Common MIG Welding Issues, Popping and Spatter

Common MIG welding issues. MIG: Popping and spatterWhether you are a professional or just a beginner welder, chances are that you’ve had encounters with popping and spatter while welding with a MIG welder. Even the experienced professional welder will occasionally get caught with a spatter issue that just doesn’t seem to want to go away no matter what is done to remedy it. One of the most common causes is improper wire speed or voltage setting. For the professional, the following information may be obvious, but for a beginner, it will help settle nerves by explaining what is going on. Many spatter problems can be corrected by just readjusting the wire speed or voltage. If the wire speed is too high, you can either reduce the wire speed or increase the voltage. Wire speed adjustment is equivalent to adjusting the amps. In fact the correlation is direct. The faster the wire speed, the higher the amps. But in general, wire popping is usually a result of welding wire being fed into the puddle faster than it can melt in and larger chunks just flying off violently as it does eventually create enough heat to weaken the wire and pinch off. Knowing whether to adjust just the voltage, the wire speed, or a combination of the two is largely a result of experience for the professional or trial and error by the beginner. Any given weld will require enough wire speed to form a proper sized and shaped weld and achieve penetration, so it may be advantageous to increase the voltage first to properly utilize all the wire that is being fed into the puddle instead of readjusting the wire speed. Don’t rule out this issue, even if you have the wire speed and voltage adjusted according to the “chart” on the welder or by the app you’ve downloaded. These are notoriously inaccurate and cannot account for every welding situation and can only be relied upon for a general ball park setting. In some cases, they may not even be close. Ultimately the key to achieving proper adjustment is to make small adjustments each time without wildly swinging the adjustment from one extreme to the other.Everlast Power Equipment, your complete MIG welding resource.Learn more on our welding forum