Welding

Turn it up and move fast.

It's a tough trade. To get hired by most companies, especially places that pay big, you need certifications.
There's always the option of outfitting a 1 ton pickup, and just looking for work, but I've never seen a lot of guys out there going rouge with a welding truck.

I learned in high school.. Move a metal washer around with a sharpened pencil without making marks on the paper.

To do your own stuff, red Lincoln stick welder. A oxy acetylene rig. A grinder, a sander, a couple of hammers.
A small mig welder. And don't forget a pretty big generator if you are going to go mobile or do site work..


It's hard on your knees, eyes and lungs. Good luck dude.

Hobby or career?
TIG is the most fun IMO, and several units are a stick/tig combo.
MIG is just awful, loud and wayyy to easy. I just got a migraine thinking about it. But it's probably what you'll be using in an industrial setting.

Classes are probably worth it unless you got friends that wanna teach you. But if that's the case what are you asking us for?

Get a comfortable pair of gloves, and sleeves. Invest in a nice auto darkening hood. Angle grinder with some flap disks is pretty mandatory as well.

I would like to be a better hobby welder but there isn't really anything courses out there for geared for a hobby welder.. Everything is certificate oriented and expensive so I will just keep poking around with my little Lincoln wire feed setup.

MIG welders will make you look like a hero faster but can fool you.
You might make a pretty bead, but have a poor weld.

I'd start with a Lincoln "cracker box", go to a scrap yard and find some clean, not rusty structural steel, (like angle iron) and start Practicing.

Start at 80 amps and see what you get. If you blow through, turn it down. If it just balls up on top with no penetration, turn it up.

If you're just going to do projects and stuff, the MIG is very easy to use, and with a little practice is a very good machine.

You will quickly figure out what power and speeds work.

You’ll want to verify your getting good weld penetration by cutting some of your welded parts in two to check yourself. Its possible to lay some real pretty beads with almost no penetration. I’ve seen new ag equipment fall apart from this; a very dangerous situation.

If you want to be versatile, buy at least a 200A MIG and a good hood. Being able to see WTF you’re doing and how the weld is flowing/penetrating is half the battle. The other is getting familiar enough with your machine to be able to set it up for whatever material you encounter. One more thing, fuck all that flux core, buy or rent a bottle and skip the bullshit.

Miller SyncroWave baby !! Dont even need a filler rod !

Looks like a tig.

What's the orange thing?

Classes are worth the money for all the consumables you will be going through and proper instruction.

However, there are really good youtube tutorials out there. Miller and Lincoln also have some pdf welding handbooks on their site for each process (stick, tig, mig) also.

Mini-Sprint chassis. Put some new spuds on for nerf bars.

Dammit Bobby!
He wants to learn how to weld!

You cutting a newbie loose on your chassis?

Our local 2 year college has a welding certification. There is a basic welding class that briefly covers torch, mig, tig, and stick.
If you have a local place that hires welders, stop in and ask them what you need to learn to get a job there. They may have an apprentice program.

The question is, "Are you looking to make a career out of welding, or just fixing broken shit around the ranch"?

Ah, get the MIG rig, and never look back.

I hafta agree with that. But the old fart in me wants him to get a cracker box and burn up his retinas at least once on a fist fulla 6011s

Where is Bruce (Stillwelding)? That dude is a magician with an arc.

If you want to do just about any welding, anywhere (even hanging upside down or underwater) you'd do well to learn "stick welding" or SMAW. A variety of rod is available to weld steel, stainless steel, cast iron and even aluminum although its generally best for steels. We primarily use portable gas powered stick welders in our business but we also have a few inverter welders that are pretty compact and don't require as much electrical power as a typically stick welder. They operate on 120V and 240V and will autoswitch to the proper supply voltage. On 120V your pretty limited on how heavy of material you can weld since you can't burn very large rod with it. With 240V you can do most anything with one. They are expensive though.

MIG is good in a shop environment but if you need to work outside, the wind can effect your shielding gas envelope plus your stinger will only be 10-20' long so you have to stay close to your welder and bottle. There is fluxed core wire available so that you won't need a shielding gas bottle. I don't have experience with it but I've never heard much good said about it by people who have. MIG has an advantage if your welding sheet metal and can work for aluminum if you also have a spoolgun (its difficult to get AL wire to feed properly through a long whip). There are consumables with a MIG (tip, nozzle and liner) and its best to not abuse your whip like running over it with a vehicle or pulling your welder around your shop by it (stupid shit I know).

TIG is really good for aluminum welding and is somewhat like brazing.

It takes some practice to get the hang of the small movements you use to weld properly. Stick welding requires a touch and pull back technique to initiate the weld which beginners usually struggle with. I learned to stick weld and it it seemed like I struggled for awhile to an get arc maintained but then one day my brain just put it all together and I was welding. Others have told me that was their experience too. Good luck!

Just fixing shit, SEEMEFIRST hit it on the head, get a Lincoln or Miller MIG and weld away. You can get a book to help understand a bit better.
Just have fun with it while you learn.

Am I the only one who hates using MIG?

Depends on what I'm doing, but grabbing a stick is usually more simple.
No gas, no screwing with splattered tips, just grab the proper stick, and get after it.

At work, most of the stuff I do is emergency rapairs, with the occasional fab project.

We had a new kid that would always ask me, or my buddy (who is a pro, I get shit done, but he's on a different level) if we would teach him to weld.

While neither of us have a problem giving tips, or showing young guys whatever we know, but if I'm in the middle of trying to get production going again, I don't have time for a tutorial. And the biggest thing is, how am I going to teach you 30 years or so of experience in a few short lessons?

We both would give him some tips here and there, but I just don't have the time to give him what he needed. So we'd find good shorts laying around with grapes hung off of them, rendering many of them useless, so we knew who was practicing .

One day I had some emergency welding to do. Some stainless sheet metal. So I fire up the TIG rig, and repair the part. Evidently he watched me tune the almost used up tungsten.
He got ahold of the rig later and tried his hand.

He put a filler rod where the tungsten goes, and it kinda went bad. Yes, this is real...

I bought a Lincoln mig years ago that runs on 110v and uses flux core wire. It's been a great little welder. For what it sounds like you want to do, it's the cats ass. I've had many other welders. One was a Miller 450amp 480v 3 phase mig. Also had the Lincoln square wave for tig. These were heavy duty industrial welders. The Miller was 100% duty cycle. You don't need that shit.

Get the Lincoln mig unless you want to weld 8" ship channel all day. If you want to save some money Harbor Freight has one but the Lincoln will will for last years with no problems. Also, once you get used to flux core it's fine.

I loaned it to my friend who does light fabricating. Fucker refuses to give it back. He loves it.

Karl that is a mess right there.

Definitely a "WTF" moment when I went to use it again. That's all one piece now, and still hangs in the office.
I don't know where the genius is now, but he ain't here.

Fortunately we have stainless wire, and rods that work too.