Greg, the time you take to explain the best techniques is much appreciated. Even your mistakes look better than most of my welds, lol. Practice, practice, practice seems to be the key.
No problem. Now all you need to do is focus on being consistent and smooth. Expect tons of frustration and failures, but it won’t take long to see significant improvement 😃
I like this video more than most, I like the 6013 1/8 rods also. I think it’s easier to control vs other rods, plus I’m trying to work on this exact weld too so this was great thanks dude
I tend to buy it from one or two steel suppliers or from Menards when they run it on sale. I also browse the fb marketplace looking for lots of steel shops are getting rid of. That generally costs a lot (due to the volume) but is far cheaper for the quantity.
@@makingmistakeswithgreg Great to know! I was thinking of going to my local Menards for sourcing, others are great ideas as well. Thanks Greg, I will continue watching and enjoying your videos. 😎
Greg, another excellent video! I just started to learn stick welding. I have watched many of your videos on Stick, MIG and TIG and I am learning a lot. One thing that is hindering me on all three, but especially Stick welding is seeing where I’m going despite having a high quality auto-darkening helmet with a large viewing window and the latest clear view technology. I get close to my work and I also use 3x or 5x cheater lens which helps, but still it’s not enough. I have tried multiple shade settings from 8 to 13 and although I can see the arc and puddle very well, I can’t tell where I need to go i.e. I don’t see the material or reference points like lines or scribes etc. and I can’t weld a straight line very far without drifting away from my intended weld line. With respect to stick welding especially, you have suggested using soap stone or scribing your path. How do you maintain proper arc gap, read the puddle and see your lines with a drag angle? My next solution is to make a burn bar, and use it as I guide for my hand on all three processes. Perhaps it will help me develop muscle memory, but I fear it will become a crutch, and I don’t want that. As a side note, I am in my 60’s, have good (corrected) vision, but unfortunately, I don’t have real steady hands, but I think they’re good enough to lay down some decent welds if I could just stay on track! In order of best to worst seeing where I’m going is TIG, Flux Core without the nozzle, MIG and my most difficult is Stick. Do you have any tips or trick for solving this issue?
Thanks for giving me great details to make it easier to figure out what will work to help you. There are a lot of things to consider, hope this helps: Since you have corrected vision and a higher end welding hood you have taken care of a big part of being able to “see” what’s going on. Without a doubt based on age your eyes will struggle more so than a younger persons. My understanding is the eyes lens looses flexibility which causes difficulty in focusing at assorted distances. Cloudiness in the eye can also cause issues because you lose fine detail resolution. Fun stuff of course, but it can be worked around. The first thing you can do is use a soap stone mark and weld to that. It may help to just offset it from where you’re welding and just tell yourself to stay a 1/4in away from the soap stone line. You could also scribe a line with a awl or file. Manipulation of light will help as well. I find many people have overhead light and that’s great, but straight overhead light makes any weld line (like a lap weld) virtually disappear since it eliminates shadows. Changing from overhead to more horizontal light source will pop shadows and you can use those to weld to. Your welding hood may also let a lot of light in from the back and that can reflect off the inside of the lens making it harder to see. Try taking a lightweight towel and draping it over the hood and make a few welds to see if you can see better. For high precision tig work I wear a hood with a back cover. With stick I run so tight of a arc that the rod (flux) bumps the plate consistently. This makes me aware of where the rod is in relation to the plate. On fillet welds the rod ends up touching both plates so it pretty much runs itself. Lap welds are similar. The hardest are butt joints and outside corners, those can be easy to lose track of. Experience matters in those situations. It’s hard to accurately describe what happens, but after a fair amount of stick practice your brain and body just click and you don’t have to think about what you’re doing anymore. Everyone takes a different time to get there, but it’s needed to be good at welding. Welding requires a ton of control over many variables simultaneously, so many that the brain simply can’t control all of them. As your body/brain gets repetitions during running thousands of rods, it will automatically start moving your hands properly without you having to focus on doing that. It’s at this point it becomes far easier to weld simply because you can focus on what you’re doing instead of wrestling with your hands. This directly ties into being able to weld straight. I can weld straight lines while sleeping, they may not be straight to a edge of a plate 😅 but they will be a straight line. When you can run perfectly straight welds, making a weld on a actual joint becomes easier because you can just position the piece so that your straight weld lands where it needs to. Visibility becomes less of a concern when you know how a weld will run based on your hand position. Honestly it comes down to more practice and little tricks like I mentioned. I have a hard time keeping things on tract sometimes. Anything that can create contrast will drastically help. Having really good shop lighting also helps.
