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In this video, I'm going to go through from start to finish the organization and setting up of the welder for a MIG weld
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So just so you can see how it all works and how I go through the steps
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So if you come and look here, I've got something set up here. It's a mock-up
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It's not an actual part that I care about, but I have treated it the way I would a precious part
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So there's two pieces of metal here. There's one that's upright and then one on the side
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I've cleaned the surface where the weld bead is going to be, but can you also see I've put a groove in here
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And that's by grinding an angle, 45 degree angle, on the two mating edges
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That's going to give the weld pool a greater surface area to bond to because we don't just
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have the flat surface, but we've also got the the grooved surface. So we have more surface area
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for the weld and also the weld is going to be a little bit lower, a little bit shallower, because
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now it has a depression to fit into. So I'm just going to pretend that this is a normal weld and
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this is how it works. My first step is to just get my cables organized. As you remember, there's two cables
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For every kind of electric welder, there's the ground cable and then the actual gun that's going
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to do the welding. Now I've got another piece of metal here too because I never ever just jump in
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and weld a piece of metal that I care about unless I test the welder because there are settings
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which I've discussed elsewhere in the course. They're crucial settings and I want to see how
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this is going to work before I commit to this because I want the weld to look nice
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So my first step is to just put on the ground clamp. Now I'm going to switch on
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and this particular welder, it's a little more sophisticated than the simple ones
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and it can help you to decide if the settings are correct. This is step one
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The MIG process with 25% carbon dioxide. That's the shielding gas I'm using. So I like that
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I like that setting. I'm going to press to select. This is the setup here. The positive and negative
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polarities on the various cables. So I rarely have to change that. So I'm going to press to accept
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Now the diameter of wire that I'm using is 25 one thousandths of an inch
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So that refers to the diameter of this wire here, the actual welding wire. So once again I don't
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change that too often. Now is where we get into a more precise setting. So this thickness setting
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refers to the thickness of the metal I'm going to be welding and you know I can go quite thin
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up to 5 16ths. So it's a quarter of an inch. So I'm going to choose that and the machine you can
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see has already set itself up for 320 inches per minute. That's the travel rate of the wire out of
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the gun and 19 volts which has to do with the intensity of the arc. So how hot it is. We want
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it to be hot enough that we get good penetration of the metal but not so hot that it burns through
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or it causes the wire to melt faster than it's coming out of the gun. So notice here that
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there's a red sections and green sections and both of these settings are in the middle of the green
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section. That's because that's the best guess of this machine for what I need. Now within those
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parameters though depending on what I find here when I do my test weld I can give it more wire
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speed feed within that range or less within the green range and the same with the arc intensity
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the voltage. I can crank it up or I can crank it down and technically it's supposed to be within
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the green range and that works 99% of the time. Very occasionally I will go a little bit outside
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the green zone when I'm adjusting but right now this is good. We're going to start. Just before I
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go on I'm going to grab a pair of wire cutters here. It's not unusual for a little bit of extra
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wire to come out. That's way too much to start with so I'm just going to snip that off and then
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we're going to lay down a test bead and see what it looks like. So here I've just struck the arc
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and there's two things I want you to notice. First of all I'm not rushing as I draw the welding gun
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across the workpiece and I'm also going back and forth to make the bead wider than it normally
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would be if I just pulled it along and the result is a nice even weld that's
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complete and strong and ready to go. So now we're on to the real thing
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So that went well. It's a nice neat weld. It's a little narrow here for my liking but
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structurally there's no issues especially since I did that v grooving before. Nice and clean and if
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you take it out here you can see there's good penetration so it's a nice strong weld. If this
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was a part that really mattered and I had the opportunity I would probably run a bead in there
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as well too just to get it from both sides but that's the MIG welding process in a nutshell
