Stick

Stick welders are considered old-fashioned today. But that doesn't mean they are out. Even though MIG welders are becoming a choice tool for fabrication needs nowadays, there are certain things a stick welder continues to be better at.

Here are 5 reasons that you should still keep one around.

Stick welders are great in tight spots

MIG guns are wide. And that makes them less than ideal for tight corners. Even TIG welders are no use with their electrode and filler metal issues.

A stick welder on the other hand, has a narrow electrode which makes it the perfect choice in these situations.

MIG welders are regularly among the top sellers because they are easy to use and create clean, strong welds. MIG welders are great for anything from a household project, to a car repair, to a series of fabrication jobs in a welding shop. However, stick welders used to be the standard machine for most welding jobs. Is

Arc welders, MIG welders, TIG welders, and Stick welders have to perform different welds with high-strength steels in their professional life. In the second part of this theme we will cover the welding of medium-alloy harden steels. Multiprocess welders know that these steels are used mainly in the aircraft industry to secure the formation of structural applications that are of ultra-high-strength.

The commercial welders are aware that these welds have low to medium carbon levels and good fracture toughness. Further to that, these steels are hardened with air, which reduces the distortion with quenching methods. The steels that belong to this group are called hot work die steels and one of them has been also named 5Cr-Mo-V aircraft quality steel. MIG welders, Arc welders, Stick welders, and TIG welders know that these steels are available in the bars and sheets, in the plates and strip, as well as in the forging billets.

Among the medium-alloy harden steels also belong

Today fabrication shops need to be versatile and well rounded to do the work that their customers request. Even though the products made vary widely from shop to shop, plant the plant, and state to state, the welding and cutting processes that are used are typical in nature, and widely used across industry.

The main processes in the fab shop usually focus around cutting and welding operations.

Cutting is an important operation in the fab shop as it used to break down the raw material into smaller length components or different shaped parts for the product that needs to be built. Cutting can be done with mechanical tools called saws an/or shears.

Shears usually cut in a straight line and a saw is capable of cutting both straight and/or shapes depending upon the saw type. A saw can have a metal blade with teeth on it or it can use an abrasive type blade. The shear and saw are used to make smaller length or smaller shaped components.

The solid metal wires were once used in the process of oxy fuel gas welding in order to add filler metal to the joint. The welding wires came in a straightened 1 m long length. One of the earliest electrodes that were used by the multiprocess welders in the process of arc  welding were bare and solid and came in length of 12 to 14 inches. In the years that followed the Arc welders, Stick welders, TIG welders, and MIG welders started using solid wire in coils which was used in the process of automatic arc welding.

Later, it was also used in the processes of submerged arc welding, in electro-slag welding, as well as in gas metal arc welding where applied small-diameter electrode welding wires are.

TIG welders, Arc welders, MIG welders, and Stick welders say that the manufacture

The first part of being successful at stick welding or shielded metal arc welding is to make sure that we have a power source that is capable of doing the work. To perform shielded metal arc welding we need to have a constant current power supply. This is a type of machine that produces welding power that has a decrease in voltage as the amperage increases. some people call this a drooping slope machine, in reference to the volt-amp curve produced by charting the machine output on a graph.

One way to identify a constant current power source is when the main knob on the face of the machine controls amperage. If you see no knob on the machine to adjust amperage but you can find one that adjusts voltage, you got yourself a constant voltage power source.  A constant voltage power source is generally used for wirefeed processes like MIG and flux core arc welding and we will talk about those in another article. We can make MIG welds with the constant current power source provided we