Thanks Greg, those are really good tips that I haven’t heard before, and I am anxious to try them. Your wisdom, experience and willingness to share is extraordinary, and I admire that. I spent 40 years as a licensed nuclear reactor operator at a west coast power plant, and I have done a lot of on the job training for new folks, and I have to say, you really know how to communicate what you are teaching at level rarely achieved by people who teach both book and practical skills. As I have said, I have trained a lot of people, and the first thing I teach them, is to learn from as many people as you can. There are many ways to do the same thing, listen to their experiences and stories, take what they pass to you, try it yourself, incorporate what works for you, practice what you’ve learned until it becomes second nature. With that being said, of all the welding content creators, I find you to be the best, and I don’t say that lightly. It reminds me of working in the garage with my dad when I was a young buck, and that means a lot to me to feel that way again As always, I look forward to all your videos, and I really do learn more from you because of the above mentioned reasons, but I also learn from the others as well. So Thank You!
@@michaelwhiting878 thanks for the kind words 😀. That’s awesome that you were a licensed nuclear reactor operator. I spend a fair amount of my free time researching electricity and nuclear history so that’s right up my alley. I work for a global power/water/waste water company that runs a few nuclear plants and it always amazed me at how many of the people at those plants had 30+ years in. That kind of dedication/experience doesn’t exist much anymore. You’re right, it’s best to take information from multiple sources, I always encourage people to do the same. Honestly that was a hard wall for me to climb starting a UA-cam channel. I know I have a lot of knowledge, and skill, but I know there is so much I don’t know and skills I don’t have. It’s not fear of making a mistake (I do that all the time) or of being ridiculed. More or less until I am a absolute expert at something I don’t feel confident sharing my thoughts. Due to a set of circumstances with my property sale (I basically couldn’t keep working on it due to it being listed and had nothing to occupy my time) I started the channel. I am really glad I did because the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive and far exceeded what I would have expected. Honestly I am just happy to be a small part of helping people better their skills and themselves. Shooting videos and sharing skills gave me purpose and I am hoping to inspire people to build something. I definitely have a ton of content that will be rolling out over the upcoming weeks/months. I even setup a new shop to make it easier to shoot videos/share content 😀
@@makingmistakeswithgreg I think the best teachers are the ones who own up too, and are honest about their mistakes. We all stand on the shoulders of those who came before, and it is not only that, but if we are wise, we stand on many shoulders and learn from their mistakes, and go out and push ourselves to incorporate that pass knowing, and then make a few mistakes of our own. As a follow up, I tried and incorporated most of your suggestions on my visibility issues, and they made a huge improvement, and I also watched more of your stick welding videos. In particular I watched several videos about 6011, 6013 and 7018 and 7014. I went to Harbor Freight and got all 4 types (1/8”). I then proceeded to try all four in a similar way to your tests, and I quickly discovered 6011 and 7018 were difficult to manage. So I sat down and rewatched your 7018 videos (some more than once), put that together with the suggestions you made earlier, and I had MUCH BETTER results. Especially with the 7018. That being said, while 7018 has become my favorite, 6011 has become my mortal enemy! In order of preference, I like 7018, 6013, 7014, but 6011 is being very difficult to work with. Practice-practice-practice is the key, and I intend to burn all these rods up doing so. But 6011 has me ready to chuck ‘em in the can! The HF 6011’s have that nice graphite tip which is easy to start, but I’m having trouble with porosity and just plan crappy beads if you can call them a bead. I have tried starting at the low end, and working my way up in 5 amp increments, and I’m just not getting anywhere but frustrated. I know a major part of it is the quick freeze nature, but it seems the slag is very thin and isn’t doing its job. Perhaps this is a brand issue. Restarts are the worst, and even though I file the tip before restarting, I’m having troubles with sticking the rods almost every time. Any recommendations on a different brand? With regard to your interests in nuclear power, I would be glad to share what I know, have experienced and some pictures too if you want. Just let me know how to contact you. Part of my years of training was analyzing other nuclear accidents, with more info than is generally made public, so that may be of interest to you. Thanks again for helping me learn to weld, and I’m excited to see what’s coming…
