Hey all, not much of an aluminum welder here so im looking for tips. I had to weld a strong back on an aluminum door last night and ran out of wire for the spool gun. Had to finish the job with 1/8 stick. I guess i did OK considering it was my first time but looking for much better results. I cleaned the surface with a flapper disc/grinder and gave the metal some preheat. I believe my amperage was somewhere around 115, but it's hard to say because our electric is WAY out of calibration. In a pulling direction and quite quickly made small circles with the electrode. The longer the arc length seemed to give me better results, maybe i should have turn the amperage up som more.. 25% of the welding was great, about 60% was acceptable and the other 40% i ground out and redone, and redone some of that again because of overlap and inconsistency. TY
There are a few threads on using these rods, do a search for them. Your experience with these rods is typical, While they do work, they don't work well.
Dave's right, ive tried the rods too and there kind of hard to work with.
The best results I was able to get from the rod was when I hooked my tig remote up with the stick stinger and set the machine on tig.
Using an 1/8th rod at 120-130 with the HF start and the remote was great, the rod lit right up and you could floor it at the start to get it going then let off as the rod burned up and the plate got warm. When I ran it normally at around 110 amps it would go from too cold to melting through within 6 inches of weld, with the tig remote I could make the rod do what I wanted it to.
Unconventional but it worked...
- Clif
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