Originally published at: How to use the four most common types of welding | Boing Boing
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What ever happened to the good ol’ oxy-acetylene welding setups? Are those reserved nowadays to simply blowtorch cutting?
In college, I took a manufacturing processes class where we learned the basics of welding. I wasn’t fully covered up, my button up shirt wasn’t fastened all the way to the top. After some amount of stick welding in the afternoon, the next morning I suddenly had a pretty bad triangle shaped sunburn just below my throat. Wow, those arcs throw off some serious UV light!
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The real trick to welding or any kind of “maker-ness” is the equipment.
My son-in-law is a welder. Makes a decent living doing it. When I asked him what I’d need to get started. It’s a couple grand in tools and equipment of various sorts… And there there is the issue of having a place to store and work with the stuff.
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precision is what happened to acetylene welding.
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Gas Welding - Pretty Versatile, pretty difficult. Several hundred dollars to set up. Potential for catastrophic explosion.
Stick Welding (AKA Arc Welding, Manual Metal Arc, MMA) - Cheap to set up (50 dollars and up), can be self taught. Really only useful for chunky stuff, not sheet metal. If you do a bad weld, it’ll obviously be bad which is good. Doesn’t need any kind of gas cos the rods come coated in flux. Can be used outdoors in the wind.
MIG Welding (AKA Metal Inert Gas) - Easiest welding to do to, but you can do nice looking bad welds which is bad. Works a bit like a fiery glue gun. Pull the trigger and hot fiery weld comes out. Starts at about 200 dollars and up. Uses wire and inert shield gas. Can be set up to weld aluminium but not the ideal tool for that. Can do stainless steel.
TIG Welding (Tungsten Inert Gas) - This is a bit like gas welding, but uses an electric arc instead of combustible gas. Difficult to do well. Can give beautiful results with practice. Can be used to weld stainless steel, aluminium and other metals. Can weld really thin sheet. These were pretty expensive up until recently but machines to weld steel start at about 250 dollars. If you want to weld aluminium you need an AC/DC machine which is more expensive.
If you want to get into welding I’d recommend starting with a cheap Arc Welder. You need to buy a machine, some rods, some welding gloves and a welding helmet and you’re good to go.
If you find you are enjoying it or are using it a lot, move up to a MIG welder. This is a bit more of an investment because you need gas (typically a CO2 Argon mix) and you need spools of wire (which last a good long time).
With a MIG you can weld sheet metal and structural stuff and you can get really nice looking welds with practice. For a maker who isn’t going to specialise in welding, this is all you’ll ever need.
EDIT - Didn’t realise there was a video in that post!
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Welding setups for $100 at Harbor Freight? I’m in!
Just need to find something that needs welding…
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TIG
As another option, could you get a spot welder into that location?
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I have one of those $100 HF flux wire MIG welders. For several years it worked like crap. Then I took a 1-day basic welding class and now it works much better.
Kidding aside, it’s a great low investment starter setup IMO. But now that I know a little more about technique, an inert gas wire welder is in my future so my welds won’t be as messy from flux spatter.
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I suggest anyone using one of those rigs to run it on at least a 20 amp circuit or they’ll trip the breaker at the most inconvenient time.
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Arc welding question for someone who seems to know their stuff: do the rods go bad? My wife and I bought our dream farm last summer and it came with a metric buttload of old and vaguely intimidating stuff. I’m selling off some antique farm equipment and/or donating it to friends who have a use for it. I’m handy enough to make use of all the scrap wood and masonry supplies and most of the hand tools. But the welding setup in the garage is not in my skillset yet. There are probably 1000 or more welding rods that have likely been there for at least a decade, maybe more. Trash, or potential treasure?
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Yeah, they do go bad over time.
I’d imagine after a decade, they’d just be toast.
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To be able to get the high current needed for this project, [mrjohngoh] started with an old microwave transformer. He removed the standard secondary coil and re-wrapped it with 1cm thick wiring to get maximum current out of the transformer.
Not a task for the faint of heart or electrically inexperienced. 
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Thanks. Such a waste!
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You could try them.
But you’d be better buying some fresh ones to learn on. Then when you know what to expect, try some of the old ones and see how you get on.
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Humidity is what kills them. They often come sealed in a tin when you buy them. If still sealed, they should be good. And keeping them in a warming oven once opened extends their life.
https://www.grainger.com/category/welding/welding-ovens-and-accessories
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After first learning to weld using old stick welders, using a wire-feed flux-core welder these days seems almost like cheating to me. Even my 11-year-old learned to do decent welds with it in a short period of time when we built a backyard ride recently.
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These are all in open-ended cardboard sleeves sitting on my shelves. I suspect they’re gone, though I’ll maybe experiment when I have time to learn a bit more how the fresh ones work like how @Mercenary_Garage suggested.
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If you get the opportunity, consider taking a welding course at a local community college. I took a welding night class for a few weeks and enjoyed the heck out of it. It was taught by a retired welder who knew his stuff and had plenty of welding stories to tell.
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But who issued the hot work permit that close a giant pile of kindling?
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Sometimes the humble rivet is the best solution.
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