In need of some advice

[abrahamfh]

Good morning to all, looking for some advice on my welds if you can call them that. I would love to take a class but none start up until August.

A little background info on myself, I have been playing with my HF 110AMP 220V MIG for the last month. I have never welded anything previous having gotten my HF welder a month ago, all I have had to go off of has been reading a few old welding books and watching a lot of youtube videos as well as asking questions on my Vintage Mustang forum. I thought it was time and more appropriate to ask here.

Looking for some advice on how to improve, if the photographs don't show what is needed to make a good assessment just let me know and I can get some up showing what is required ASAP.

FWIW, I love to learn new things and take criticisms extremely well especially when it is educational.

(Please ignore the welds towards the top of the photograph, I know now that there is very little if any penetration, I will be grinding those down and giving it another try soon)








Thank you advance for any help

[turk]

you have a significant improvement in the second and third pics over the upper and lower right welds in the first pic. beyond the standard get a better quality welder, i would recommend being more attentive to preweld cleaning. i try to have only clean bare metal within 1 inch of a weld in all directions. it looks like you are using a solid wire, possibly with a 75/25 mix gas, is that correct? using a good quality wire is 100 times better than using cheap harbor freight wire. i would highly recommend practicing on something not related to the suspension for a while first.

[Bluewelders]

As Turk said,clean things up.
And keep in mind that a 110 amp welder will weld about .001 inch metal per amp.
If you are welding angles or stacked pieces of metal,it is easy to run out of amps ,with a small welder.

[Pro-Fab]

Your flat position welds arent bad for a rookie, but you need to practice your vertical technique on scrap material. Actually, you don't have a technique, so I suggest turning your heat down to where you can control the puddle and try and mimic what you were watching in the videos.
Be careful when choosing on-line instruction, youtube is probably the largest source of misinformation that there is.

[tackit]

Be advised a mig weld can look beautiful but not have penitration,it's important not to weld things over a machines capabilities....

Clean the steel but don't polish it until it shines like chrome....like with a blending pad ...polishing hardens the surface of the steel making penetration harder to achieve, especially so for 110 mig welding machines.

[abrahamfh]

I know it has been a really really long time but I will be getting back into playing with the welder again soon and wanted to thank everyone who replied for sharing their wisdom.

Since my last post last year, I have moved on from my harbor freight to a amazing Lincoln SP 135-plus and find it to be far superior from what I was trying to learn on previously.

[JohnR]

Originally Posted by tackit

Be advised a mig weld can look beautiful but not have penitration,it's important not to weld things over a machines capabilities....

Clean the steel but don't polish it until it shines like chrome....like with a blending pad ...polishing hardens the surface of the steel making penetration harder to achieve, especially so for 110 mig welding machines.

I've never heard of work hardening the surface of mild steel by cleaning rust off with a flap disk...

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