what both of you said prooves to me that you havent had that much experience welding.
tig weld two pieces together. fine, if you want 1" at a time. look at the metal as soon as you take your foot off the pedal. whats that? its red hot? but jeez i thought that foot pedal controls the heat? the reason tig has heat issues s because of time, just like jnj said. you saty on the metal longer resulting in more heat being transferred through the piece. THE HEAT COMES FROM THE TIME IT TAKES TO COMPLETE THE WELD NOT NECESARILY THE AMOUNT OF CURRENT YOU ARE USING (ie the setting on the mig machine or the requested current coming from the foot pedal with tig)
now if if you mig weld, your filler is your source of penetration. so it cools when A. the voltage cant carry the heat any deeper and or B. you move the source of the heat.
this all being said i would trust a tig weld more than a mig weld anyday. but not if it is overkill. tig looks pretty but for body panels where you have to smooth over it anyways, mig is the way to go. or like rob said oxy brazing which i completely suck at.
i will check this thread again later, right now i have to go out in my shop and weld for a living. please continue to argue while i am away
ooooh this sounded kind asshattish. sorry, i dont mean to come off that way
you guys def know something about this topic, i was just trying to get the point across that i do it everyday. i tig almost everyday to make tables, and i MIG as part of my fathers job shop.
to be honest i thought exactly like you guys do until i actually started tig welding my tables. after hammering them around and banging stuff to get them stright i finally listened to my father when he says tig puts ALOT MORE HEAT to material.
MIG is perfectly capable in the right hands. penetration is possible to the point of tig, you just have to have the piece clean and gapped if it is thick.
You are correct. Here is the deal, TIG is mostly used for root passes in piping and other intricate applications. For body work taking with a MIG is the way to go. And whats this about MIG being “redneckish”??? MIG has come along way in the last 10years. I use a pulsed mig machine at work everyday to tack work shit together and to fill gaps and put root passes in on tons of different joint configureations. I use the TIG for the other stuff and for couplings and what not. IMHO, pulsed mig is the way of the future. Some of the newest GMAW-p stuff out there now is crazy (RMD, regulated metal deposition,(also called surface-tension-transfer, a pulsed mig process that is replacing tig in many cases) The cool thing about pulsed mig is that it breaks the arc away in such a way that you get a weld very similar to a tig weld, but you save about 50% more time due to the higher depostion rate.
To sum it up, both processes have their place. I work with aluminum everyday @ American Presision Industries, using both GMAW-p and GTAW, and both are equally important, but pulsed mig is the way to go.
<----LowlyOilBurner, from DITB, cert 6g pipe welder, cert in ASME section VIII coded welding (GMAW, GTAW, SMAW)
i like subarc myself. costly and tough to set up but man the bead looks pretty and there is something about chipping the flux off.
at an IMTS show in chicago they had a display of a subarc…just a piece rotating around and around and the positioner would move over and keep making passes. it was really cool.
yeah sub-arc is pretty amazing stuff, API Bassco has a couple of those machines, i saw that thing run while over there a while back super cool stuff. Ever seen electro-slag welding? thats pretty amazing as well.
<----LowlyOilBurner
Yeah that where he works. Sorry he posted under my name. But he saw me reading this at work and wanted to jump in and he does not have an acct on here yet. But he will…