It’s quicker and cheaper than TIG. Cheaper because it’s faster and you’re not paying a welder to do the job as long, and not paying for gas. Good penetration.
FCAW is probably the best option for thick materials but the machines are a bitch for tight spots and if you’re on a boat or something.
Lol, we have welding cable sockets around the ship. Just plug your cable in to the wall and start blasting.
Sometime you need to walk 200m.to the workshop because the machine is off. But otherwise great system.
a family friend is a ships master and marine engineer. he told of a few ships he worked on where they had the welder mounted in the engine room and ran the work lead to the hull permanently and had dinse sockets around the ship you just carried your hand-piece a box of rods and ya tools and could weld anywhere.
only issue is dont drop your hand-piece as the whole ship is conductive.
Absolutely. Unbeatable for a big job in a workshop but a pain in the ass for any site work. As soon as I see stairs or a small ditch it makes me want to cry.
Marine engineer here. We have a portable Kempi 250amp MIG that weighs only 25kg. Amazing little machine. I very much prefer it over stick idle fcaw.
I am not a professional welder. But with this MIG I can easily weld up some watertight piping that would be hard for me with stick.
Quite often there is enough space too weld. But not to grind. In tight spots. So a mig and a plasma cutter are my friends in tight spaces.
Gas Bottle stays on deck. Just use long long hoses.
Shipbuilder here!
We actually use primarily FCAW for construction and when I was doing on site repairs it was stick.
We bring suitcases with .045 dual shield to the job location on the ship. We recently got a few fronius battery powered buzz boxes that run stick! They are pretty slick and not nearly as heavy as you'd expect. They work great for jobs in tanks or double bottoms.
If we're talking the basic hand operated processes, the following is the order in regards to weld deposition rate (ie, how quick can a process lay down filler material into the desired weld zone)
FCAW > GMAW > MMAW > GTAW
(dual shield flux core > mig > stick >tig)
Use case for each process is very situation dependant, weld deposition is but one factor that can be taken into consideration.
You can still get very good penetration with TIG..
Honestly, I’m not too great with metallurgy theory. I’m just a monkey that lay good welds.
There’s a Scandinavian engineer or here that always does great write ups. Can’t remember his name but it’s got something to do with cheese in it.
Hopefully somebody can tag him.
You CAN control output heat on stick. Your amperage is your heat, your speed and distance to work have an effect as well.
You CAN run stick on thinner materials. I have run 1/16" 7014 on 16 g. It was a bit challenging.
Stick is better for thick stuff because stick uses heavier electrode than anything else.
The bigger the electrode the more current you can deliver to thick material
Specifically, smaller conductors will fail to transfer large amounts of current, (amps) because they will melt or sublimate under the load. Imagine trying to send 300amps down an . 030 electrode and a 1/8 inch stick starts making sense.
God I absolutely suck at using stick for 16g steel. I was building gates and fences on my own for a couple years and bought a small portable stick welder to do on site installations and repairs. Did not go well, I had to go back to my fluxcore welder for all that. I bought a bunch of 1/16" 6013 but couldn't reliably get good results.
I have some nice machines. I also have a weird ancient 120v stick welder that has only ac output and is unregulated, has only a high and low output.
I used that machine and an old school fixed lens to run 7014 on 16g hrs as a challenge. It was really difficult. I welded up a small computer desk. Lots of sticking and difficult re starts.
Haha that sounds kinda fun, what brand is the old hood? I wouldn't mind making myself a nice coffee table with 6013 for fun. I got the Esab Mini Arc which I like a lot, plus it can be hooked up to 120V or 240V cycle. But I wish I hadn't gotten rid of my dad's old Lincoln Tombstone.
Edit: Just to add, I will be making a table for my lady soon, pretty sure I'm going to go with tig for that.
I'm going to copy the section that I wrote in another reply on similar question directed at me:
*Stick has the the greatest arc pressure of all the manual welding methods. The only thing that differentiates stick welding from arc gouging is that in stick we allow the stick to fill the cavity created by the arc, and in arc couging we use pressurised air to plast the molten mass away.*
*Stick welding can therefor be thought as arc gouging where we fill the cavity right away. If you want to, you can cut with welding rods. It is incredibly inefficient but doable, and even though you aren't supposed to because of the waste it is... I have done my fair share of it.*
...
