Lest you think I have a cake decorating tip on my welder, here are the raw welds used for assembly. I'd like any certified or home welder to say how easy or difficult it is to place welds like this ... Good burned in solid spots ... And NOT trash all if the surrounding parts and surface area.

Gary.

Masterful job on the welds! It is just this type of detail that those who have never tried working with a particular technique can never really understand the skill required.

For those without a "cracker box" as they are referred to here, try a little experiment the next time you have a birthday. Take two birthday candles and place them perpendicular. Now take a lit third candle and with the lights out peak thru a pinhole in a paper bag as you melt the third candles wax uniformly leaving a bead in the angle. Don't let the wax run. Don't melt the other candles too much. Don't let your candle blow out. Don't drip the wax where it's not wanted. Don't let your candle stick to the others. All that and I bet the candles are an easier task to master than keeping an arc of electricity just right.

Kent

Funny... I was looking at the picture before reading what you had written, and I was thinking how terrified I would be to pull the trigger on that welder while hovering above beautifully finished components! One wrong ZAAAP and a couple weeks work goes right out the window! Fortunately, these welds look spot on. Bravo!

Scott

its hard to get a scale on those welds without a finger or coin or rule in the shot , what process are you using.

Thanks guys, for your comments. True, you have to be a welder. Just FYI for all, this is MIG welding. The parts must be grounded well. If a ground arc jumps, it bites a chunk of steel out of the component. The weld is a blinding arc of electricity that hears the base piece of work and the filler steel wire, to about 3,000 degrees F. That creates a puddle of molten steel into which you flow the molten steel from your filler wire. The entire area is bathed in a gas shield to exclude O2 from the weld area. The weld produces a shower of sparks which are molten steel droplets. They want to stick to and weld to all surrounding area parts. You have to protect those surrounding parts to prevent pitting, and defacing from these sparks. You cannot look at the arc or itvwill blind you. Seriously. You have to look thru a very dark glass shield and can obligate at all, when the arc is striking bright. Some welding helmets have light sensitive shields that click on and off at the arc. The ones I've had were a real pain. Another story. I use the old school shield.
Then, the weld has to be struck in exactly the right place. You can't move it once the metals have been melted. The heat setting of amperage AND the feed rate of the filler wire must be perfect. Too hot and you blast a hole. Too little fill wire and the spark is intermittent as it strikes and then runs out of wire. If the gas shield isn't right, the whole thing becomes a festering pocks of blisters.
What you see here are two welds. Each one will be carved as one flower on the finished gun. There are twelve of them on this action. Any one of them could ruin the parts everything is all turned and threaded. All drilling is complete. The valve seat and all chambers are formed. There are days of work involved first, and then you step up to the welder and flip the switch.
Hah! Full Metal Joisting is for kids. ;?)
gary

Great looking welds Gary. I learned to weld in High School years ago and know how hard it it is.

Keith

hi , your still using a what ,,, a bit of tinted glass ,,, oh gary , try on one of the new generation of auto masks ,,, you will be stunned , they are so fast and sensative compared to how they used to be .... it will make life a lot easier ..... promise. make sure you get one with variable darkness and delay , about a hundred quid sterling for a nice one .... you will never look back.

I hear they have digital electronic door knobs now too. You can call them from your smart phone. Have a great conversation. .

Regarding the new masks, When they go get fresh batteries when they've prematurely eaten the current ones, I'll think about it. So far, I've never found my piece of dark glass to fail to work. And that price sounds like quite a few dinners with the wife at the diner. I do gave a couple of expensive change my life electronic masks that were crap. Ate batteries. Wouldn't get dark. Wouldn't get light. New batteries and poking around wouldn't fix them. They didn't change my life, but they did raise my blood pressure. . Gaha

ah ,,, that was the old days ,,, now they use the light from the arc to charge the onboard battery , i kick mine round the floor frequently , and in five years ive only ever had two ,,, a tractor ran over the first one. .. on a serious side two free hands and being able to see right the way through would make that detailed work a lot easier. ... u tube laser welding , is amazing these days too....

