The Home Machinist!

One issue I have with tigging aluminum is inside corner joints, I never seem to to be able to
keep the arc steady it jumps from one side to the other.
Lap and butt joints I did well with as long as I remembered to ease up on the pedal once the puddle formed

BadDog wrote: ↑

Mon Feb 03, 2020 8:44 pm

With the slot properly oriented and sized, it makes a sort of very primitive coring drill.

The slot would need to be just wide enough to straddle the broken embedded tip, and thus not stopped by the tip.

Ah-HA ! Now it makes sense.

Looks like a sweet deal you got there, you'll enjoy tig welding, both in steel and aluminum.
I know I prefer tig over mig after getting my feet wet with mig welding.

If You could slot the tip of the broken off center drill and make the slot a little bigger than the broken off piece it will core the broken piece out. I'm having a hard time visualizing how this works . By slot do you mean like a slotted screw slot across the diameter of the broken center drill ?

McMaster also sells fire brick, I've been buying a brick or two here and there to
some day make a small annealing /hardening oven.
This is what I've been buying - McMaster p/n 9355K1

A workmate was using eyedrops to battle an eye infection, went to the refrigerator in the middle of the night and inadvertently put drops of Loctite super glue in his eyes, spent a week in hospital! Have no idea what they used to dissolve the glue? A hard lesson learned that work materials should n...

Nyle - The lincoln manual said that the electrode tip was to be tapered but blunt, but I tried it both ways, as per the manual and hand grinding a rounded tip, I got acceptable arc starts and got to laying down some dimes with a little fiddling of the settings. Being new to all things tig I did dip ...

Bill, My setup is using 100% argon, 15 cfh, the pre flow and post flow about 15 sec is controlled by the welding unit which unfortunately isn't user adjustable. It could be that I had some contamination on the aluminum scraps I'm practicing on, I scrubbed them with dedicated SS wire brush but did no...

I just got started teaching myself TIG welding aluminum with a Lincoln SQ wave 200 and I have some questions about the electrode in the torch. After using the torch for a while the electrode has hard dark gray deposit on it which makes getting the arc started difficult I have to either brush it off ...

Thanks for that bit of information. I am aware of Kevlar, but was not familiar with the word aramid. Unfortunately, that's likely not a good choice, as the diaphragm must be capable of stretching, and I strongly suspect Kevlar doesn't permit that quality H Glad you found a diaphragm material ( subj...

McMaster does have sample packs of rubber sheeting, 8450K2, quite spendy for 15 assorted 4x4 or 6x6 sized sheets. The 9402K22 I mentioned I'll guess is reinforced, since the product description says it's a aramid ( kevlar ) /buna-n blend it's probably worth it to ask McMaster for a sample of that pa...

Harold, have you looked at McMasters offerings for fabric reinforced rubber materials ? I took a brief glance thru their Buna-N and Viton rubber sheets and some of them come close to your .036 thickness ( 9402K22 ) most of what McMaster offers is 1/16" thick. I'm not sure where this cutoff valve is ...