How do you tie tack welds into your welding seamlessly? How do you go from a tack weld to a finished weld? Do you weld over the top of the tack weld or just weld up to it, hop over it and weld again?
Kevin uses his Everlast PowerMTS 221STi to weld TIG, MIG and stick (arc) tack welds to show various ways to handle tack welds. First, TIG. He shows a tiny tack weld he did with no filler, just melting the top piece of metal into the bottom piece. Next: a little longer tack done with 16th of an inch filler wire.
Then he created a tack weld using 1/8″ filler wire. When Kevin is making structural welds he wants a nice size fillet and good penetration. In this case, he will hop over the weld and keep welding to avoid creating a big lump that he’d have to come back and clean up to make it a cosmetic weld as well as structural.
With the little 16th of an inch filler wire and the first tiny fuse tack weld, he’ll go right over the top, although he might not give the 16th of an inch filler wire tack weld as many dabs and might speed up a bit so it looks better.
On the back side of the metal, Kevin has some MIG welding tack welds. He’ll just come in and fill in between them. The fillet is big enough that he’d start his weld at the end of the tack, back up a bit, and run over to the next tack weld. He’d run up on it a little and back off again – real quick, back and forth to help blend everything in.
Then Kevin shows an arc tack weld made with some 7018 rod. On these he’d start at the end of one tack weld and just continue, blending it in, running it to the next tack to smooth everything together.
It’s time to make some sparks and show how to do it!
On the TIG side, Kevin comes up to the first tack and ties it in at the end of the piece of metal then keeps going, hops over to the next section, getting the puddle going. “Dab 1000, dab 1000 ….” Then he runs up onto the big tack weld and backs off.
For the next section with the 1/16″ of an inch tack weld, he starts in a section that is not welded. Kevin welds over the first tack, backs off again, goes right up to the tack weld and stops. He hops over the next tack weld and stops. You can see where the texture changed and the weld got bigger as he went over the one tack weld.
Kevin shows the MIG section and how he hopped over the tack welds to weld in between them, then he shows the stick welder section.
There are a lot of different ways you can tie in your tack welds, whether you put it nice big fillet tack weld and weld up to it and over a little, or go right over welds that were just there to hold it together until you were ready for your finish weld. It really boils down to what are you trying to do. Is it a structural weld where nobody’s going to see it? Or a cosmetic weld where everybody is going to see it? Or are you trying to make a weld that you could just grind down and make go away?
Kevin hopes that helps clear up any questions you may have.
Before you leave, stick around for a moment to see what Kevin does when he thinks no one is watching ….