So I've gone back to school to seek the help of an experience welder and to have the equipment needed to learn more. Three days into starting school I passed my 3g. We've been redoing the welding shop at school, all new booths, lots of new equipment and it's had the teacher covered up. He has not been able to get out and get steel so my 4g has been put on hold temporarily. So I decided that I needed to try my hand at the infamous TIG.

I've been at it for about 8 days now. He pretty much just let me loose on it. I poked at some aluminum for a couple days just running stringers and some t-joints. Then switched over to steel and that did not go well. After "reading the directions" or the book on TIG I realized that, according to the book that you can run carbon steel with TIG on AC but it is not the prefered method. So, monday night switched over to dc and wow!!!

This TIG stuff is just Awesome!!!! I'm actually excited to go to school at night and sit there for 5 hours pluggin away at it and at the end of the night get kinda depressed that its over. Now, is that just sick or what?

We talked monday night after everyone left and talked about walking the cup. So, last night I set up a vertical t-joint and tried my hand at the famous cup walk. Had some undercut but he said for the first time ever it was pretty good, just add more filler. So I poked away at it and turned out decent looking cup walk welds. Gonna keep at that and have just about forgotten what a mig welder is with my introduction to tig. Actually, my thoughts on mig now are......it sucks, but has its purpose I suppose. Getting pretty good at keeping my tungsten tip clean. First couple nights I was constantly grinding the contaminated tip, last night I think I did it twice and the second time was just to get the tip cleaned up at the point.

Just had to let this out, the excitement I guess of how cool tig is. I actually did a t-joint with no filler, more or less just to try it and man, just to cool. I'm gonna work on my welds more to smooth them out get nice looking beads and maybe at the beginning of the new year bring in some schedule 40 to start practicing pipe. I know it's not good for the test but at least to practice going in circles.