I bought a Spool gun for my Hobart 210 from Northern Tool. They're having a 40th anniversary sale, everything that fits in one of their buckets is 15% off. I crammed the spool gun into one and it deformed the bucket into an oblong thing, but I got 15 % off.
Anyone else have any experience with a Spool gun. Tips, tricks?
No, but I am welding up some cracks in both of my white enclosed trailer fenders. An older white 16' v nose I bought in 2009 but has been parked for 3 years now. Painted it last weekend and replaced the brakes and hubs. Now I have to get the wheels blasted and painted and the fenders welded. Got to get it back on the road.
Wow that was weird. Gonna take a while to get used to it. You definitely have to run it with allot more stick out. Meaning the tip has to be allot further away from the material than steel mig welding. The sound is wayyy off of what I know is normal. Almost like a microwave struggling.
Only scrap aluminum I had was some pipe. Cut it in half and welded it back together. Ran a couple of push and pull welds on top to see how it plays out. Definitely need more practice.
So one fender done. Lucky I have many grinding flap disk's. The fender was different than the pipe. I had to essentially put in a bunch of spot welds to keep from blowing through then grind them flat.
The pipe was probably 3/8" thick so it was allot different. Because aluminum heats up so fast, your weld will look piled up when starting and look more flat when closer to the end. A bit tricky to find the mid point btwn too hot and not enough.
I have a 251 Miller with a spool gun for aluminum, I was going to tell you to have fun, looks like you already experimented! Once you get it dialed in yo good to go but it’s not always easy on dirty aluminum!
I have had much better results at my house with helium/ argon or straight helium for aluminum on the TIG. Looks like you are getting there with your setup, I have never used a MIG.
The Miller Maxstar 150 STL came with a 40CF bottle of Argon. I now have a 125CF bottle of Argon too that is unused. Need to put the time into learning TIG. Dabbled a little but far from getting it down.
My logger buddies came over Friday to have a bracket hold down welded on the log forwarder that retains 8 hydraulic lines on top of the boom. Had to stick weld it as there was no way to get the MIG on top of the machine even with a 25 fifty amp extension cord.
You can help control the heat by stopping intermittently on long seams. What's especially nice about your equipment is mig welds have way more penetration than tig making them a lot stronger. I've cross sectioned both on steel and tig had surprisingly minimal penetration, even though it appeared to be deep during the welding process. the thicker the material, the worse, since there is so much more heat sink to suck away the energy. Providing there's enough material thickness, mig over tig every time.
So I re positioned the hinge on my fold up trailer step. It needed to be down further but never had anything to weld aluminum. I had shimmed it with large washers but now I don't have to.
Great looking welds! Way more strength on that thickness than you could ever get with tig, especially into the curve of that flare bevel.
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