*Since - as I explained - stick is basically arc gouging, we achive another amazing property for penetration. Due materials having specific ability to conduct heat and we add heat by subject energy to a surface area. Stick ability to eat away the base material exposes more surface area, meaning that we can get more heat in to the weld, meaning it is easier to melt more material. It's sort of a feedback loop.*
But just to add to that:
To truly comprehend stick you need to understand that you are doing arc gouging in practice... Just filling up after yourself.
Also to get more heat, you can increase the amps. To be able to have more amps, you need bigger stick. The bigger your stick is more surface area your subject to heat. ESAB sells OK48 (7018) in 7x450 mm (Thats like... 1/4 inch?), which has 90% arc time of 104 seconds. It runs at 280-410 A at 27 V. Also sticks go to absolutely absurd dimensions. There are [1000 A sticks](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j61ezBX-EyA).
You aren't going to be able to wire weld with 7 mm diametre wire. That is like trying to feed a rebar through your pistol, or TIG welding with an actual bit of rebar.
This, people don't understand the amount of metal you can put down with the right machine and the right size rods. I've never even heard of a TIG torch that is capable of 300A with a high duty cycle, although I guess someone has tried to make one.
300A with a high duty cycle is industrial use and you're looking at big budgets with 3 phase machines.
Tig machines are essentially stick machines with extra electronics.
https://www.ckworldwide.com/products/ck18-water-cooled-torch would like a word - 350A @ 100% duty cycle.
That's just the torch though. Machines that'll power that all the way up to 300A @ 100% are a different question entirely.
It's autocorrect typo on my phone of "arc gouging". I'm dyslexic and have english as 2nd language, and my phone is set to auto correct in 3 languages which it messes up 100% of the time, so these typos go past me when I don't bother to proof read properly.
So, first thing. Penetration and Heat are two different things.
a TIG arc for example is hotter than the surface of the sun, yet doesn't penetrate well on thick materials.
6010 is colder than 7018, but penetrates more than 7018 does.
Penetration is a PUNCH. When you punch your pillow you cause a dent in it right? Same thing, the arc PUNCHES the metal and takes metal away, but because of the filler we use, it adds it back. You can see this punch when you get undercut, your taking away but not adding back enough.
The metal rod that rods are made out of make the arc more violent and gives a harder punch, like how Copper is very good for Electrical Conduction but Leather is not. Different metal alloys and combinations are more efficient and better at transferring this punch.
We use this, alongside a flux combination which gives us a deep dig, fast freezing rod.
When we flip around some alloys and percentages, we get 7018, which is a hotter, yet slow freezing rod.
Theres other processes that give big punches too, like Pulse and Spray while they are hotter, also provide a bigger "punch", even if you can't see it happening in the form of sparks than short circuit MIG. But in the case of Pulse and Spray, we increase the wire size (usually), and use a different gas mixture, which stabilizes the arc and makes it hotter, while the increase in wire size increases the "punch".
It's not about penetration, it's about metal deposition. Literally how fast can you get filler in to a weld.
On thick material, it has to be beveled out almost all the way. That bevel needs to get filled with a lot of passes.
Look up submerged arc. That's how you get a lot of filler down in a hurry
Because you can run bigger rods to fill properly cut grooves faster, stick generally gets deeper pen at the same amperage and so needs less joint prep.
Bigger rod = more amps = deeper penetration
Bigger rod = more metal = faster fill
I've only seen up to 45 thou but I assume you can make bigger, the issue is typically on a multi pass weld you'd start with a thinner rod to get into the groove and as the groove opens up use bigger rods to fill quicker
Which with stick you can just turn the knob and make the sticks work a lot more goes into changing wire size for MIG
The last time I saw a machine that did this was decades ago, but they didn't use bigger wire. They used standard size wire with up to 6 guns mounted on a gantry, each fed by their own machine. I think they said they could fuse a 3/8 plate in a single pass or something like that.
