Long Welds in 5052

I'm pretty much a novice welder, but I do have a couple MIG rigs already. I've got a Century which is good for about 2 inches of bead (in steel) before it destabilizes. I had to cut a hole in the case and add a huge push fan to get that much. I learned my lesson. Actually it did what I bought it for. Its great for welding handles on gates on 120V household or office power. LOL. I have since replaced it in the field with a little Lincoln flux core only rig. The Lincoln is much better

Later I acquired a Miller 212 with automatic select dual guns. I wanted it primarily for welding aluminum since I didn't have that ability before. I can weld aluminum with it, but its a constant struggle. Short quick welds in .125 to .190 are not to bad, but longer welds are a struggle for me. I have to plan the welds, then stitch and back fill. Its slow and tedious, but I can do it. I want to be able to clamp everything up and just go. (after cleanup of course) I have done some very very very fast welds with it as small as .043, but its way beyond the ability of the welder. I can make a bead about .250 inches long before it vaporizes the base metal. I don't need to weld .043. I was just playing, but I would like to be able to make long welds in sheet as thin as .063 with out having to stitch and fill back and forth every few inches.

I didn't even know about Everlast welders a few months ago, so I was looking at the Miller 350P and its just to far out of my price range. Its pretty sweet though. I had the chance to burn some bead a while back in a shop where I was helping out with something else. It was already all setup for the weld though. I basically just had to pull the trigger and the welder who let me play with it told me to speed up a little from the rate I started my pass.

Anyway, I am seriously considering an Everlast Pulse MIG unit. I would really love to see some welds and some weld videos of one doing aluminum. Preferably 5052 from .063 to .125. Also, the settings are a bit daunting. Is there a guideline somewhere for setting up one of these welders for different thicknesses and alloys?

I already have a spool gun on my Miller, and if the pulse mig works out I would probably just use the Miller for steel work from then on. Can I use my Miller spool gun on an Everlast Pulse MIG? How difficult would that be to do?

Well, now that I have exposed my ignorance. LOL. Anybody want to jump in?

There must be something wrong with your setup on the miller 212. You should be able to run your spool gun with no problem. That machine can run up to 210 amps at a reduced duty cycle. If you are trying to weld alum much thicker than 1/4" you will find that a 200 degree preheat will make a world of difference in the smoothness of the weld and will also allow you to back off the amperage a little with some trial and error. The preheating will also improve the looks of your welds even at thinner thicknesses. I would not give up on the 212. I think you jut need to find the right setup for it. I will throw this in just in case, Are you using straight argon for your shielding gas with the spool gun? If not then that is your problem.

Yes, I have made some adjustments once or twice. In fact I have successfully made welds both at the high and low end that are outside of its recommended material size range.

Yes, I am running straight argon. I have considered swapping one of my spare bottles for some Argon/Helium for the heavier stuff.

I can get acceptable welds in 5052 in a variety of sizes using my Miller 212. I just hate the method necessary to do so for some welds. Some welds that I hope to be doing more of in the future. Now I am sure you can tell me how I would set it up to run a ten foot long bead in one continuous weld with out stopping with it, but I never figured that out. I can get very acceptable welds about 3-5 inches (shorter in thinner materials and longer in thicker) long, and then skip a section and make a similar weld. Not just tacks to hold it in place, but short beads a few inches long. In fact some very experienced welders told me that's probably the best way to make a long weld with my welder. Weld a few inches, skip a section, weld a few inches, skip a section, weld a few inches, skip a section. Go back and fill in every other gap. Then go back and fill in the rest of the gaps. It works. I can get acceptable welds doing that. I have welded aluminum from .043 (playing, not real welds) to .375. This welder is a pretty good actually on 1/4" plate. Its fair to good on 1/8" sheet. It sucks on 3/8, but its not rated for 3/8 anyway. Preheat with a torch and its possible, but you have to stop and preheat several times for longer welds. Its not at all capable on .043, but if you can move the gun fast enough its possible to stick metal together without totally vaporizing it. I've repaired cracks in boats, and built enclosures with it. Heck, I just finished welding a whole new back section into the hull of one of my little shallow water boats. The other day I made a bracket for a sealed control enclosure inside a paint booth with it. It does weld aluminum. I never in said it doesn't. As far as I can tell there is nothing wrong with my 212. Most of the welds I make with it use settings very close to those on the little flip card attached to the welder. (I do have to run slightly faster wire speeds on most of the aluminum welds) Now forget all of that. Assume that somebody just emptied a gattling gun into my welder and there is no way in all of eternity that all the king's men and all the king's horse will ever put it together again.

I want a pulse MIG because of what it can do. Make long beads fast. Not long welds, but long continuous beads. (Actually a whole bunch of short overlapping beads fast. LOL) Now you can argue with me and tell me that I don't "need" a pulse MIG, but I don't care. I want one. I am just not sure I want an Everlast. I ran some bead with a 350P as I already said, and I could easily see the difference in how it welds, and how the hot and cold cycle allows for much much longer continuous welds, and how it can make it much easier to weld thinner sheet continuously and quickly. Heck, I made a weld about 2 feet long in .090 my very first try with the 350P. A pretty good looking weld except where I had to much build up at the start.