@@michaelwhiting878 I have never ran 6011s from harbor freight. I mostly use Hobarts 6011 because it’s what is most commonly available. Hopefully these tips help you with 6011, I may may not have mentioned these in the video: If you can run a real solid 7018 bead but your 6010/6011 is not good, change how you think about it. 7018 deposits more metal faster than 60xx. You still want to make the same width weld with 6011 as 7018, however to achieve this you must move forward slower, and feed more rod in per inch. If you grow accustomed to 7018 60xx will end up producing a narrow weld that is highly inconsistent in width and height due to the lack of metal deposition and unintentional long arc gap. You must feed rod in at a faster rate, you will know you’re doing this because the arc will sound less harsh, the arc light output will lower, the spatter/sparks will lessen, and the molten pool will clean up. Very similar to welding uphill with any rod, 60xx rods need a fair amount of feed rate into the puddle. Too much feed rate will stick the rod, so arc gap that is almost sticking the rod is correct. Also, most people learning to weld move too fast and with too low of amperage. 1/8th 6011 needs to be at 90-110 amps depending on how accurate the welder is, and what thickness of metal. 3/32 rods need to be around 70-75 amps. 3/32 rods need to deposit almost the same width weld as 1/8th, so you really have to feed in a lot of rod with 3/32. The 60xx series rods have a very light, difficult to remove flux, that is flakey. The restarts tend to be sticky likely due to either running too low of amperage or not having hot start. Welders with high open circuit voltage and hot start make it infinitely easier to restart 60xx without sticking the rod. With 6011 I tend to finish a weld, leave the flux on the rod, and just restart. With 7018 I will pinch the flux off to expose the tip, 6011 doesn’t need that. Out of curiosity what welder are you running? The last thing worth mentioning is 6011 welds freeze so fast that if you aren’t 100% consistent they will be rough looking. 6011 is a fair bit better than 6010 but much harder to get a clean weld than 7018/6013. Get a piece of 1/4in still and run some beads with 6011. Tell yourself to slow down, tighten the arc gap, and feed in more rod. Your finished weld width should be the same or wider with 6011 as a 7018. Height wise off the plate it should be the same as well. If your weld is barely off the plate it means you’re going to fast and essentially just arcing across the metal instead of depositing metal. Hopefully that helps 😀
With stick welding I universally run a stringer weld with no manipulation. In the horizontal position you can just a straight smooth bead. You can oscillate to a certain extent however doing it excessively can cause weird things to happen (lower penetration, weld pool dripping, etc).
@@makingmistakeswithgreg thanks for the explanation. I did backward Es today when I was practicing horizontals and it did look kind of weird but I was using 6010 1/8 electrodes. Thanks Greg. I’ll try just running a straight stringer tomorrow.
If you’re referring to the distance from my face to the weld pool, on a non obstructed weld it’s possible to weld it with my face multiple feet away. You don’t actually need to see as much as you might think to stick weld decent. So much about stick welding is just running enough rods that your body just does most of the work without you thinking about it.
Greg, the time you take to explain the best techniques is much appreciated. Even your mistakes look better than most of my welds, lol. Practice, practice, practice seems to be the key.
V0
I watched every one of those tutorials thank you so much I learned a lot
No problem. Now all you need to do is focus on being consistent and smooth. Expect tons of frustration and failures, but it won’t take long to see significant improvement 😃
Excellent arc shots as usual. Cheers.