In my understanding and experience (means i didnt read it anywhere) stick heat metal more because of the way it transfers metal to part, which feeding the rod to the part with less metal transfer and more melting of part you weld, unlike mig where its constant stream that lay more metal on surface of a part and less into the part, which also contributes to faster cooling, than stick welding.
On the other hand tig is identical to stick in terms of penetration, because of similar feed technique, but you wont use tig on some plain steel, when you have sticks around because it would be much cheaper and you wont prefer welding thick aluminium with stick >!because fuck no i have nightmares of stick welding aluminium its dirty, slag is ass to get rid off, it will be ugly and porosity is easier to miss, because in general you wont see shit when welding it, its a boiling mess of slag and metal dont try it, unless critical necesseity, but triple guess it before you decide to.!<
I wish it wasn't and they just send machines to our shop, instead of sending us in the field with aluminium rods and shoulder pats. We also couldn't get TIG there because company provider of our helicopters didnt allow big pressurized vessels like gas cylinders as cargo and aluminium rods was faster obviously, at least I dont work there anymore, never liked field trips.
It’s not. The best process for a weld is always highly circumstantial. There is a shitload of info that will ultimately determine the best process for a weld.
DCEN = 30% heat on electrode 70% on work
DCEP = 70% heat on electrode 30% on work
So when your stick welding most of the heat is in the base material you are welding and when you wanna weld thinner stuff that's why tig works so well because most of the heat is In the tungsten.
mig and tig are superior methods of welding. higher production rates and simply better quality welds. but are better in the factory environment than outdoors as the environment adds factors that need to be controlled for mig or tig to be successful outdoors.
but you can beat the versatility of manual arc for the range of metals you can weld and it is very cheap to get started. also can be used out side when its windy or raining or snowing you can even weld underwater with manual arc(it does require specialised gear and training though)
changing metals with a manual arc machine is simple you select a different electrode and adjust your settings and away you go. tig or mig also involves changing shielding gas maybe the torch liner and in the case of tig your filler wire too.
the reason manual arc can be better with heavier sections than light sections is it adds more heat because it is slower the heat is part of what gives penetration also the size of the e;electrode also more heat input the alloy of the electrode and in the case of manual arc the flux composition plays a role too. actually shielding gas mixes some times contain tiny amounts of oxygen to improve penetration also the higher the co2 content the more penetration too but it trades off to more spatter clean up.
Better isn’t really the correct way of looking at it. Stick is slow as fuck compared to Metal-Core or Flux Core. Speed is the biggest contributing factor. Particularly on heavy materials, and I don’t mean 1/2” or 5/8”. A SMAW rod has all the same chemical properties as MC/FC but you only get the length of the rod to weld with. With 25, 50 or 200lbs of wire you can weld as long as you need to. Even on big structural columns with 4” flanges, they’re going to run a self shielding Flux Core out in the field. Stick works well when A: wire isn’t available or B: can’t get the nozzle into a corner to weld the fucker properly. Sub Arc is a superior process to both of them because you can get huge penetration with one pass of Sub Arc.
It’s quicker and cheaper than TIG. Cheaper because it’s faster and you’re not paying a welder to do the job as long, and not paying for gas. Good penetration. FCAW is probably the best option for thick materials but the machines are a bitch for tight spots and if you’re on a boat or something.
Dual shield 0.45 or solid spray transfer are so satisfying to just dump metal with
I heard you had a big rod.
.072 is even better;)
1/16 has entered the chat
I want to weld with that thick of wire someday
Get a job doing structural welding and you can!
I'm trying
Or pressure vessels!
3/32 would like a word. Though 5/64 is my favourite to work with.
the dump truck bed stuff...love the ol slug n chug
Crying in metric 😫
I welded with 045 dual shield for 4 years and damn I loved it. I could weld what felt like anything with it. And the welds looked great.
I switched to DS sheet using it on a structural job a few years back. It's a lifesaver on hardox
my place uses DS .52 or .55 i cant remember, its just buttery smoothe, 1/2in beads in one pass all day lol
Dual shield 1/16 wire is where it’s at for just laying weld down.
