Something I wanted to share.
As many of you know I am building a Bill Pentz cyclone and though I have finished it I still have some periferal things to do to it before it is airborne.
But along the way I had occasion to try my hand at welding with little success. The welds worked ok but they were ugly and very not profesional looking. I was using a mig welder I picked up at a pawn shop and was using flux core wire. Preparing to use my "new" welder I download the users manual and read it several times trying ot understrand and learn enough to give it a shot.
I had looked into some of the welding forums and learned that flux core welds are not as neat as solid wire with gas so I rented a cylinder hoping that would help.
I brought the cylinder home ready to fire it up and after rereading the manual references to solid wire and gas I deterimed I needed to change the polarity of the wires for solid wire use as the polarity for "mwog" (metal without gas(something like that)) and mig is different. Well to my surprise I (not) I noticed that the polarity was set for solid wire all along!
I had been welding with the polarity wrong for flux core!
I had the tank and I decided to use it to weld some stuff and it worked ok but I decided to reload it with the flux core and see if it was actually the polarity that made it so bad.
Like night and day! My welds were nice straight beads and almost no spatter, a most common occurance when the polarity was wrong. I even heard the bacon sizzle! On one of the welding forums they described a good weld when the welding sounded like bacon sizzling.
This experiance has tought me one thing so aptly displayed on the side of my welder in large black letters: "Read manual before use!"
Well, just a thought I wanted to share.
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She's a great cook otherwise but won't read those instructions for some reason. But I'm glad your persistence paid off and you got the job done.
Originally Posted by Stu Ablett in Tokyo Japan