I like this video more than most, I like the 6013 1/8 rods also. I think it’s easier to control vs other rods, plus I’m trying to work on this exact weld too so this was great thanks dude
No problem 😀.
@@makingmistakeswithgreg I always get a crack up when your drawing something and mumble no expenses spared on the quality of this illustration lol 😂
I love your videos, they do help me a lot with understanding. Where do you typically source your metal for projects/test runs?
I tend to buy it from one or two steel suppliers or from Menards when they run it on sale. I also browse the fb marketplace looking for lots of steel shops are getting rid of. That generally costs a lot (due to the volume) but is far cheaper for the quantity.
@@makingmistakeswithgreg Great to know! I was thinking of going to my local Menards for sourcing, others are great ideas as well. Thanks Greg, I will continue watching and enjoying your videos. 😎
Greg, another excellent video! I just started to learn stick welding. I have watched many of your videos on Stick, MIG and TIG and I am learning a lot. One thing that is hindering me on all three, but especially Stick welding is seeing where I’m going despite having a high quality auto-darkening helmet with a large viewing window and the latest clear view technology. I get close to my work and I also use 3x or 5x cheater lens which helps, but still it’s not enough. I have tried multiple shade settings from 8 to 13 and although I can see the arc and puddle very well, I can’t tell where I need to go i.e. I don’t see the material or reference points like lines or scribes etc. and I can’t weld a straight line very far without drifting away from my intended weld line.
With respect to stick welding especially, you have suggested using soap stone or scribing your path. How do you maintain proper arc gap, read the puddle and see your lines with a drag angle?
My next solution is to make a burn bar, and use it as I guide for my hand on all three processes. Perhaps it will help me develop muscle memory, but I fear it will become a crutch, and I don’t want that. As a side note, I am in my 60’s, have good (corrected) vision, but unfortunately, I don’t have real steady hands, but I think they’re good enough to lay down some decent welds if I could just stay on track! In order of best to worst seeing where I’m going is TIG, Flux Core without the nozzle, MIG and my most difficult is Stick.
Do you have any tips or trick for solving this issue?
Thanks for giving me great details to make it easier to figure out what will work to help you. There are a lot of things to consider, hope this helps:
Since you have corrected vision and a higher end welding hood you have taken care of a big part of being able to “see” what’s going on. Without a doubt based on age your eyes will struggle more so than a younger persons. My understanding is the eyes lens looses flexibility which causes difficulty in focusing at assorted distances. Cloudiness in the eye can also cause issues because you lose fine detail resolution. Fun stuff of course, but it can be worked around.
The first thing you can do is use a soap stone mark and weld to that. It may help to just offset it from where you’re welding and just tell yourself to stay a 1/4in away from the soap stone line. You could also scribe a line with a awl or file. Manipulation of light will help as well. I find many people have overhead light and that’s great, but straight overhead light makes any weld line (like a lap weld) virtually disappear since it eliminates shadows. Changing from overhead to more horizontal light source will pop shadows and you can use those to weld to. Your welding hood may also let a lot of light in from the back and that can reflect off the inside of the lens making it harder to see. Try taking a lightweight towel and draping it over the hood and make a few welds to see if you can see better. For high precision tig work I wear a hood with a back cover.
With stick I run so tight of a arc that the rod (flux) bumps the plate consistently. This makes me aware of where the rod is in relation to the plate. On fillet welds the rod ends up touching both plates so it pretty much runs itself. Lap welds are similar. The hardest are butt joints and outside corners, those can be easy to lose track of. Experience matters in those situations.
It’s hard to accurately describe what happens, but after a fair amount of stick practice your brain and body just click and you don’t have to think about what you’re doing anymore. Everyone takes a different time to get there, but it’s needed to be good at welding. Welding requires a ton of control over many variables simultaneously, so many that the brain simply can’t control all of them. As your body/brain gets repetitions during running thousands of rods, it will automatically start moving your hands properly without you having to focus on doing that. It’s at this point it becomes far easier to weld simply because you can focus on what you’re doing instead of wrestling with your hands. This directly ties into being able to weld straight. I can weld straight lines while sleeping, they may not be straight to a edge of a plate 😅 but they will be a straight line. When you can run perfectly straight welds, making a weld on a actual joint becomes easier because you can just position the piece so that your straight weld lands where it needs to. Visibility becomes less of a concern when you know how a weld will run based on your hand position.
