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Quick welding question

nad

nad

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I'm in the middle of trying to weld a piece of sheet metal in my floorboard. I'm a noob welder, so I'm trying my best, but for some reason my little Craftsman MIG welder is eating right through the sheet metal that I bought. It's 22 gauge sheet metal, so I dunno what the problem is. Any suggestions from you master welders?
 
Turn the heat down and dont try to run a continuous bead. I would recommend doing little 2-3 sec tacks. Move around the piece to prevent heat soaking 1 area and eventually fill in all the gaps between the tacks.

Dik
 
Well it's just a little mig welder with Hi and Lo voltage settings, and a wire feed speed setting. Nothing fancy to adjust the heat with. If I move fast it doesn't eat through it quite as bad, but the bead looks like $hit.
 
Any other ideas? Did I buy the wrong kind of metal or what?
 
Well I wanted it to be as close to matching the stock floor as possible.
 
I was seriously considering it. Now that you suggest it, I might just try. ;)
 
Well the welder is crap. It won't even lay an even bead on anything. It just pops and crackles and leaves a bunch of slag everywhere. I finished this one little patch and it looks crap. I dunno what else to do, I guess I'll have to find a friend with a better welder or use JB weld as mentioned above ;)
 
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Well I had my buddy try using my welder, and he's taken welding classes and I've seen some of his work, and when he used my welder, that's exactly what happened. It looked like crap. I guess since there's no way to adjust my welder, I just have to make due with that?
 
You could also drill holds and rivet it as well .
Click to expand...

i used rivets, bolts, and self-tapping screws, then sealed it up with caulk and painted over it all. it's not gorgeous, but it does the job well.
 
That's what I considered doing. I plan on doing Herculiner on the whole bed when I'm done. If I ever get done. I want it to look decent, but I'm not super worried about being able to see some stuff. I have it somewhat tacked, but there are a lot of holes where the bead didn't cover well. I'm trying to decide whether I should cut it out and start over, or just seal up the holes with JB weld and have my buddy help me with the rest of the welds.
 
Yep, when I was up at school my roommate bought one of those 110 jobs.

It did ok, but we tried to weld our 3rd roomate's canned goods together one day while he was in class. It pretty much just burnt through the cans. Could have been the metal make up too.:dunno:

We ended up using his silverware to practice on instead and it laid down some good beads on that. :waytogo:
 
my grandpa has an old lincoln gasless like that, just a high and low setting. it welds preaty good being what it is.

get some 16 guage and turn it on high and play with the wire speed till it welds good. you will have to stop and let it cool every once in a while so it doesn't burn threw but its better than a cold weld.

then once you have it dialed in, cut that out of the floor and get a new peice of 16 guage and weld that in.
 
I can't see any pics at work but are you running gas? If not do you have flux core wire? The popping makes me think you are not shielding the weld in any way and can lead to a really crappy weld.

Just a thought

Dik
 
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