Life hack for a welder: how to improve the electrode for sealing and surfacing
Typically, soldering and surfacing use a filler wire fed into the arc zone at a specific speed. To learn this, you need solid practice. There is a way to carry out such welding that is accessible even to a novice welder, and at the same time his second hand will be free. You just need to slightly modify the existing electrode.
Will need
To implement the idea, we will use an electrode for manual welding, metal wire and a piece of steel pipe.
- Drill;
- wire cutters;
- mites;
- vice;
- chisel;
- metal brush;
- sandpaper.
The process of improving the electrode and welding the end of the pipe
We clamp the electrode into the drill chuck, turn on the tool and wind the wire along the length of the electrode.
After finishing winding and stopping the drill, we bite off the wire with wire cutters.
Depending on the welding process mode, the wire spiral on the electrode is made more dense or sparse.
It is not easy even for an experienced welder to weld the end of a pipe with one electrode, because there is not enough metal.
The welding process using an electrode with a spirally wound wire is faster and of better quality, since the metal of the wire is added to the metal of the electrode.
Carefully cool the pipe with the welded end, without directing the stream of water directly to the welding site.
We beat off the slag, clean the welding area with a wire brush, remove excess deposited metal and grind it with sandpaper.
As a result, we will get a firmly, hermetically sealed and beautifully welded end of the pipe.
