Silver Case

Fafner und Fasolt. [In need of chains to anchor them to the wall]

I had two full-sized bottles of Argon delivered today, so after work I dashed to the workshop to test my machine. Fafner and Fasolt had one last surprise for me though — despite me specifically asking the dolt at the welding gas shop — my Harris 355 regulator wouldn’t fit the bottle! Really annoying. [I should have brought the thing with me] They’re both right-hand-tighten threads, but the Harris regulator is just modestly bigger than whatever this asian spec is, so it doesn’t fit.

Madness!

In a fighting spirit, I took another regulator that does fit the bottle, but doesn’t fit the welder gas input. I chopped a piece of air compressor hose and spliced a connection with hose clamps. Gross, but it worked. If this was acetylene or oxygen, this wouldn’t have been a great idea, but it’s just an inert gas. The worst thing that might happen is that the splice sucks some oxygen inline and contaminates the shielding gas.

Not a thing of beauty

But that wasn’t the case. This machine is nuts! The High Frequency starting mode is scary — I started an arc four inches from the work piece when I was trying to purge the gas line of dirty air. I did a few lap joints on some 1/4″ mild steel pt late and then a butt-joint of two pieces of 1.0mm thinwall cromoly tubing.

The butt-weld was funny. I need more experimentation at these low-current jobs. With a cool tube and lower current (20amp) I got a bead. After the small tubing segments got hot, the welds looked more like an autogenous weld with way too much penetration into the back of the weld.

This all doesn’t mean much, because I really couldn’t see what I was doing on the butt weld. I was using a spare helmet from the shop which seemed to be a total piece of shit. Basically I realized after (too long) a while that I was welding without the auto-darkening engaged. That’s bad. I had quite substantial Nanny flash-bulb eyes. Even now they feel weird, although the bright white ball in my eyes’ center is gone. I am guessing that at these very low currents I should consider using a fixed mask, not an auto-darkening one. I think they don’t trigger well enough in these low power situations.

Anyway, I’ve got a three-day weekend coming up, so I’m looking forward to more extensive practice.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 6th, 2010 at 10:33 pm and is filed under Uncategorized.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.