8 Useful Tips for Mig Welding

Make use of those tips to better your MIG welds!

While being trained at school, more experienced after practical work, Vietnam welders are also encouraged to draw lessons along the way and utilize welding tips to smooth their work process and perfect their finished products. There are useful tips as related to Mig welding that welders can make best use during their work.

1. Always begin with clean materials

To work with contaminated or dirty materials is the fastest to ruin a weld. Take it a note to always clean up the workpiece you are about to weld and ensure the metal is really clean and contaminate free. Examples of things that can contaminate the weld include rust, corrosion, old paint, grease, oil, or just plain dirt. Better the weld by getting it off.

2. Use the best possible welding wire for Mig welding.

This will pay off in better welds. Then get the best possible wire you can afford. Of course, you can save money buying inferior wire. Sure there is plentiful rubbish out there in the market, but it won’t last long. Your welds will just end up being poor quality and having to be redone later.

For Mig wire, always find the one with nice copper coating, accurate dimensions and without being oversized at any point along its length.

3. When you can, always use an auto darkening welding helmet

You sure will pay a little more, which will make up for the extra time you would earn to grind and redo your work. Rather, it takes some more pay to avoid lag time and have better weld. Using an auto-darkening helmet, you will kill the lag time from when you begin your weld, to when a standard helmet is flipped down into place. That very brief moment of time can make you lose track of your welding path and cause lots of extra worker afterwards because you have to grind, redo your work.

4. Always use the Earth clamp

As the welding process is just like a high voltage electric circuit, any circuit break can induce welding problems. A good clamp with a strong spring just prices around $20, and is worthy of money. One way for eliminating those circuit breaks is using a good Earth clamp, and making ready for the metal underneath by sanding off any corrosion or paint.

Bear in mind that a bad ground is one of the biggest Mig welding problems. Always ensure that your clamp comes with a good, clean ground surface for clamping onto; otherwise, you will be in trouble before you get started.

5. Get a good tip for Mig welding

You need a good Mig welding wire for good weld production. Also, you need quality contact tips. There are many cheap contact tips on the market these days; the internal surface of the tunnel that the wire feeds through can be rough or uneven. That can result in fickle or unstable welding arcs, inconsistent wire feeding, and other problems.

6. When Mig welding, use the right shielding gas

You can use directly CO2 when Mig welding though, a 75% argon and 25% CO2 mixture is rather much standard in the welding industry.

7. Have the Mig welder set to the right polarity

Just remember that when Mig welding, polarity is associated with the type of welding wire you use. If you use bar wire, you will need reverse polarity electrode positive for a good weld. For flux core welding wire, you will need reverse the polarity.

Because Mig welding machine doesn’t include a switch for polarity change, you will have to do this manually.

8. Use a good anti spatter compound

If welding is done with flux core wire, welding spatter is part of the process. Still, you can decrease the spatter for cleaner welds by using a good anti spatter compound like LPS aerosol 02116. Another upside of the LPS compound is that it is water based and non toxic, then unlike some cheaper compounds, it won’t do any extra damage to welder’s health.