I was watching FantomWorks the other day and they were restoring a '57 Corvette from a pile of parts. Someone had drilled holes in the cove moldings and attached them with screws. To fix this, Ol' Dan hisself carefully dinged the dents out, getting the trim piece in as good a shape as possible. Then he welded the holes up with what appeared to be a standard MIG welder, and then ground and polished the piece until it looked like new.. Is this possible? The pictures showed what obviously was a MIG gun. He wasn't using any filler rod and I couldn't see a Spool Gun. Were they just using stock footage, or can this actually be done?
I use s/s mig wire. For exhaust and thick things, never used it on thin metal like trim. Polishes out well if necessary.
Generally with solid SS mig wire you use tri mix. For something like that they may have used straight argon. And if it was polishing out nice 316 would have been the alloy. I’ve done a ton of polishing on SS but with TIG.
Solid SS wire, I HAD to try it! At the time, I had Argon. 75/25 was out of the question! But @X38's posts, 75/25 works. Must try that again. Thanks to my HAMB brothers.
@tubman @Atwater Mike In this post you can see some things I welded with stainless. I didn't make a point of it, but you can see where I welded tabs on the grille in one shot and later I had blended the weld. The support rods I lengthened were also stainless. https://www.jalopyjournal.com/forum/threads/1938-39-40-sloper-custom.1210500/page-19#post-14620229
I just looked it up and the tri mix is argon/co2 and they throw in a little Helium. An 75/25 would work as X38 said.
I use my MIG all the time for welding stainless, mostly exhaust, but works well on other stuff too. Tri-Mix gas does produce a cleaner weld with less spatter. I keep both tanks on my cart and just switch the regulator any time I switch between wire.
I have welded a bunch of stainless tube elbows together with my wire and gas for mild steel. You can weld 304 to mild steel tube no problem. Just like they are the same. (Stainless elbows and muffler, mild steel tube & flanges) Only thing, the welds aren't stainless. Pipes on my OT toys will get a little rusty at the welds. The dude on TV probably was going to paint it or chrome it or, he just didn't know (or care). If you aren't worried about the stainless-ness of your welds, have at it. Mike
It looked great to me, and his shop has a reputation for top-shelf restorations. Thanks for the information guys. This opens up a whole new area for me.
In a mig forSS tri mix Helium is recommend , it will be a cleaner weld , Tri Mix is more expensive, & can be used to weld mild steel, some say tri mix is a wast to use for mid steel , to me seem to weld cleaner .. So I just use tri mix , incase I do mig SS. Op asked / said did not see filler in mig , I have see a few use mig gun with no wire in gun but use filler rod & feed by hand @ electro tip, I have not tried this on mig , I just use the tig.
Just cause you can, doesn't mean you should, but a lot of times you can get by doing so. What he said. I think what's missing is the answer to the question, what is the purpose of the shielding gas. It's not can you weld it. Cause you can. It's the results of doing so.
No, that is not the question. The OP observed what appeared to be a MIG gun being used and asked if welding s/s with a MIG was possible. And as far as rust goes, Acccurate Mike has thrown a red herring in here by bringing up the subject of regular wire. The whole point is to use stainless steel wire.
I posted a answer for what the Op question /asked, I have seen some weld with a mig with out filler wire in gun, They used filler rod / wire,, fed by hand @ electro tip, like tigging . I have not tried this Method myself with migging
If you're welding carbon steel to stainless and using stainless wire, it won't make any difference, the weld is going to rust anyway because you're contaminating the stainless with carbon. Hit a clean piece of stainless with a carbon steel hammer and where the hammer struck, the stainless will rust. Same thing with grinding wheels, if you use a grinding wheel that's been used on carbon steel on stainless, the stainless will rust. Just a suggestion on your welds. Make smaller passes. Don't try to pile all that metal up on top of itself. You'll get much nicer results. I know the example is square tube but trust me, it all welds the same.
No on retro tip ,,,,they feed rod/ wire by hand in between tip & work instead of feeding wire threw gun & out of tip
I'm not saying it's right. I'm saying you can weld it. I don't do it for anything that matters. I have done 304 exhaust on lawn rides, they do stay stuck together. If you don't have SS wire, you can still stick stuff together. I guess I may also just figure Fantom Works was capable of such hackery, I'm not a fan. Maybe he keeps a MIG machine loaded up for SS for just such occasions. I didn't want to put that picture up, it was just the easiest to find. I hacked that together in a few minutes. Right after I found the big hole in the original. I needed something to start up an engine sitting since '92. It ran for an hour on that, now it is destined for the "Tree of Shame". The muffler came with the 1" flex tube (Diesel cabin heater). Gotta' admit, it is funky. RE convert MIG to TIG You put a tungsten in the tip to make a scratch start DC TIG. If you have a MIG welder, $20 and you have some TIG capability. Or, use a air cooled TIG gun to do the same thing, smaller and a few more bucks. Pretty cool. I want to try it. Mike
With so many fairly good quality imported TIG welders available for around $1000 or less, I think TIG would be a better alternative. I picked up a Primeweld TIG225x for $764 on Black Friday and couldn’t be more pleased with its performance. Actually, there are probably a half dozen other brands out there and I haven’t read anything bad about any of the current budget machines, other tales of yore, from experiences fifteen or twenty years ago.
I know a whole lot of seasoned welders that only ever use blue or red welders at work, who have a Primeweld 225X in their home shop. All report excellent results. None have had any issues.
I built these tail pipes last year out of Stainless. I used my MIG with SS wire and a tri mix gas. I found it doesn't melt like regular MIG wire, takes some practice. They turned out nice but required a lot of grinding and polishing. No replacement for TIG welding but a handy ability to have in the garage since I don't TIG...yet.
I was required to weld up thin gage SS with MIG (all position) when I qualified.....I didn't know any different, and my welds were highly praised by the instructor. Always use MIG in my shop.
While I have a nice TIG welder, I do, on occasion MIG weld stainless. When I do, it is when I am making stainless headers for weird things, in tight spaces, and I am having trouble clamping/holding/hanging upside-down. I run the Argon flow gauge and bottle from the TIG on the MIG, and tack weld with it. Once a few tacks are on, I will pull the header out, back purge, and TIG weld it.
Bandit Billy that sure looks nice. I have mig welded stainless with a mig on refer trailers .and some stuff on buses. never had any luck with thin stuff
It is a weird animal, the wire is stiff and wants to bounce when it strikes the pipe. You turn down the wire speed and it wants to burn through. You can use regular wire on stainless but the weld will rust unless you paint it. I did threw the SS wire and gas back on the MIG to fix a buddies turkey fryer last thanksgiving after the burner had come loose, worked fine for that but I wasn't polishing those welds.
Those are beautiful! Did you pressurize the tubes? Or just weld them with gas blowing on the weld like regular carbon steel MIG welding?
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