learning to weld...

I’m not a ‘welder’ so can’t offer much advice ....
you don’t just want to clean the metal where you are going to weld, the earth clamp likes clean metal as well .... and speaking of which get yourself a decent earth clamp, in my experience the ones you get with such welders lose their clamping force after a while.

Practice on thick steel getting your hand in first,before trying thin stuff ..... i find i am more comfortable moving the weld one way than the other,find what suits you best .....

Oh and get some good welding gloves!


I am sure more competent people than me will be along with better advice,

Where you've ground the weld try welding it again it'll be a much stronger weld.
Also have you tried your local college I did a course a couple of years ago and it was only a couple of hundred quid

We need settings.

The practice and ramp weld the bead seems to sit on the metal so that could be not enough power or too fast a wire speed.

Go back to practicing and adjust everything one thing at a time to see what it does.

The thicker the material you are welding the more power it will need (sorry for stating the obvious)

Just play and then play some more.

Once you have mastered the practice pieces when you go back to the actual thing you want to weld everything will go wrong and that is normal

Tip no1 - steel requires 40amps per mm of thickness as a rough guide - your 151 if rated at 150amps - will not be at 100 duty cycle so check that as well - duty cycle means the % time per minute it will operate so if if its 50% duty cycle at 150 amps thats 30 seconds every minute so 2 15 second runs per minute . - so 150/40 = around 3.5mm rating at maximum setting so you will need to carry out some good weld preps to successfully weld 5mm steel.

The issue you are having here is that you are not getting enough temperature into the steel thats why its just building up on the top.

As a practice use the grinder to cut a prep into a piece of that 5mm steel 3.5mm deep and 10mm wide and then fill it. Move the torch in a figure 8 - are you leading torch or trailing torch? - I take it that its .8mm wire.? Max power and 1/3rd wire speed - if it fits and starts - gradually increase the wire feed until it buzzes -

A weld needs to be stronger than the parent metal to be strong enough. so do some welds and then try and destroy them if the welds fail before the parent then its a fail.


Another tip - Use 3mm steel maximum - 75% of a good weld is in the preparation so make sure that you spend 75% of your time on the prep - bright clean metal all around and as mentioned electricity and especially high currents can only move through really really clean metal. You need to remove all of that mill scale from the weld area and the weld clamp area.


ETA -

The duty cyce is 10% at 150 amps for that machine and they list it over a 10 minute period so you can weld for 1 minute every 10 minutes at max power - the machine is 100% duty cycle at 55 Amps the min setting.

Thanks for advice will read in more detail tomorrow, and look at videos etc. today I just wanted to have a play. Have asked in the past at college but no courses, also I travel a lot for work so it's not really an option.

I get that I need more power and slower wire speed although they were pretty high and low respectively. It's .6 wire, did also buy some .8 to try.

More practice next weekend, Haynes breakfast meet tomorrow and gardening on Monday.


I did blow the 10a fuse in the extension lead... Thought I'd broken the welder took me ages to work out what had happened, so much for fault finding skills.

I did a module as part of my degree, free choice in welding tech and theory. Did Arc, mig tig and oxy. Guys who had been at it forty years teaching really helped. I find as I only weld rarely it takes a few minutes to get back into the rhythm and then all is fine. I use a gas less full cored one at home as all the welding I do is on the drive and its always windy! Not amazing results but it’s only ever exhausts and broken brackets that sort of thing. I need to convert go gas welding at some point but trying to find nylons to supply our bottles not happening here

Great please contribute to the thread (if only so it's not just me showing bad welding :-) we can share settings.

make sure you have good shelter, yet also good ventilation, if its windy you'll have the shielding gas blown away, with a larger bottle with flow reg you can compensate to a certain degree with more flow but you'll obviously use a lot more gas.

As for welding car bodywork that is totally the opposite obviously as its thin 1mm ish . Get hold of some 1mm steel from somewhere and have a practice . You will need the power right down and try the same with the wire .Remember you can literally just do a small tack then you have to let it cool before you can add another , aiming into the previous tack weld about a third of the distance in . This means the previous bit of weld absorbs some of the heat and does not burn the sheet metal away .[/quote]

I wish someone had told me that at the start, my expert called me ‘Swiss cheese’