Tig Welding Aluminum Tube: Pulsing with a Foot Pedal

4 Comments

1. Keith

   October 24, 2013 at 8:59 PM

   I love the tig finger, I bought a couple for my fellow welder. I don’t think you need to make a whole glove , but it would be nice if it covered two fingers. When i’m trying to do a cover pass on three inch 4130 pipe or doing some thicker aluminum the radiant heat from the torch gets pretty hot the fingers that it don’t cover. Maybe if I was a better welder I’d be a little faster and I wouldn’t need it.
   If you wanted to give us a class on wire selection for different metals and tungsten’s that would be cool.
   Thanks for the videos , they are a great help.

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2. Joe Jordan

   October 24, 2013 at 7:51 PM

   Yes Indeed, I love the tig finger…I have all sorts of props I have made from pipe and etc to rest my hand on due to the heat,yet with the tig finger im able to get upclose and personal with the weld joint,,,great video by the way….Joe

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3. TamJeff

   October 22, 2013 at 1:33 PM

   You did as well as I would expect. A couple of points regarding this process and where it is most beneficial. Most shops will have one or two Ace welders and a handful of assemblers and at best, tackers. On decorative pieces, in a setting that can utilize the efficiency of sub-assemblies, mismatched weld profiles stick out like a sore thumb. This process allows multiple welders to have closely matching bead profiles so that the work does not look like something from the mass production sector.

   As you may also have noticed, a common cure for small tubes in a production setting, will often have welders laying beads in multiple directions to actually save from either re-positioning, or setting up the part multiple times for ideal positioning. As you were welding, you will likely have noticed that you could have hidden your stop bead anywhere you wanted and without additional starts and with the ability to keep your beads uni-directional.

   Finally, with the differential of skill levels that we may see on the forum on any given day from hobbyist to pro, we have folks that may weld a handful of a certain joints in a lifetime, or for maybe even a one off project for themselves. This method allows them to get professional results with some measurable degree of forgiveness. It also gives them an advanced degree of practice with things such as torch angle and arc length, with such subtle pedal corrections giving them time to actually study what the arc is doing. It was obvious in your weld pass that you were able to compensate and make your corrections without much fuss.

   Most people will start out pulsing as you have so clearly described, slowly, with an acceptable pulse-per-second fashion, but after a time and little practice compared to standard procedures, their pulse speeds will increase and will eventually be running full out at 2-3 pulses per second and even continuous travel once they find and recognize their opportunities as they arise.

   This is one of the best ways to teach amateurs how to weld aluminum. Especially being that most will never have mountains of aluminum to practice on like we had in welding school, with enough of a predictable set of variables to fit a larger group of skill levels. After a week or so, they will often get the idea that they had no idea how close they were to getting the idea of aluminum, with the only difference being that they now had time to actually focus on, and learn the mechanics of the actual arc stream relative to torch position etc.

   I will also add that when I discovered the TIG finger, which is what brought me to your site in the first place, was indeed the ingredient that had been missing from my arsenal. The cure for my last obstacle pretty much across the board for many years.

   Thank you for the mention in your video. I hope that this will get a lot of folks who are otherwise intimidated by aluminum to give this a try. It will make a lot of welders better at aluminum welding without having to invest a lifetime towards the process as many of us have.

   TamJeff.

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4. Neil kynman

   October 22, 2013 at 1:01 PM

   The tig finger you advertise I bought one a year ago and it’s great ,but my question is have you ever thought of doing a single glove made in the same material .
   I don’t know about anyone else but I would love one
   Neil

   Reply