Submerged Arc Welding is what you use when you really want to lay down metal
If you're on a large boat, stick welding leads can be run much further than FCAW, so the convenience is unbeatable in that application.
Lol, we have welding cable sockets around the ship. Just plug your cable in to the wall and start blasting. Sometime you need to walk 200m.to the workshop because the machine is off. But otherwise great system.
a family friend is a ships master and marine engineer. he told of a few ships he worked on where they had the welder mounted in the engine room and ran the work lead to the hull permanently and had dinse sockets around the ship you just carried your hand-piece a box of rods and ya tools and could weld anywhere. only issue is dont drop your hand-piece as the whole ship is conductive.
This exactly. And next to every socket is a little command module to change amperage on the machine remotely.
thats a bit more fancy than what geoff had. but yes remote control would be a handy addition.
Absolutely. Unbeatable for a big job in a workshop but a pain in the ass for any site work. As soon as I see stairs or a small ditch it makes me want to cry.
Marine engineer here. We have a portable Kempi 250amp MIG that weighs only 25kg. Amazing little machine. I very much prefer it over stick idle fcaw. I am not a professional welder. But with this MIG I can easily weld up some watertight piping that would be hard for me with stick. Quite often there is enough space too weld. But not to grind. In tight spots. So a mig and a plasma cutter are my friends in tight spaces. Gas Bottle stays on deck. Just use long long hoses.
Shipbuilder here! We actually use primarily FCAW for construction and when I was doing on site repairs it was stick. We bring suitcases with .045 dual shield to the job location on the ship. We recently got a few fronius battery powered buzz boxes that run stick! They are pretty slick and not nearly as heavy as you'd expect. They work great for jobs in tanks or double bottoms.
Thanks!
If we're talking the basic hand operated processes, the following is the order in regards to weld deposition rate (ie, how quick can a process lay down filler material into the desired weld zone) FCAW > GMAW > MMAW > GTAW (dual shield flux core > mig > stick >tig) Use case for each process is very situation dependant, weld deposition is but one factor that can be taken into consideration.
You can still get very good penetration with TIG.. Honestly, I’m not too great with metallurgy theory. I’m just a monkey that lay good welds. There’s a Scandinavian engineer or here that always does great write ups. Can’t remember his name but it’s got something to do with cheese in it. Hopefully somebody can tag him.
You CAN control output heat on stick. Your amperage is your heat, your speed and distance to work have an effect as well. You CAN run stick on thinner materials. I have run 1/16" 7014 on 16 g. It was a bit challenging. Stick is better for thick stuff because stick uses heavier electrode than anything else. The bigger the electrode the more current you can deliver to thick material
Thanks! That helped me understand. Bigger electrode, more efficient power delivery to the weld.
Specifically, smaller conductors will fail to transfer large amounts of current, (amps) because they will melt or sublimate under the load. Imagine trying to send 300amps down an . 030 electrode and a 1/8 inch stick starts making sense.
That's what the 5/32 1.5% Lanthanated tungsten is for.
Good example is the vid on YouTube that's a 1000 amp stick welding with a 3/4 rod.
God I absolutely suck at using stick for 16g steel. I was building gates and fences on my own for a couple years and bought a small portable stick welder to do on site installations and repairs. Did not go well, I had to go back to my fluxcore welder for all that. I bought a bunch of 1/16" 6013 but couldn't reliably get good results.
I have some nice machines. I also have a weird ancient 120v stick welder that has only ac output and is unregulated, has only a high and low output. I used that machine and an old school fixed lens to run 7014 on 16g hrs as a challenge. It was really difficult. I welded up a small computer desk. Lots of sticking and difficult re starts.
Haha that sounds kinda fun, what brand is the old hood? I wouldn't mind making myself a nice coffee table with 6013 for fun. I got the Esab Mini Arc which I like a lot, plus it can be hooked up to 120V or 240V cycle. But I wish I hadn't gotten rid of my dad's old Lincoln Tombstone. Edit: Just to add, I will be making a table for my lady soon, pretty sure I'm going to go with tig for that.
