Fitting and TIG Welding Thin Aluminum Coped Tubing Subscriber Request

CREATIVE EDUCATION

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00:00Hey, welcome to the shop. Today we're going to work on welding a coped or notched joint on some

00:04thinner walled aluminum tubing. This is in response to a question from one of the subscribers in my

00:10online courses and I think there's a lot to unpack and talk about here that could be helpful to a

00:16lot of people. So I'm making a whole video about it rather than just replying to his question with

00:21all the details. I'm going to go ahead and cut some short lengths with an aluminum blade here

00:25on the chop saw. Now this is 1 16th of an inch or one and a half millimeter wall thickness,

00:32one inch diameter tubing, which is pretty similar to what he is using. And he's notching it with a

00:39Harbor Freight tubing notcher. So I'm going to follow suit here. A little bit of anchor lube

00:43will help out a lot with anything that you're cutting. Some cutting fluids always pretty helpful

00:48and then I'll start off slow and once it's started just crank right on through. Now these

00:553d printed templates or you can print out paper templates and hand notch with a die grinder.

01:01I prefer to do that because you just have less cleanup in the end when you do it that way but

01:06this will work. Now face value this looks like it fits together pretty good and it does but it's a

01:13little bit off of square and it's really difficult to get these little at least the cheap ones dialed in

01:19real square so you need to take like a die grinder and take out a little bit of material there to square it

01:25up. And usually if you're trying to hit a length that means that you'll have to go just a little

01:30long and do that anyway. So at that point you might as well just notch it by hand with a die grinder

01:35anyway. But the other thing that I don't like on these notch joints is how the end here comes down to

01:44that fine point. I don't like that very well for a couple of reasons. One, it doesn't really give

01:50anywhere for your weld to go in there and to fill in. And two, when you taper down especially on this

01:58side with this longer kind of like a burr, that thinner material is just asking for a lot of

02:05contamination. So I'm going to go ahead and just face these edges off here to make them square to the

02:11tubing. This is how I like them to fit with those faced edges. It just makes it a lot better and

02:22cleaner when you weld it. Now I'll clean everything off with a little bit of solvent. This material is

02:27pretty clean and new anyway, but not a bad practice. So I set my machine at 100 amps. I actually wished I

02:33had a little bit more once I got into it, but we made do. And then frequency right around 120 hertz and a

02:40balance of 75%. So we're going to focus a lot on tacking because that's what he was struggling with

02:45the most. And so the technique here is to start ease on the pedal with the tungsten biased towards

02:53that flat side and then move in towards the edge till you see a puddle on both sides and then dab with

02:59some filler metal just to bridge that gap and fill it in. So let me show you how that looks. So start

03:05there over on the flat side and I'll just wait until I see a little bit of a shine. So I'm just

03:12easing on the pedal and I see that puddle on both sides. That's when I release. Let me show you that

03:17one more time right here. We'll ease on and position until I get it on both sides. Add a little filler to

03:24bridge the gap and we're done. Let me show you what can happen if your arc length gets long. So right here

03:30with a long arc length notice how it just blobs off the end. I don't want that to happen. So that's

03:36why you want to keep your arc length short and you'll get a nice tack like that one right there.

03:41That right there is where it blobbed in. So let's go ahead and show you here in this fillet down in

03:48the corner. It's the same technique. I'll start back on the flat portion and then move in towards the edge

03:55and add just a little bit of filler metal. Once it's bridged I'll just hold it there to let everything

04:00smooth out and let off. So let me show you under the hood here what that looks like. So I'm starting

04:06over there towards that flat side. Once I see a shine add a little dab of filler metal and then let it

04:14smooth out and that's pretty much it. We'll just watch it one more time here to get the hang of it.

04:20Start there on the bottom. Let it pull. Add some filler to bridge and it's good. Now when it comes

04:28to actually welding this out there's really not a lot to it but notice I am pulsing the pedal just

04:32a little bit varying my amperage. That just allows me to reposition. The hard part about this small

04:38diameter coped joins is you just have to change your position a lot and so I tend to stop and start

04:45maybe a little more than most would because I'm not welding the small tubing really very often but

04:53you know this is is a way to to be able to handle it just by pulsing the pedal going as far as you can

04:59comfortably while keeping the right arc length torch angles and travel speed. Then once you kind of

05:06reach the limit on that then you can reposition once again and finish it out. So this is what I ended up

05:14with. Certainly not perfect but acceptable for most things and I hope this technique helps you out.

05:21Thanks a ton for watching. We'll see you next time.

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