Honestly it comes down to more practice and little tricks like I mentioned. I have a hard time keeping things on tract sometimes. Anything that can create contrast will drastically help. Having really good shop lighting also helps.
Thanks Greg, those are really good tips that I haven’t heard before, and I am anxious to try them. Your wisdom, experience and willingness to share is extraordinary, and I admire that. I spent 40 years as a licensed nuclear reactor operator at a west coast power plant, and I have done a lot of on the job training for new folks, and I have to say, you really know how to communicate what you are teaching at level rarely achieved by people who teach both book and practical skills.
As I have said, I have trained a lot of people, and the first thing I teach them, is to learn from as many people as you can. There are many ways to do the same thing, listen to their experiences and stories, take what they pass to you, try it yourself, incorporate what works for you, practice what you’ve learned until it becomes second nature. With that being said, of all the welding content creators, I find you to be the best, and I don’t say that lightly.
It reminds me of working in the garage with my dad when I was a young buck, and that means a lot to me to feel that way again
As always, I look forward to all your videos, and I really do learn more from you because of the above mentioned reasons, but I also learn from the others as well. So Thank You!
@@michaelwhiting878 thanks for the kind words 😀. That’s awesome that you were a licensed nuclear reactor operator. I spend a fair amount of my free time researching electricity and nuclear history so that’s right up my alley. I work for a global power/water/waste water company that runs a few nuclear plants and it always amazed me at how many of the people at those plants had 30+ years in. That kind of dedication/experience doesn’t exist much anymore.
You’re right, it’s best to take information from multiple sources, I always encourage people to do the same. Honestly that was a hard wall for me to climb starting a UA-cam channel. I know I have a lot of knowledge, and skill, but I know there is so much I don’t know and skills I don’t have. It’s not fear of making a mistake (I do that all the time) or of being ridiculed. More or less until I am a absolute expert at something I don’t feel confident sharing my thoughts. Due to a set of circumstances with my property sale (I basically couldn’t keep working on it due to it being listed and had nothing to occupy my time) I started the channel. I am really glad I did because the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive and far exceeded what I would have expected. Honestly I am just happy to be a small part of helping people better their skills and themselves. Shooting videos and sharing skills gave me purpose and I am hoping to inspire people to build something. I definitely have a ton of content that will be rolling out over the upcoming weeks/months. I even setup a new shop to make it easier to shoot videos/share content 😀
@@makingmistakeswithgreg I think the best teachers are the ones who own up too, and are honest about their mistakes. We all stand on the shoulders of those who came before, and it is not only that, but if we are wise, we stand on many shoulders and learn from their mistakes, and go out and push ourselves to incorporate that pass knowing, and then make a few mistakes of our own.
As a follow up, I tried and incorporated most of your suggestions on my visibility issues, and they made a huge improvement, and I also watched more of your stick welding videos. In particular I watched several videos about 6011, 6013 and 7018 and 7014. I went to Harbor Freight and got all 4 types (1/8”). I then proceeded to try all four in a similar way to your tests, and I quickly discovered 6011 and 7018 were difficult to manage.
So I sat down and rewatched your 7018 videos (some more than once), put that together with the suggestions you made earlier, and I had MUCH BETTER results. Especially with the 7018.
That being said, while 7018 has become my favorite, 6011 has become my mortal enemy! In order of preference, I like 7018, 6013, 7014, but 6011 is being very difficult to work with.
Practice-practice-practice is the key, and I intend to burn all these rods up doing so. But 6011 has me ready to chuck ‘em in the can!