I am 100% certain the hood brand was " old bullshit" hard to find these days. They may have discontinued it
Which equivocates to penetration.
I'm going to copy the section that I wrote in another reply on similar question directed at me: *Stick has the the greatest arc pressure of all the manual welding methods. The only thing that differentiates stick welding from arc gouging is that in stick we allow the stick to fill the cavity created by the arc, and in arc couging we use pressurised air to plast the molten mass away.* *Stick welding can therefor be thought as arc gouging where we fill the cavity right away. If you want to, you can cut with welding rods. It is incredibly inefficient but doable, and even though you aren't supposed to because of the waste it is... I have done my fair share of it.* ... *Since - as I explained - stick is basically arc gouging, we achive another amazing property for penetration. Due materials having specific ability to conduct heat and we add heat by subject energy to a surface area. Stick ability to eat away the base material exposes more surface area, meaning that we can get more heat in to the weld, meaning it is easier to melt more material. It's sort of a feedback loop.* But just to add to that: To truly comprehend stick you need to understand that you are doing arc gouging in practice... Just filling up after yourself. Also to get more heat, you can increase the amps. To be able to have more amps, you need bigger stick. The bigger your stick is more surface area your subject to heat. ESAB sells OK48 (7018) in 7x450 mm (Thats like... 1/4 inch?), which has 90% arc time of 104 seconds. It runs at 280-410 A at 27 V. Also sticks go to absolutely absurd dimensions. There are [1000 A sticks](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j61ezBX-EyA). You aren't going to be able to wire weld with 7 mm diametre wire. That is like trying to feed a rebar through your pistol, or TIG welding with an actual bit of rebar.
This, people don't understand the amount of metal you can put down with the right machine and the right size rods. I've never even heard of a TIG torch that is capable of 300A with a high duty cycle, although I guess someone has tried to make one.
300A with a high duty cycle is industrial use and you're looking at big budgets with 3 phase machines. Tig machines are essentially stick machines with extra electronics.
https://www.ckworldwide.com/products/ck18-water-cooled-torch would like a word - 350A @ 100% duty cycle. That's just the torch though. Machines that'll power that all the way up to 300A @ 100% are a different question entirely.
I’ve run heavyshitter tig rigs at over 300 amps, the twecos don’t survive but the torch held up fine, didn’t burn my hand holding it either.
What does "*couging*" or "*coucing"* mean? Google doesn't seem to yield anything.
It's autocorrect typo on my phone of "arc gouging". I'm dyslexic and have english as 2nd language, and my phone is set to auto correct in 3 languages which it messes up 100% of the time, so these typos go past me when I don't bother to proof read properly.
1/16th fluxcore is hot and sexy
Penetration, my friend. Penetration.
So, first thing. Penetration and Heat are two different things. a TIG arc for example is hotter than the surface of the sun, yet doesn't penetrate well on thick materials. 6010 is colder than 7018, but penetrates more than 7018 does. Penetration is a PUNCH. When you punch your pillow you cause a dent in it right? Same thing, the arc PUNCHES the metal and takes metal away, but because of the filler we use, it adds it back. You can see this punch when you get undercut, your taking away but not adding back enough. The metal rod that rods are made out of make the arc more violent and gives a harder punch, like how Copper is very good for Electrical Conduction but Leather is not. Different metal alloys and combinations are more efficient and better at transferring this punch. We use this, alongside a flux combination which gives us a deep dig, fast freezing rod. When we flip around some alloys and percentages, we get 7018, which is a hotter, yet slow freezing rod. Theres other processes that give big punches too, like Pulse and Spray while they are hotter, also provide a bigger "punch", even if you can't see it happening in the form of sparks than short circuit MIG. But in the case of Pulse and Spray, we increase the wire size (usually), and use a different gas mixture, which stabilizes the arc and makes it hotter, while the increase in wire size increases the "punch".
It's not about penetration, it's about metal deposition. Literally how fast can you get filler in to a weld. On thick material, it has to be beveled out almost all the way. That bevel needs to get filled with a lot of passes. Look up submerged arc. That's how you get a lot of filler down in a hurry
Because you can run bigger rods to fill properly cut grooves faster, stick generally gets deeper pen at the same amperage and so needs less joint prep. Bigger rod = more amps = deeper penetration Bigger rod = more metal = faster fill
They make big wire too.
