The Beauty of Pulse Arc Welding

I have done a little silver work with a tig, down around 15A. I really felt this was the bottom of the range and struggled to maintain a puddle. is there anything fundamentally different about this process?

1970-01-014• 3 years ago

This is pulsed MIG.

Edit: It's TIG in the video. I assumed jewelry used MIG because that's normally how thin copper is welded: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IyAaX0RZMVc&t=70s

tylerag• 3 years ago

And therefor you don't need to maintain a puddle in the workpiece. I'm assuming silver tig welds like copper, the heat flows away from the puddle so fast that the entire thing turns into a blob.

shirleyquirk4• 3 years ago

No it's not, there's no spool. It's tungsten electrode, inert gas. Feed wire and electrode diameters are, like, 0.3mm

shirleyquirk4• 3 years ago

Not fundamentally different, technically, just optimized for that low end. I think this model maxes out at 13A. And you're looking at your weld *through a microscope*.

1970-01-014• 3 years ago

ChatGPT isn't going to destroy Jeff's job.

CoastalCoder2• 3 years ago

How about ChatGPT producing a suitable CNC program?

(I have no idea how feasible that is, I'm just curious.)

Blackthorn4• 3 years ago

And you thought chatgpt was bad with subtle bugs in generated Python code. Now just imagine it scrapping a thirteen hour part or crashing a $300,000 machine.

edrxty• 3 years ago

I'm sure you could train it on a bunch of g code and get g code out but it wouldn't have any context for the specifically targeted CNC machine and would probably just gouge random holes in the bed with random tools

abakker2• 3 years ago

SO BAD. It is NOT aware of G and M codes on a per machine basis and will create amazing crashes will full conviction that it will work.

Edit to add: E.g. it fully recommended that I use a G38 instead of g31 in a macro, which would on my machine would probably destroy my probe.

Blackthorn4• 3 years ago

Robotic welding processes have caused quite a bit of grief in the workforce before the advent of ChatGPT, unfortunately.

buildsjets• 3 years ago

Any weld that can be economically automated should be. Several years ago I worked a project to help a supplier implement automated orbital tube welding for an aerospace product. There were two of these welds per part, and 8 parts per airplane, for an airplane that was being produced at around 50 per month. So they needed to make about 800 welds per month, about 37 per day. Including setup, each manual weld took around 15 minute, so over 9 hours of welding the exact same setup over and over, while being exposed to hot surfaces, UV light, and welding gasses. That's no job for a human.

jacquesm3• 3 years ago

There is good money made by people fixing up after the robots.

WheatMillington• 3 years ago

On a production line, sure. But not in the kind of work in the link, and not in almost any kind of repair work, bespoke work or built to order manufacturing.

nimbius• 3 years ago

having worked in shops alongside automatic welders its a toss-up at best. See vendors like Fanuc and Motoman will say just about anything to get the bid for a process automation contract. 50k cycles per hour? sure. maintenance period every 25 years? why not. seamless switching between pulsemig, pulseGMAW and cupped tig? you know it. Vision system? it can see through time buddy, this robot does eeeverything.

the problems start when your shop retools without a cycle time analysis, makes small tweaks to existing metal profiles without updating the bots, or finds out robots aren't magic money saving golems. for me its been the last one because every shop Ive been in will literally run an autowelder until the teeth in the gears sound like an empty bag of cheetos and the tool path leaves about an inch of over-weld and spatter. the overweld and quality issues get the grinder treatment from a line worker whos pulled out to do lots and lots of reworks so your cycle time is now bob's cycle time. now eventually the setup to pulsemig wont make sense anymore or nobody can remember how to switch it to GMAW or a customer needs a mig joint so more tweaks happen until your $250k bot is now just a pneumatic arm that shoots metal boogers at a joint and sends it to rework.

no shop wants to spend money on a programmer or mechanical maintenance unless the machines literally swinging around in a fiery puddle of its own hydraulic.

m463• 3 years ago

maybe wait for gcodeGPT?

wyclif• 3 years ago

How does a person become an apprentice silversmith?

Cthulhu_• 3 years ago

Maybe obvious, but, find a silversmith and ask. Finding them is the hard part though, I think you're better off finding something broader, e.g. a jewelery shop that makes their own or does repairs, there may be relevant courses and education paths for it.

The trouble is, I think, that it's a dying art; for years a lot of these craftsmen have been superseded by cheap mass-produced fashion jewelry on the one hand, and cheaper or more practical every day use items. There's less pieces in people's homes that are worth handing down to younger generations.

But this can be reversed, it just means people need to make investments into items that may not be immediately useful or won't be used daily, things like grandfather clocks, jewelry, display pieces, art, etc.

