Proplem with aluminium is there are are not to many sort cut's that are benificial and why worry you get paid by the hour weather your cleaning your gun or running a bead the price should be the same. That artical that Denny mentioned was a good one.

Denny,

great! Thank you for replying!

It's a pleasure and - of course - a honor for me, to get to know you by the way of discussing interesting welding-topics in the forum. And so... to get to know one of exactly those experts I have mentioned in my previous post, having such a huge experience to share it with the welders community!

I understand you have to clean the gas-nozzle from time to time, when using filler-wires for MIG-Welding 5xxx-base-material-alloys, at least due to Magnesium-evaporation.

But however, from my personal experience basically I can not remember to have seen nozzle-gels or similar for using it in MIG-aluminum welding here in Germany. Therefore my high esteem for what "ssbn727" has collected on information regarding different agents, also usable (so far the advertisement) for aluminum-alloys.

In Germany, in GMA-Welding aluminum-alloys, I do personally not know any fabricator using anti-spatter agents or -gels. The worry about achieving probably welding-problems like explained in the "ALUMINUM Q&A"-article - in particular - porosity, seems too large compared with any perhaps possible benefits. However, what I personally know is - mainly in the field of the Automotive Industry - a new kind of gas-nozzles. As you certainly may imagine in automated GMA-Welding applications the issue of weld-cycle-time is much more "critical", compared with manual applications. This is due to the high-volume production conditions, mainly been calculated on basis of seconds or tenth parts of a second, respectively. The cleaning-procedure of the nozzle must thus being integrated mostly within the period between a welded car-body is removed off- and a new car-body is moving into the jig. In normal cases, i.e. GMA-steel-sheet metal-welding in the car-industry, the cleaning-procedure is also a generally important issue, but there anti-spatter agents can surely be used without greater problems. But in Aluminum car-body GMA-Welding, using thin sheet metals (1.0... 3.0 mm) mainly of 6xxx-alloys, the fabricators do strictly avoid and forbid the usage of anti-spatter agents (danger of porosity, arc-perturbations etc.). Therefore these manufacturers use the above mentioned modified gas-nozzles for automated GMA-Welding their aluminum car-bodies, combined with cleaning-stations being controlled by the Programmable Logic Controller. The "trick" is, that those nozzles have a special surface coating, avoiding the adhesion of spatter. But, really important is, these nozzles should not have to be cleaned like "conventional" copper-nozzles, i.e. by using a milling cutter, due to the coating would be removed from the surface and then the positive effect of anti-spatter adhesion would be lost (no more distinctions between conventional and surface coated nozzles). For cleaning these special nozzles, the car-builders use a special rounded brush instead of a milling cutter, being implemented into the automated cleaning-station. I have spoken several times to German aluminum-car-builder welding-engineers and they told me they have achieved sustainable beneficial results in using this mentioned combination and could increase the duty-cycle of the gas-nozzles at many times compared with conventional copper-nozzles. However, as far as I know, these nozzles are not being used in manual aluminum GMA-Welding applications, even only for automated MIG-Aluminum Welding.

Regards to you and all other appreciated colleagues,
Stephan