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You can get gauges separately but for the price something like LordBug's reg with flowmeter sounds alright. The budget ebay ones are not too expensive and all-in-one.

How did you go with finding...

Probably best to raise this in the welding subforum.
The discolouration of the metal is called the heat affected zone. Good to see on the back of a T joint but if your sheet pieces are butt jointed,...

Yeah. What Mick said. It's more forgiving to learn on some thicker scrap to start with. 10mm maybe.

Get yourself a chipping hammer/chisel and a wire brush to clean up the welds so you can look...

I'm guessing it's way too cold from your description. You don't really want the wire to just stick to the metal. You want both things to melt together. Clamp as close to the weld as practical.
...

My tip for finishes would be to avoid the issue by avoiding finishing right at the edge. You'll always burn away too much. Right at the edge is the last place you want it weak as well. You don't...

Gmail has a mail fetcher feature that lets it retrieve emails from your bigpond account.
You can set it up in the Gmail Settings under Accounts somewhere.

Similarly you can set up Gmail so it...

Ken,

I think the first thing you should do is change your Outlook Express options so that you do NOT keep messages on the mail server. This is something you always try to avoid with POP3...

My concern with the Unimig and the token tools machines would be whether you can buy the right rollers for Aluminium for them. That would be something you'd have to ask them.

A fellow student at TAFE wanted to check his tailstock alignment on his lathe at home.
The basic procedure was to get a testbar turned up on another lathe and put it between 2 centres on the lathe...

I have old TAFE texts here for milling. It's got some ballpark chip per tooth numbers on a chart here:
On Steel (in mm)

End Mill HSS 0.03 - 0.15
Slitting Saw HSS 0.012 - 0.042

Sounds like you're 90% of the way there. Could you show us some photos of your finished product when you're done?

If you are doing well with the steel sheet, perhaps instead of a spun cone you...

Hi Nord,

When I lived in Adelaide I got to see one of this guy's guitars:
Donmo Resonator Guitars

They're called resonator guitars. As you can see on the site, he makes them out of brass or...

I don't know if it's worth a few hundred bucks just to give scraping a try. You can afford the glass.

And we're talking a piece of thick glass vs a granite headstone not a surface plate. I think...

Did some at TAFE a month or so ago.
With bearing blue. I used a combination of one carbide scrapper and one steel scrapper.
Using an old file to make one is a good idea.

Supposedly a sheet...

lather,

According to my TAFE teacher, a simple old school method of checking the bed is to use a wire stretched tight just above it. Then you measure along under it with a feeler gauge. They...

Might need a bit more info, Shane.
Are you welding it?

For big rectangular-shaped stuff, measuring across the diagonals is probably the easiest way to check you're squared up. If the two...

A couple of points:

1. No one on the thread seems to be concerned about when the bids are made so I'm not sure where you're getting that from. The issue is shill bidding from a "fake" buyer. ...

It's not the same as a reserve price though.

The harm is to other sellers. Those who put their legit starting price on ebay don't get bids when they could actually be the better deal.

It also...

I have the Unimig. The good thing about it is it's solar powered. Speedglas Utility isn't -it's a battery only. Plus Unimig has adjustable shade, delay and sensitivity controls. Speedglas...

Check the MDS but generally not while really hot. You'd steel brush it while really hot, wait until it's cooled down then apply the gel. Different products have different procedures and times to...

What speed did you run the hole saw?

To cut stainless, maybe it's about 15 metre/min cutting speed.

So RPMs for your saw = 15 * 1000 / (50mm * PI) = ~ 100 RPM.

Stainless is a little more forgiving IMHO.

Yep. A little change in angle tends to make a drastic difference.



You're welcome, Gozz. Let us know how it goes.

Feeding wire through your fingers isn't that important IMHO. The nature of...

It's more because you need that cleaning action of the AC current to be all the way around the bead. One you start tilting it as you would by walking the cup, the side of the leading edge of the...

The panels can be quite cryptic! The manual sometimes doesn't help either.
I can make a guess on most of the knobs.

