I heard of welding before, but I'm unfamilar with the process. Can anyone point to me a step by step guide?
here is a guide for MIG and Oxyacetylene welding http://www.metalwebnews.com/howto/weld/weld.html http://www.mig-welding.co.uk/tutorial.htm
The MIG welding one is really useful! Welding tends to be expensive initially, as all the equipment is bought in one go, but should keep going for a while without much ££ input
I grabbed a cheap MIG arc welder from Machine Mart (IIRC) for about £110, last year. A £150 ish investment will get some nice kit if you're not going to be welding all the time. It's TIG welding that's more expensive I think. Oh and btw, welding aluminium is very hard!
Mig welding steel is fairly easy, but aluminum is difficult. I find stick welding steel very difficult, but some think it's easy. Buying the equipment is very expensive. However, Cambell-Hausfield makes some cheap 120V 20A stick welders for light steel, and Harbour Freight tools has cheap MIG and Flux core welders.
A stick or electric welder is the cheepest unit around, but it is definetly the hardest one to use. The stick get stuck all the time in the beginning. It is in kompensation the strongest welds u can make. Thats what all our ships are made of because Mag(MIG), Tig or Gas can't weld two cheets of 20-100mm steel together. It seems u don't know much what it is. Simply welding is like saying: melting steelatoms down and gluing them together again with the stick.
people have said some good stuff I happen to be a career welder going into my senior year of a welding engineering degree. MIG is perhaps the easiest to learn, followed by stick (arc) welding. gas and tig are a degree harder as they require both hands to be doing different things. There's some good books on welding on amazon, but really if you are going for simple joints, it's nothing you can't experiment with and teach yourself. Stick is going to be the cheapest and can handle 90% of what an amature or hobbyist would encounter but as mentioned every welding process will cost a few hundred bucks to get into. Gas is fairly cheap and durable, plus it doesn't need a socket. oh and response to Oooo MIg and tig CAN weld thicker plate together it's just not economical because it takes too much time, BUT they no longer use stick welding they use Submerged arc welding because it makes no sparks or smoke and you can make extremely large welds in one or 2 passes. Technically on many metals TIG will give the strongest joint, but no one uses it on plain mild steel because of the time thing.
I'm only welding arc in school and on the ships, so my experience is rather limited. From what i know Tig and arc is used on ships. In 90% of the cases Tig is welded first and arc on top. Thats because the Tig weld can't, aparently, hold the load by itself. The other 10% is either only Tig or only arc. Submerged arc welding maby in under water welding, but never over water.
they often use tig to do the first path because you can get a much higher quality weld than arc, and then switch over to arc as it's much faster. I'm pretty sure it's mostly to do with speed/cost as opposed to strength but there are strength disadvantages to doing very big welds with tig. I used to be a pipe welder and would often do TIG for the first pass and move on to arc but I hate pipe welding and heavy welding in general http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submerged_arc_welding if you want to get an idea what submerged acr welding looks like and the beast is right I would stay away from harbor freight welding machines
Oops, sorry. Tooke the submerged as underwater. So this is like the automatic version of the arc welder, and made to do much bigger welds than handheld ones. But this is "NOT" for home use. Must cost a fortune. I have used ESAB and Unitor, in Swedish areas, because they are best for heavy duty work.
