Alright I am rather excited about this... probably a decade-long dream of mine has been to be able to weld... and since most of the projects I want to do are aluminum (intake manifold, aluminum exhaust, brush bars etc) I got my hands on my new 250EX. If I am going to be a noob again, I may as well noob it up on something ultra cool.

My welder arrived a couple months ago, and I have spent these months aquiring the remaining gear such as a nice Vika portable workbench (xmas gift from the GF), cutoff wheel, bench grinder, my own argon gas cylinder (a 22), 4-sensor auto-darkening helmet, and consumables. Most importantly, I read and read and watched many welding videos. Having never done any welding, I needed to cover all the basics. I perform in the music industry, so dealing with lots of knobs and foot pedals is familiar territory, thankfully .

I cleaned up a heavy piece of 1/2" aluminum U-plate to use as a welding surface and protect my table, and used another piece of plate as a third hand.



Two evenings ago, I felt I was ready to have a go at it. Since I have tons of scrapyard aluminum tubing, and I will be working on intakes and exhaust tubing, I figured I'd get my practice in on tubing instead of flat sheet. After several hours of familiarizing myself with the settings on the machine, I had it dialed in pretty good. I ran lots of beads, and they went pretty well, all noobing aside. Last night, I attempted to join two pieces of tubing together, which was considerably harder than running beads. But, I got it figured out.

And tonight, I chopped half a dozen 1" bands of tubing, and welded my first pieces of tube together. I have to say I am extremely impressed with this welding machine. It was very forgiving. Considering I was using scrapyard tubing with a few burrs here and there, just a quick wipe with acetone on the outside, not to mention a complete noob, it gave me a beautiful arc and nice puddling. I am fully aware of the importance of correct cleaning... I was curious as to what I could get away with playing around with the AC balance.

This tubing is 3 5/8ths diameter, around .0508 wall. I am using 3/32" 2% lanthanated tungsten and 3/32 4043 rod. My settings are 60 amps, 7 lpm of argon flow and a #6 cup, AC frequency at around 135 and balance at about 50% (which happens to be right at noon for both).



Starting the joint was the hardest part... what worked for me was to warm up both sides of the joint (but avoiding the seam), until I had a puddle started on each side and then just added filler and joined the puddles, kind of a "U" shape movement with the torch. If there is an easier and cleaner way I would be happy to hear about it. You can see the start-point in the pic below:



Any advice, tips, thoughts are most welcome. I will keep adding to this thread as I tackle my intake, exhaust and manifold projects.