Is That A Stack Of Dimes In Your Pocket?

Or am I just happy to be welding?

So, I've collected enough supplies to start practicing my welding. I was waiting on the set of practice coupons as well as the electrodes (those are kind of important), but they arrived this afternoon so I was all good to go.

First things first, the mill scale needs to come off the coupons.

Silicon carbide abrasives are a miracle of the modern age. Usually mill scale is a royal pain to get off, but with this stripping disc it just evaporates effortlessly.

With that taken care of, let's try out some 6013 electrodes.

Not surprisingly we're off to a bit of a rough start.

Under the slag, things are...

Not great, not terrible.

Just need to calm down a little and keep a short, even arc with a steady travel speed.

Bead #3 is not too bad. Still got a ways to go.

Ok, let's try switching to 7014. Dial up the amps a little and...

Well that's sure something. As before, bead #2 comes out much better.

7014 is a high-deposition electrode, which has a bunch of iron powder in the flux coating to go along with the iron in the rod itself, and it makes for an absolute firehose of metal gushing onto the workpiece.

I ran a couple more beads and ended up dialing back the amps a bit since things were running a wee bit hot, and by the end I was getting pretty good results.

I switched back to playing with the 6013 again and managed to get the mystical slag peel.

Though I only managed it the one time.

By the time I was done I'd burned through 7 rods in total, 3 7014 (right) and 4 6013 (left).

Not quite instagram-quality welds but I'm working on it.