After 12 years of bolting, riviting, screwing and adhering aluminum together with chewing gum, we just put our new tig welder on line last week. We have a guy who has been welding for 35 years teaching the students (and mentors). Everyone walks away with the biggest silly grin on their face after trying it for the first time.
I can’t believe how easy it is to get a good weld on aluminum! I’ve welded before, but never with tig. We actually have to refrain from wanting to weld everything! The best part is, we were able to get about 20 people to try a hand at it so far. Some of the kids really have a knack for it and will probably end up doing most of the necessary welding on the robot this year.
This was made possible when our school district realized that one year’s robotics graduates brought in more than 10x the scholarship money than all sports scholarships COMBINED! The school board now realizes the importance of investing in the team’s development.
Yeah, welding is fun, but I prefer mig over tig; and stick over everything. It’s fun to get the mask on and weld. The first time you do it, it seems pretty awesome after you take off the mask and you see that you actually made a straight weld (a funky one in my case), but over time, you start to get used to it. I’ve always been fascinated by the sparks and how welding works.
It’s good that your school is paying more attention to your team as well.
Awesome! I found TIG welding to be an incredibly useful skill, especially in college. In addition to welding for my Formula SAE team and numerous student projects, it landed me a very nice on-campus job: welding lab supervisor. My college even paid for me to take several certification exams. I still keep the skill up, and I have done occasional weld jobs for a local helicopter and air plane shop as well as for my day job. A recent alum from my team is now know as “the welding girl” as she got a job her freshman year welding for her college’s drama department making set pieces.
Tell your kids to keep up the TIG practice! Skilled labor is in high demand these days, even if you’ve got an engineering degree.
TIG:
-Can weld anything if it can be welded (steel, cast iron, aluminum, titanium, super alloys, etc)
-Cleanest process of the three
-Requires highest operator skill
-Slowest of the three processes
-Needs good shielding gases
-Easiest to control when welding dissimilar thicknesses and/or materials
MIG:
-Fastest welding process
-Can weld most materials (steel, aluminum, titanium if you have the right wave-form)
-Requires expensive equipment for premium welds, pulsed waveforms, etc
-Easy to use
-Possibility of spatter
-Can weld flux-cored without shielding gas outside
Stick:
-Easily welds outside in high winds w/ flux
-Faster than TIG I believe, but not as fast as MIG can be
-Relatively cheap equipment
-Can do steel and aluminum, not sure what other materials it can do though
I prefer TIG because of it’s versatility and neat welds even though it’s slow and needs to be done in a shop typically. I can go from steel to aluminum to titanium in many thicknesses without changing much equipment, if any. You can’t beat MIG for thick materials and quick jobs. I’m sure pipe welders wouldn’t do anything but stick for outside environment out-of-position welds.
Definitely. I’ve noticed that a lot of TIG welders have popped up on Craigslist lately for really good prices, and many of them are from Welding shops that have gone out of business so they seem to be properly maintained. I’ve been considering picking up a used one for some of my own work once the weather warms up.
Lucky your school district lets you weld. Ours doesn’t want a any students (even those trained already) to touch the welder. We trying to change this but it doesn’t look like the district will have a change of heart soon tho.
In college I dealt with a similar situation. The solution was to get paperwork and standards regarding welding safety and walking the school’s safety officer through our lab and explaining how we met each part of the safety code. I even got him behind a welding helmet to try it out, after that we didn’t have a problem. He even used part of the safety budget to buy new equipment for the lab to keep it in tip-top shape.
How can people who call themselves educators interfere with students learning a skill that is in demand, especially if you already have the equipment and a certified person to teach the fundamentals? You to get some local business support and go to a district board meeting.
DC tig welders have become cheap and are usable. Good ac tig welders for AL are still expensive. I would love to have a ac tig for our team but, it’s not in the budget. Will have to make due with a mig and spool gun again this year.
I was refering to the 3000 - 500$ dc tig units. They are actually usable. Have you welded AL with this unit? I tried a import 900$ ac dc unit and it was unusable on AL.
No, I have not used it, but I believe that it would work well enough. I have used a Miller Diversion 165, which worked well enough for a $1600 unit, but was wildly over-simplified for my taste. I understand your skepticism about anything not Miller or Lincoln, but check out this review of the PowerPro 256 and another video series going over TIG welder settings with the same welder.
Jody, the guy who runs this site, is brutally honest and very knowledgeable. You can see that the welder works just fine on aluminum. It appears that all of the inverter controls let you get a very nice arc. Perhaps Miller or Lincoln would last longer, but for an FRC team you don’t need the 100% reliability for the next 30 years that you’d get with Miller or Lincoln.
The problem with that is its not the issue of safety. We got all the equipment, the paper work, and approval of those who would do the safety check. Its the school board who is saying no and we are having difficulty changing their minds.
TIG is the hardest type of welding there is, but it’s the most precise and you can pin point your heat and filler really well. Heck if your gap is small enough you dont even need filler, you can fuse weld.