One example I can think of is that my parents have an "analog" weather station on their wall, it's got things like a quicksilver thermometer / barometer, a weather glass, and a blurb of text, etc. They bought it because quicksilver was being banned for use in thermometers etc, so they figured it would be the last chance.

But the other factor, and we're zooming out a bit now, is that people have less permanence in their lives nowadays. Home ownership is decreasing fast, and people seem less interested in "being set for life", e.g. buying a house with the intent of living there forever and/or raising a family. But that's very tangential, lol.

anfractuosity• 3 years ago

Intriguing, I wonder how this compares to laser welding for jewellery etc.

Edit: Just noticed he mentions in the video laser welding is more suited to smaller items

MisterTea2• 3 years ago

That custom micro TIG setup is really nice. That articulated arm is really neat, but that scope head must be very light. I'd like to know the brand as it looks plenty solid.

Pulsed welding is super useful for filling and repair operations on thin sheet where you can "shoot" a tiny blob of filler wire into the joint/hole/gap and fill it in. Or perform small butt-seam welds without filler. I've worked with fiber and yag lasers and the welds are really clean and solid. You can even weld larger parts together with decent strength or tack fo larger welding operations. Even some of the electron beam welders there had a pulse welding mode.

"Won't fit in a laser cabinet" - You just need a better laser setup instead of a fixed optics machine. Buy a fiber laser, like an IPG QCW 450/4500 get a small D30 head, 125mm lens, coax nozzle with a camera tube (don't buy the camera from them as they just resell a Sentech for double the $) and build another station like your TIG setup but mount the laser head instead. You'll have one hell of a fiber welder. You might even be able to move work over from your TIG setup. They might offer a binocular setup for the head or have one fabricated if you don't want the camera/monitor setup.

gertrunde• 3 years ago

The article refers to it as a "Lampert PUK04" - a search turned up this link: https://www.lampertusa.com/products/puk04-with-microscope-sm...

I suspect that it has since been superseded by the current PUK6 model (and previously the PUK 5, judging by search results)

MisterTea2• 3 years ago

Yeah the Tig will certainly be less costly vs the laser setup which will run about 20-30K.

analog312• 3 years ago

The first thing I saw was no protective gear. Does this process really produce no UV?

Gh0stRAT• 3 years ago

Does this process really produce no UV?

I have no idea, but the microscope he's looking through could certainly have UV protection built-in. Or perhaps the pulses are so short and small that the cumulative risk is negligible?

Either way, it seems to me like there could be ways for it to be safe enough to require minimal PPE while still producing some non-zero amount of UV.

analog312• 3 years ago

I'm also thinking about skin exposure. Fortunately glass optics are at least opaque to the most dangerous bands of UV, but not to retinal blue, which has its own special place in the regulations.

gaze• 3 years ago

the microscope blanks when the arc is fired

MaxikCZ• 3 years ago

What happens if one time it fails? Does it instant blind?

Blackthorn4• 3 years ago

Only somewhat related: has anyone tried pulse stick? I don't have a machine capable of it, but it seems like it would allow some pretty easy stick welds. Especially on thinner pieces.

dsfyu404ed• 3 years ago

The venn diagram of people who get really exited over pulse welding and people who spend enough time using a stick welder to notice yet alone realize any benefit from those settings" is just two circles.

I can see the theoretical benefit in how quickly you can put down material but all of the people who actually need that in practice are probably already using something that feeds off a spool.

shirleyquirk4• 3 years ago

Correct. In a stick welder I care about: working all day, in the rain, up a ladder, at 130A. For ease/quality of the weld, I pay for quality welding rods, not more settings.

binarymax• 3 years ago

Really beautiful work. Though not as detailed, This Old Tony has an amazing pulse TIG welding video, for those who want to see it in action https://youtu.be/a6fUCApr03g

causi• 3 years ago

Sometimes the joined area is not visibly accessible, and I don't know if lead has been used.

You could use a lead test swab. They come as small as precision q-tips.

CamperBob2• 3 years ago

Perfect excuse to get that XRF gun you've always wanted but couldn't quite justify to your spouse!

farkanoid2• 3 years ago

I'm so infatuated with these machines that I've been working on designing my own version (using parts available at Mouser/Digikey) for close to a decade.

Unfortunately I've been unable to maintain a decent work/life balance due to the high cost of living. As a result, I honestly die a little inside each time I see an article posted about them.

The last update was in 2013, where I completed the EHT "popstart" circuit (to replace the expensive retractable electrode, and allow the use of a standard TIG head): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4c5Le2kT6w

Some day I'll complete it!

doubleg72• 3 years ago

Man, has it really been ten years already that we have been waiting for you to post that design?!

farkanoid2• 3 years ago

I'M SO SORRY

geocrasher• 3 years ago

This reminds me of TIG welding, but on an even more refined level. What an art!

The Beauty of Pulse Arc Welding

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