Arc force is for your stick. I'm a little unsure what it does exactly. I...

Looks good already gozz! Do you have to go that much narrower?

It can be hard to get right in the corner for a smaller weld. A smaller cup would help. A touch more stick out won't hurt because...

Looking good, Mick!

To get those dimples out, you just have to spread the heat evenly around that last bead as the downslope is occurring. Quick little swirls around the circumference of the bead...

If you aren't actually doing a joint then ignore what I previously said. A bead in the middle of a flat plate is probably not going to warp it that much. When you have two pieces of metal, it's a...

Stress. Aluminium expands a lot due to heat. When it cools there's stress on the weld.

The width of the bead should be determined by the type of weld and the thickness of material being joined....

Well if it's in the CIG pocket guide, it must be true. ;)

"Smooth stable arcing and excellent fillet shape
and edge wetting are achieved when welding
galvanised steel fixtures."

They suggest...

abrogard,

Ignore those Cig welding salespeople.

As BenM78 said, 0.6 wire with gas for the body panels. That's the most conventional solution. Can your welder run with gas?

Different...

Maybe you can get it done but I think you'll struggle. AND blame yourself rather than the equipment.

Most home handymen get along with a stick welder and then later want to upgrade to something...

Basically yes. It's buyer beware. They try to sell backyarders a wire that they shouldn't use because it fits the cheap welder they have.
It's like $100 per roll. It won't weld properly.
...

Well I think we can actually blame the welder.
It's not able to wash the runs together or into the base metal because you can't turn up the volts enough with that wire.

Understood.

Do you have any images of some welds done gasless?

In industry they don't use gasless wire under a certain thickness because the wire can't hold the amount of flux needed to fully...

One other thing about gasless is that I hope you don't have one of those cheap home gasless MIGs.

Grahame has written before about how they are useless and my TAFE instructor just gave the same...

In that case, don't expect to see a lot!

You kinda don't start learning MIG by actually joining stuff to be honest.
You get your settings all sorted out running beads on some scrap first.

Once...

Different helmets do help. They vary in quality. Having said that I use my crappier helmet for MIG and reserve the better one for TIG.

Helmets can also be fitted with plastic magnifying lenses...

Well a lot of inverters have AC balance and transformers don't. IMHO it is way more useful than AC Frequency.

On the transformers, I don't have any issues with the arc blowing out usually. Those...

This has a couple extra features that the Ebay ones don't: AC Freq control and up slope.

As mentioned in the other thread, AC Freq tends to whack up the price a lot.

Not a necessity IMHO. You can manage to weld with 60Hz. It's one of of those "nice to haves".

Silverwater Welding and Hare and Forbes sell Unimig TIG machines and they are both in Sydney.

Scrap metal yards / metal recyclers. What size electrodes did you get?

As Grahame said the cheap auto darkening helmets are good enough for stick welding (as long as they comply to the relevant...

With Aluminium, I'd say give it a try first.

Having somewhere to rest both hands or at least stabilize the rod is a good idea. Just being able to rest your elbows on the workbench wouldn't hurt....

I do find the pulse fairly useful actually.

It works in AC as well and it's really good for aluminium when the parent metal can't take a lot of heat. For aluminium, you put a hole through it with...

The Pulse is somewhat tricky. On the better machines there's a lot of settings to adjust the amount of peak and base current and the durations. Since your machine doesn't have that adjustability, it...

Pulsed DC is a way to put a lot less heat into the weld while still keeping the puddle going. Good for stainless.

Damn shame you don't have AC.
Perhaps you can tig braze the aluminium in DC.

Try start it on the copper plate then move it on to the blade. Or grab a bigger rod. Running on 120 amps when the rods shouldn't be over 90 is no good.

John, good question.
I believe each of the equal shorter lengths should be approx. the same as the thickness of the thinner material.

The tolerances for TAFE assessment for a fillet weld were...

Take my advice with a grain of salt, John. I'm still completing my TIG course at TAFE.

It's looking nice and consistent on the T Joint. Well done.

As Lou said though, you want the width of the...