How to Operate the Controls of a MIG Welder

Video Transcript

Hi I'm Doug. I work with twenty great guys in St. Louis at Doug Jenkins Custom Hot Rods, and we're going to do some work for you today on Expert Village. The next thing we're going to do here is learn how to adjust the welder a little bit. There's three adjustments here. One is on and off. The other is arc volts. The other is wire speed. To take it to an extreme, if we go maximum arc volts and minimum wire speed, you're going to have a very, very hot fire occurring with your weld, and not a whole lot of wire going in to it. So if you were to do something ridiculous like this you'd end up with spark, spark, spark, because the wire would burn up so quickly. If you go modest on both of them, this is about where we do sheet metal welding. If you're trying to weld down a manhole cover, you go maximum arc volts and pretty near maximum wire speed, because you're trying to do a whole lot of heat. If you have the wire down here it would just use up the wire before it could create much of a weld. Now, if you've got some tricky sheet metal that you want to do, and you want higher heat for better penetration but you don't want to generate all that extra heat, if you just back off on the wire speed a little bit the wire heats up a little bit more as it goes in to the weld. Most of us here haven't been to welding school, we just kind of learned it by other tradesmen, but these are kind of the four or five basic settings for the wire MIG welder. If you have one of these, experiment with it, have a great time. If you've got a buddy that knows how you can get a few pointers that way. Or go to night school, you can learn a ton more than I know about welding if you do that.

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