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Mig Welding Torches. Miscellaneous MIG Accessories. Mig Welding Torch Consumables. Mig Welding Wire. PPE Safety Equipment. Tig Welding Torches. Tig Welding Gloves. Tig Filler Rods. Avoid large weave beads on aluminum. If larger fillet welds are needed, multiple pass straight beads will provide better appearance and have less chance of cold lapping, burn-through and other weld defects. It will be necessary to increase torch travel speed as the base material becomes heated during the weld.
Troubleshooting common problems If you run into these common challenges when MIG welding aluminum, consider these steps to address the problem. Burn-through melt through caused by overheating the base material Increase the travel speed and make shorter welds. Move around on the part, spreading out the heat. Dirty welds Use a push angle instead of a drag technique.
Increase the voltage to get into spray transfer. Use the proper base metal cleaning techniques, such as using a stainless steel brush. Check for proper shielding gas and wire alloy type. Wire burns back to contact tip during or at the end of the weld Maintain proper tip-to-work distance. Check to make sure the contact tip size, drive rolls and gun liner match the wire diameter you are using. Wire birdnests piles up in front of inlet guide on gun Check and adjust the drive roll tension.
Check to make sure drive rolls match the wire diameter. Replace contact tip if necessary. Check pressure adjustment on the aluminum spool gun hub. Related Products.
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The entered e-mail addresses do not match. There are a few ways to combat this with your MIG torch. Lastly, you can get aluminium specific contact tips, which will also help with the wire feeding. The shorter torch you have, the easier this is and the shorter the travel distance for the aluminium , but it does get tricky if you have a 3 or more metre torch. Big loose curves or loops can be ok, but any tight circles are almost definitely going to kink your wire.
You load an aluminium spool in the MIG welder the same way you would for steel and stainless, by lining up the locating lug and hole, slotting the spool into place and screwing the nut on to lock it in. Sometimes this will work, but you must have the correct setup. A birdnest in your wire happens at the drive rollers. That somewhere is all around your drivers, where it tangles and loops over itself and looks a bit like a loose bird nest.
There are a few things you can check if your wire does birdnest, but even if you check everything, it might not work. You want your straw to be as hospitable to your noodle as you can make it. Aluminium is different of course. When you attach a spool in the machine, you feed the first part of the wire into the inlet guide, then over the rollers, and into another guide tube, which leads to the torch.
When the torch is unplugged, you can reach into the hole on the front of the machine to grab it. You can then feed the excess Teflon liner into the new guide tube when you reconnect the torch. If your Teflon liner sticks out further than the tube and over the drive rollers, then you would cut that bit off.
The liner should be flush with the guide tube. This guide tube and liner will stop the aluminium wire from vibrating around freely in the 6cm or so between the end of the steel guide tube and the beginning of the torch liner, which is one of the biggest causes of birdnesting. If your torch is straight and you fed your wire through without a contact tip, but when you tried to weld it failed, check the tension on your wire. You can have more tension on a steel or stainless wire than you can on aluminium, and too much can flatten or deform your wire.
Be careful not to loosen it too much, as not enough tension means the drivers will just spin and not push. Getting all these things just right can be a bit of a juggling act; trial and error is the main way to find what works best for you. Your wire birdnests again. This is, again, a bit of a spin the knob until you get it right kind of deal.
Too much pressure on your spool means the drivers have to work extra hard to pull the wire and make it spin. On the other hand, not enough pressure and the wire will unravel on the spool and be impossible to feed. You can adjust this pressure by loosening or tightening the nut that holds the spool in place. UNIMIG sells an aluminium kit that contains an aluminium liner, neck spring, drive roller, guide tube and contact tips.
You can get everything you need for a standard MIG torch in one place, all in one go. Life will be much, much easier if you purchase a spool gun. Spool guns were designed specifically for welding aluminium.
Instead of feeding your wire through a long torch lead, the spool holder is attached to the gun, reducing your travel distance from 4-metres to roughly 30cm. It also includes a small wire drive inside, which feeds the wire through. Setting up your spool gun is relatively simple, and most of the process is pretty similar to setting up your standard MIG torch.
The next step is to attach your wire spool. This, again, is done pretty much the same way as with a normal torch:. Spool guns are pre-loaded with U-groove rollers, but just remember that if you change your filler wire thickness, you might need to change those rollers to match.
Now you can hold the trigger and feed the wire through. Even though the setup is the same, welding aluminium with a spool gun requires a bit of a different technique to get it right. With increased travel speed comes increased wire feeding speed, which means turning your voltage up.
Your wire feed and voltage still need to work together. UNIMIG machines come with a setup guide inside the door, which includes recommended settings for aluminium.
One of the most important things for getting a good aluminium weld is your angle. Aluminium should always be pushed. Anything with gas should be pushed. If you pull or drag your aluminium weld, you can trap the contaminants inside the weld puddle, resulting in a poor-quality weld. However, if you push, the argon gas can properly shield the molten weld pool and keep it clean. MIG welding aluminium is naturally a dirtier process than TIG welding it and a thin layer of black soot on the weld is normal, as well as a bit of spatter, but too much soot is a problem.
One of the things that will affect how black the weld is the travel angle and the gas.
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