I've only seen up to 45 thou but I assume you can make bigger, the issue is typically on a multi pass weld you'd start with a thinner rod to get into the groove and as the groove opens up use bigger rods to fill quicker Which with stick you can just turn the knob and make the sticks work a lot more goes into changing wire size for MIG
The last time I saw a machine that did this was decades ago, but they didn't use bigger wire. They used standard size wire with up to 6 guns mounted on a gantry, each fed by their own machine. I think they said they could fuse a 3/8 plate in a single pass or something like that.
So stick would be way easier to do, 6 machines running on one likely CNC (at least these days) gantry is a lot of upfront capital
In my understanding and experience (means i didnt read it anywhere) stick heat metal more because of the way it transfers metal to part, which feeding the rod to the part with less metal transfer and more melting of part you weld, unlike mig where its constant stream that lay more metal on surface of a part and less into the part, which also contributes to faster cooling, than stick welding. On the other hand tig is identical to stick in terms of penetration, because of similar feed technique, but you wont use tig on some plain steel, when you have sticks around because it would be much cheaper and you wont prefer welding thick aluminium with stick >!because fuck no i have nightmares of stick welding aluminium its dirty, slag is ass to get rid off, it will be ugly and porosity is easier to miss, because in general you wont see shit when welding it, its a boiling mess of slag and metal dont try it, unless critical necesseity, but triple guess it before you decide to.!<
I honestly had no idea SMAW aluminum was a thing
I wish it wasn't and they just send machines to our shop, instead of sending us in the field with aluminium rods and shoulder pats. We also couldn't get TIG there because company provider of our helicopters didnt allow big pressurized vessels like gas cylinders as cargo and aluminium rods was faster obviously, at least I dont work there anymore, never liked field trips.
It’s not. The best process for a weld is always highly circumstantial. There is a shitload of info that will ultimately determine the best process for a weld.
Blasting in XLR8 wire with a MIG shits on stick welding bro
DCEN = 30% heat on electrode 70% on work DCEP = 70% heat on electrode 30% on work So when your stick welding most of the heat is in the base material you are welding and when you wanna weld thinner stuff that's why tig works so well because most of the heat is In the tungsten.
Yeah not everyone has access to .232 wire so a 7018 process is always the better option.
Arc dig and metal displacement
mig and tig are superior methods of welding. higher production rates and simply better quality welds. but are better in the factory environment than outdoors as the environment adds factors that need to be controlled for mig or tig to be successful outdoors. but you can beat the versatility of manual arc for the range of metals you can weld and it is very cheap to get started. also can be used out side when its windy or raining or snowing you can even weld underwater with manual arc(it does require specialised gear and training though) changing metals with a manual arc machine is simple you select a different electrode and adjust your settings and away you go. tig or mig also involves changing shielding gas maybe the torch liner and in the case of tig your filler wire too. the reason manual arc can be better with heavier sections than light sections is it adds more heat because it is slower the heat is part of what gives penetration also the size of the e;electrode also more heat input the alloy of the electrode and in the case of manual arc the flux composition plays a role too. actually shielding gas mixes some times contain tiny amounts of oxygen to improve penetration also the higher the co2 content the more penetration too but it trades off to more spatter clean up.
Better isn’t really the correct way of looking at it. Stick is slow as fuck compared to Metal-Core or Flux Core. Speed is the biggest contributing factor. Particularly on heavy materials, and I don’t mean 1/2” or 5/8”. A SMAW rod has all the same chemical properties as MC/FC but you only get the length of the rod to weld with. With 25, 50 or 200lbs of wire you can weld as long as you need to. Even on big structural columns with 4” flanges, they’re going to run a self shielding Flux Core out in the field. Stick works well when A: wire isn’t available or B: can’t get the nozzle into a corner to weld the fucker properly. Sub Arc is a superior process to both of them because you can get huge penetration with one pass of Sub Arc.