Nice work there. Even when I practice first on similar scrap, I'm still lucky to get maybe half of my beads to look like I want them to with no undercutting and good penetration. I like the new wire feed machines, but they really are finicky about getting all the settings just right. And of course even when you've got them perfectly dialed in, YOU'VE got to be dialed in to get good results. Welding those assemblies after all that machining work is a high-stakes operation.

Also learned last week that it's certainly possible to re-sunburn a welding sunburn even through a long-sleeved shirt. Go ahead, everyone ELSE is already on me about the one-armed "Alaska tan", you should have seen the looks I was getting at the pool.

Next week I'm gonna wear sunscreen AND a long sleeve shirt. If that fails me, I guess I'm gonna have to find a leather jacket that I don't like all that much.

It's the "artist's" performance, that brings together the preparation, timing, and skill to make the job look easy. If someone hasn't tried it, then they assume it's easier then it is. It's the practice that allows the artist to eventually accomplish much of the process without conscious effort

Sean,

Trying out all my computers here. I'm on a keyboard on my desk again now. Almost forgot how. I think it was about 6 weeks trying to get back.

Anyway ... welders who spend much time doing it, do wear protective gear. Used to be a suede shoulder and arm gear. Yes - you can really fry yourself. I've gotten burn a few times when making machines, etc. Where there was a sustained welding. Mostly, with a few precise welds, it's not a problem.

You will know, that there are at least two kinds of wire machines. One has a flux core wire (I think that's usually considered a lighter home unit) and the normal MIG uses the inert gas shield over the weld area, to prevent oxidation. Stick welders are usually for construction, hard surfacing digging teeth and buckets, and general farm type use where a cheap stick machine can weld 1/2" steel. You'd need a $5k MIG to weld stuff that thick.

Gary

Hello Gary,

I'm still a newby to the wire feed machines, but I took metal shop in high school and they taught the basics of "stick" arc welding and oxy-acetelyne welding. The only wire-feed machines I've used so far are the ones that need an argon bottle, not the flux-core type. What amazes me is how quick the MIG machines weld, it's SO much faster than oxy-fuel welding, and the heat affected zone is miniscule by comparison. I also really like the fact that you don't have the ever-changing electrode length of stick welding, it always seems like I'm just getting the hang of it when the stick is about an inch from gone.

one of the drawbacks though is any weld flaw , usually linear porosity , or lack of sidewall penetration , or indeed cold lap , can go on for a long time before its caught making repairs time consuming.
lack of penetration is the big issue though as a lot of people starting out tend not to let the weld pool form properly,, the easiest cure for that is preperation , and avoid butting the two parts together , especially in sheet steel , the edge prep , and the gap play a huge part in weld quality.
speaking as a former non destructive testing inspector.... i have had some strange jobs.
but , its like most manual skills , practice practice practice.
do a u tube search on laser welding,,,, its stunning. or 5 axis cnc cutting. again , turns up some interesting vids.

The one I'd love to have is a CNC waterjet cutter. The cuts are glass-smooth, and they go through stone and ceramic tile like they were cutting balsa wood. Probably a bit messy though, not something you'd want in the basement.

As an update to the welding conversation, I got to try my hand at TIG welding tonight in class. Now THAT is gonna take some practice.

I thought it would be a lot like oxy-acetylene welding, but boy was I wrong about that. The arc seem to jump around all over the place instead of settling down where you want it to, and adding filler rod seems to be an extra incentive for it to blow out a big hole instead of filling one in as intended. I couldn't get it to weld aluminum at all, and the welds on steel were either beautiful or horrible. I'm still not sure why some turned out great and other not at all, it seemed almost random. So far it seems like the MIG machines are much easier to learn and far more repeatable.

Just buy an edm.............

i would go as far as to say , its easier to fool yourself you can weld with a mig ... results can look good , but hide things , i tend to find the biggest prob with mig is lack of penetration , (sat night welding) . it takes a fair bit of faith to either turn the amps up , or the wire feed down. again , its like having the faith to leave the gap , but as with all tactile skills , practice practice practice.
may i also add , not all welding machines are created eaqual. you do get a feel for your own machine ,, if you stick at it.