I'm making my half doors right now. I'm starting to weld one together but I'm having issues. The wall thickness of the tubing I'm using is 1/16" (roughly 14 gauge if I I'm correct) and I followed the directions or suggestions on the welder for that thickness of steel. However, before I can get a good bead going, it melts through the steel.. Don't worry though, I tried it out on a scrap piece first so I didn't ruin the doors.
Does anyone have any suggestions or anything? It's a canadian tire flux/mig welder, 80amp I believe

 

to hot, what size wire also. thinner may be better

 

I'm assuming your using flux? For anything thin like that you will just have to turn the welder down really low and do about 10,000 spot welds spacing them out to prevent the blow thru. It sucks and takes forever but that's really the only way to weld something that thin unless you have a tig machine and are a really good welder lol!

 

What rex said. You cannot run a bead on that thin of metal with a Mig. Plus you don't want to because it would warp the work. You need to heat it up just as it and stop. Only a second or two. Then move to different part of the seam 4-6 inches away and do the same thing. Do this in at leat 4 sections then go back to the first one and put another spot weld a little bit away. Keep doing this until all the spots are connected in one continuous weld. Be mindful of how hot the metal is getting and if it's getting to the point that you feel the work will warp, take a break. It's tedious and takes awhile, but believe it or not, at the same time it doesn't take as long as you would originally think.

 

I was afraid the solution would be to basically do a thousand tacks! I'm using .030 wire, it's the wire that came with the welder. Would buying better wire make a difference? The settings on the welder are max-min (voltage), 1-2 (tension), and wire feed speed 1-10. I'm guessing voltage at min, tension at 1, and wire feed at 10 would be my closest chance at welding this myself? aside from tacking it, that is.
Would getting a tank and using gas to mig weld it, as opposed to flux, help at all? or would it not be worth getting a tank of gas..
thanks for the help!

 

a better wire would help a bit. I have a flux welder. The wire that comes with it is crap! Get some lincoln welding wire. I picked up some .035 from home depot and it works really well. And the better wire you get with flux, the less splatter you will have.

I was practicing laying a bead down on some scrap 16 gauge sheet, and got some good penetration on the lowest setting of the welder with the .035 lincoln wire and did not burn through. I think I had the wire speed around 3 (this was last fall so I dont remember. I could go out to the garage and look, But I think it was around 3 for the wire speed.

 

Using gas would help cause it doesn't burn as hot as flux. If you stick with flux tho turn the welder down but like rich said keep the wire speed up just a bit. The reason for that is so it will put more material in to create the tack weld quicker than with a slower wire speed thus helping to prevent heat warping and blow thru if that makes sense.

On the flip I have seen nice tacks with high hear and low wire speed but I'm pretty sure that was with gas.

The other thing is to be sure you have a nice clean welding surface. Even tho flux will blast thru a lot of crap have a clean surface will help it do it's job much quicker and better when working with thin metals.

 

Ill try everything I can with what I have. I wasn't planning on spending a lot of money on these doors. I've been able to make one door with materials I already had, I have enough left over for at least one back door