well I have at least 5 or 6 years before I can consider retiring but I have built a small shop to get out of the lean to I have been in when I wasn't on the bare ground and have it set up fairly well for my uses though I will never be completely happy unless I receive a HUGE windfall but I have invested in a Lincoln 180 mig, and a Lincoln tig 200 SW.
I have never really tig welded, just played with one at work a few times with dismal results so after trying to get a broken off stud out of a old Collins chop saw I was hoping to give a friend who just got going using the mig and washer / nut method much recommended here and failing 4 times I decided my spirits couldn't get much lower and decided to put some time on the SW. felling ambitious from the broken stud folly I started on some 3/16ths aluminum, big mistake. I had a few 3/16ths X 1.5 X 3" pieces of hot rolled angle close at hand so I polished two of them and started of with a lap weld on both sides first just blending the base metal and then adding filler. it went better than I thought it would so I just started padding beads. I can tell this is going to take some time but it is coming along. I really thought it would come second nature but for some reason feeding the filler and holding a tig torch seems terribly different from using O/A and filler which made my living for me for most of the last 30 some odd years. I know one thing, there is a heck of a lot more heat transfer to skin with tig, using O/A I rarely wore gloves and the tig is burning me through tillman tig gloves even with the heat shield on the left ( filler ) hand. for a practice project I am going to make some hanging planters for the wife out of 30 pound Ref drums to go with the shepherd hooks I made her about 12 years ago and finally put 2 up for her yesterday. kind of a two birds one stone approach, practice and brownie points in one smooth motion, well hopefully smooth.
any tips are welcome and if the welds on the planter pots don't look like they were done with a bic lighter and a Hershey bar I will post them but at this point I am far from optimistic.
creek
- Granddaddy
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Guide
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Joined:Mon Feb 13, 2017 4:53 pm
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Location:NW Fla
the heck with the duty cycle on the welder, tell me about the duty cycle on that grinder !!