I was hoping somebody would be willing to answer the questions I asked, but I have found in every new forum the first few responses I usually get are answers to questions I didn't ask. Hopefully we got that out of the way, I didn't piss to many people off so bad they won't get over it, and we can find out if I want an "Everlast" Pulse MIG or not. I just sold a big job (not welding related) and I could afford the Miller right now, but if the Everlast would do similar work I would seriously consider it.

1. May I please see some photos of welds in the size and type of materials I am most interested in? .060-.190 5052 aluminum sheet.
2. May I please see video of some of these welds in process if somebody has done any?
3. May I please know if there is a published setups guide available for the Everlast pulse MIG welders for pulsing aluminum similar to the guide card that came attached to my Miller welder, and is printed under the door on my Lincoln welder? Maybe just a little bit more comprehensive since those welders only have two adjustments (3 if you count gas flow) and the Everlast Pulse MIG welders have half a dozen.
4. (Almost forgot) How hard would it be to use my Miller spool gun on the Everlast Pulse MIGs? (I figure if it works why use the 212 for aluminum if I get a pulse MIG.)


I would appreciate seeing some welds maybe specifically in 5052, but I can get a good idea of how it will work from seeing some 6061 welds.

For anybody who helps me make my decisions thank you very much both now in advance and again in the future. I do try and help when I can in forums where I have received useful help. I make a point of it.

For anybody who thinks I was a bit harsh, I snipped my whole sarcastic string of barbs at the start before clicking Submit. LOL.

I can not help you with the pulse mig info because I do not have one but I am interested to see what answers you get to your questions. I have been playing with the idea of getting a 205P myself. Not to replace what I have but to keep in my work trailer because it would be easier than dragging my millermatic around. I would say you could probably use your miller spool gun but you would probably need to change the plug. I doubt the Everlast uses the 14 pin connector. If you look at the pdf manual for the mig you want it should have the wiring schematic for the plug on the welder so you can check your wiring of your miller spool gun. I am sure a pulse will help with what you want to do but the heat will still build up in the aluminum at some point to where you will need to stop and let it cool before going on with the weld. It might take a few feet to do it but it will do it. It sounds like you use your gun for mostly very thin alum. I would think you need to make a heat sink of some sort to help dissapate the heat.

After looking at the miller 350P info I do not think you will be happy with anything else. That welder is designed for alum mig only. I do not think the pulse function on other welders will even work with a spool gun. ( I could be wrong but the pulse needs to make the wire hesitate momentarily too and I do not know that they are set up to do that through a spool gun plug port). The 350P uses a push/pull setup that is built into the wire feeder and gun in the machine.

All the pulse welders i know of the wire does not hesitate.

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Originally Posted by performance

All the pulse welders i know of the wire does not hesitate.

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Like I said , I could be wrong. I do not have a pulse mig welder. I just figured that if the wire did not pulse too that it would go into the puddle and your stickout would fluctuate . It must be fast enough that it does not do that. In that case it should work with the spool gun setup.

The Everlast Power i Mig 250 can pulse if you run stitch and spot welding together I tried aluminum but it was hard to get everything at the right speed. I will try and see if I can some day down the road. Steel work very well it nice going up hill with it doing both stitch and spot at the same time.
Need a push pull gun for aluminum. I tried a spool gun but just burned the tip off.

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Originally Posted by Bob La Londe

Yes, I have made some adjustments once or twice. In fact I have successfully made welds both at the high and low end that are outside of its recommended material size range. [/I]

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Bob, I asked some of the same questions about hooking up a different welder to an Everlast on another thread. Obviously I can't answer those questions because no one has answered though I have my suspicions. My reaction to one of your queries about long welds is my own questions: What's a long weld to you? This really is confusing: "Make long beads fast. Not long welds, but long continuous beads:. ??? (Actually a whole bunch of short overlapping beads fast. LOL) ??? More importantly what kind of weld (or bead, as you seem to prefer); fillet, butt, vert up or down? "I can get acceptable welds in 5052 in a variety of sizes using my Miller 212. I just hate the method necessary to do so for some welds." Send some pictures of your welds then perhaps one could get a grip on what you're after. It sounds like you may be doing some kind of art project.

Because I'm in the marine world I only weld 5052, 5086 and 6061-63 with 5356 wire in .035, .047 or 1/16".

The difference between welding .060" plate and 3/16ths is about three planets and a Big-Momma Thorton apart.

I've never used a Miller 212 and the gun it supports but I'll bet I could be happy all day long with it on .190" plate 5052 with .035 wire - .060" plate - not so much.

