some gurus for sheet metal panel work. On closer inspection I found out the reason why no settings sprung to mind. The table inside the door had all the settings mentioned for 0.8 mm and 0.9 mm for (Steel) 1 mm, 2 mm, 3 mm, 4 mm and 6 mm. The factory provide all 0.6 mm consumables including gas wire, rollers, tips. However, the settings table does not include 0.6 mm. All it would have taken was just another line of text, not much effort required, one would think. I checked the Operator's Manual and it is a similar story. 0.6 mm is Nigel no friends. I have contacted the company to find out if they have any data on the settings for 0.6 mm.

Burn Back Settings: I could not find anything other than a mention of how the welder features a burn back rating that is adjusted via a dial located inside the cabinet. No information is provided about different burn back ratings for the different diameters or types of wire - as in gas wire or flux/gasless wire. More trial and error, I suppose.

Kind regards
Lionel

Making long weld runs is efficient but requires lots of practice, and preparation. It reads like you have achieved runs at times, and will improve with practice.

You might want to consider welding things together with single beads or dots of weld. Used a lot in thin sheet work for cars, but equally at home in thicker stuff, just experiment to get the amps right.

This method might match your minds eye expectation of a perfect weld - which it will be, but just small. Join lots of them together. One wrong dot of weld is easier to grind away than a long bad run. In some ways a long run is just lots of dots joined together but in less time. If you've got the time then go dots. You may start to turn your dots into small runs.

Wondered about the balls of metal you were getting - blobs of weld solid on your job but just in the wrong place - or lots of small 'ball bearings' every where?

Hollow wire filled with flux (called core flux or flux core wire) creates lots of pesky small ball bearings, mostly lose, but some stick, nearly perfectly round. The flux tends to 'explode' as it heats, sending a small amount of the wire all over the place as 'ball bearings'. Core flux does not require gas from tanks. Core flux does not require the shield you talked of screwing on. Core flux is recommended for outdoor use when there is air movement.

Solid wire requires gas from a cylinder. Use in still air conditions in your shed. Requires the screw on shield. The shield helps hold your gas over the weld for longer.

Core flux and solid wire have different polarities so check that out. If you have the wrong polarity you will get some sort of weld, but not looking good.

Originally Posted by Lionelgee

Selling gloves individually is the start of a slippery slope. l

You can buy pairs of right hand gloves, it amused me in the weld shop. Consider a shield to go over the glove to reflect heat.

Good luck.

It is worth thinking about if you really need a long weld for strength, Cadogan did a video on this recently which I can't link to due to language so I'll paraphrase and refer to MIG instead of stick as per the OP. MIG ER 70-S means 70000 psi as the strength of the weld, so in "ghetto engineering" as he calls it, a 3mm x 1 inch weld is roughly 1/8 of an inch so 8 into 70k ~ 8000. Now take a worst case scenario where someone wants to lift something on your weld, lifting equipment usually has a safety factor of 8 or 9 so let's say 10, so 10 into 8000 is 800 pounds divide by 2 for kilo's is 400 kgs in "ghetto engineering maths".

Seems close as using an online single butt weld calculator with figures of 25 x 3mm x 70000 psi comes to ~36 000Newtons which I think is divided by 10 to get kgs, so 3600kg with a safety factor of 10 is 360kg.

Thats far more engineered than the old and very basic inch per ton rule of thumb.

Lionel, are you using any antisplatter spray? Vegetable cooklng spray is a cheap alternative.

Originally Posted by V8Ian

Lionel, are you using any antisplatter spray? Vegetable cooklng spray is a cheap alternative.

Hello Ian, I have not done any welding for months. Thank you for the vegetable cooking oil spray tip though.

Kind regards
Lionel