The HF 6011’s have that nice graphite tip which is easy to start, but I’m having trouble with porosity and just plan crappy beads if you can call them a bead. I have tried starting at the low end, and working my way up in 5 amp increments, and I’m just not getting anywhere but frustrated. I know a major part of it is the quick freeze nature, but it seems the slag is very thin and isn’t doing its job. Perhaps this is a brand issue. Restarts are the worst, and even though I file the tip before restarting, I’m having troubles with sticking the rods almost every time.
Any recommendations on a different brand?
With regard to your interests in nuclear power, I would be glad to share what I know, have experienced and some pictures too if you want. Just let me know how to contact you. Part of my years of training was analyzing other nuclear accidents, with more info than is generally made public, so that may be of interest to you.
Thanks again for helping me learn to weld, and I’m excited to see what’s coming…
@@michaelwhiting878 I have never ran 6011s from harbor freight. I mostly use Hobarts 6011 because it’s what is most commonly available. Hopefully these tips help you with 6011, I may may not have mentioned these in the video:
If you can run a real solid 7018 bead but your 6010/6011 is not good, change how you think about it. 7018 deposits more metal faster than 60xx. You still want to make the same width weld with 6011 as 7018, however to achieve this you must move forward slower, and feed more rod in per inch. If you grow accustomed to 7018 60xx will end up producing a narrow weld that is highly inconsistent in width and height due to the lack of metal deposition and unintentional long arc gap. You must feed rod in at a faster rate, you will know you’re doing this because the arc will sound less harsh, the arc light output will lower, the spatter/sparks will lessen, and the molten pool will clean up. Very similar to welding uphill with any rod, 60xx rods need a fair amount of feed rate into the puddle. Too much feed rate will stick the rod, so arc gap that is almost sticking the rod is correct. Also, most people learning to weld move too fast and with too low of amperage. 1/8th 6011 needs to be at 90-110 amps depending on how accurate the welder is, and what thickness of metal. 3/32 rods need to be around 70-75 amps. 3/32 rods need to deposit almost the same width weld as 1/8th, so you really have to feed in a lot of rod with 3/32.
The 60xx series rods have a very light, difficult to remove flux, that is flakey. The restarts tend to be sticky likely due to either running too low of amperage or not having hot start. Welders with high open circuit voltage and hot start make it infinitely easier to restart 60xx without sticking the rod. With 6011 I tend to finish a weld, leave the flux on the rod, and just restart. With 7018 I will pinch the flux off to expose the tip, 6011 doesn’t need that. Out of curiosity what welder are you running?
The last thing worth mentioning is 6011 welds freeze so fast that if you aren’t 100% consistent they will be rough looking. 6011 is a fair bit better than 6010 but much harder to get a clean weld than 7018/6013. Get a piece of 1/4in still and run some beads with 6011. Tell yourself to slow down, tighten the arc gap, and feed in more rod. Your finished weld width should be the same or wider with 6011 as a 7018. Height wise off the plate it should be the same as well. If your weld is barely off the plate it means you’re going to fast and essentially just arcing across the metal instead of depositing metal. Hopefully that helps 😀
Nice. Thank you.
lol I hate horizontal welding flat welding is the best for stick but only time will get you better
Thanks..
No problem 😀
Were you running stringers or oscillating a bit as you were welding the horizontals or a mix of the aforementioned techniques?
With stick welding I universally run a stringer weld with no manipulation. In the horizontal position you can just a straight smooth bead. You can oscillate to a certain extent however doing it excessively can cause weird things to happen (lower penetration, weld pool dripping, etc).
@@makingmistakeswithgreg thanks for the explanation. I did backward Es today when I was practicing horizontals and it did look kind of weird but I was using 6010 1/8 electrodes. Thanks Greg. I’ll try just running a straight stringer tomorrow.
You seem to be welding a massive distance, have you got superman eyesight?
If you’re referring to the distance from my face to the weld pool, on a non obstructed weld it’s possible to weld it with my face multiple feet away. You don’t actually need to see as much as you might think to stick weld decent. So much about stick welding is just running enough rods that your body just does most of the work without you thinking about it.
@@makingmistakeswithgreg Ahh ok, that makes sense.