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Originally Posted by Yofish

Bob, I asked some of the same questions about hooking up a different welder to an Everlast on another thread. Obviously I can't answer those questions because no one has answered though I have my suspicions. My reaction to one of your queries about long welds is my own questions: What's a long weld to you? This really is confusing: "Make long beads fast. Not long welds, but long continuous beads:. ??? (Actually a whole bunch of short overlapping beads fast. LOL) ??? More importantly what kind of weld (or bead, as you seem to prefer); fillet, butt, vert up or down? "I can get acceptable welds in 5052 in a variety of sizes using my Miller 212. I just hate the method necessary to do so for some welds." Send some pictures of your welds then perhaps one could get a grip on what you're after. It sounds like you may be doing some kind of art project.

Because I'm in the marine world I only weld 5052, 5086 and 6061-63 with 5356 wire in .035, .047 or 1/16".

The difference between welding .060" plate and 3/16ths is about three planets and a Big-Momma Thorton apart.

I've never used a Miller 212 and the gun it supports but I'll bet I could be happy all day long with it on .190" plate 5052 with .035 wire - .060" plate - not so much.

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You could be right. As I mentioned in one post the 212 does a good job on .250, and a fair to good job on .125. .190 is probably its sweet spot. LOL. On .250 I can wallow around like I am working on steel and its very forgiving. I've done repairs down to .080 that don't leak but its difficult and ugly.

Pulse welding looks like a series of overlapping tack welds. Hence my comment about a bunch of short welds fast. (tongue in cheek) If you want to be technical its not really, but more somewhere in between that and a continuous bead since the welder and arc don't actually turn off. (It actually looks like a technique I have used on thin steel like pickup bed repairs where that's exactly what I do. A series of short overlapping tac welds. If its supported you can grind it smooth even.)

Since you are in the marine industry I am sure you are familiar with the type of welds I would like to be able to do. Flip any inexpensive small aluminum boat over and look at the seam down the keel or in some cases the chine. Most of them are obviously pulse welded several feet at a time. I am sure they used tac welds to hold it in place, but most of them are obviously NOT robot welded. You can see where the welder stopped and restarted on most of them too. A few are hard to tell, but if you look close you can see it. Often enough they have a small leak at that point. It makes it all that much easier to identify the restart points. LOL.

P.S. I asked about the spool gun because one of the Everlast models looks "IDENTICAL" to my Miller spool gun right down to the little clear acrylic cover over the feed rollers. I figured it was probably the same gun with a different connector. I have ordered repair parts for my gun that were NOT "made by" Miller, but the seller said they were manufactured in the same factory. Yeah, I have dropped it once or twice. :O

To the guy who burned his tip. I forget what it was, but there was a modification I did to my gun nozzle that reduced that. I think I found it on the Miller Welds forum. I forget exactly, but it had to do with the length of the tip relative to the length of the gas hood. It helped a lot, but you still HAVE TO remember to clip the tip of the wire off to remove that little ball EVERY time. You also to HAVE TO (or I do anyway) work in a very breeze free environment and keep your gun distance and angle right. I've worked outside on breezy days, but I had to setup little wind breaks directly around my weld areas.

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Originally Posted by Bob La Londe

Since you are in the marine industry I am sure you are familiar with the type of welds I would like to be able to do. Flip any inexpensive small aluminum boat over and look at the seam down the keel or in some cases the chine. Most of them are obviously pulse welded several feet at a time. I am sure they used tac welds to hold it in place, but most of them are obviously NOT robot welded. You can see where the welder stopped and restarted on most of them too. A few are hard to tell, but if you look close you can see it. Often enough they have a small leak at that point. It makes it all that much easier to identify the restart points. LOL.

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Bob, by marine I mean marine, as in saltwater. No bass boats made from .100" stuff, but I now know what you are talking about, I think. Most of that weld appearance you are talking about is what is known as 'short arc'. Short arc or short circuit is the original 'pulse' so to speak, wherein the wire 'balls up' in the arc and then transfers to target material in a 'splat' (my term). To confuse, there is 'globular transfer' which I defy anyone to really tell the difference to the former. One can weld, corner-to-corner .100" aluminum with .035 that looks like a knobby TIG. One sees a lot of that on 'tin skiffs', done with small diameter wire - no pulse necessary. I think I might have some .100" 5052 around. I'll send some pics of what I'm talking about. You're never going to 'spray' weld .060 unless you are in an environment with the equipment to do that, certainly not a spool gun but for a lucky inch at a time. Set up for continuous welds on material becomes more problematic at a geometric rate as the thickness gets smaller. No where, on any planet, by any transfer method, could you weld .060 aluminum plates, say a fillet weld in a 4" wide X 60" long plate in the middle of another plate the same dimension, without it turning into a cool twisted sculpture. That is - if you could keep it tacked together!

OK, here we have a couple of pics of a corner to corner 90 degree weld done short arc. The base material is .100" 5052 and the filler wire is .030" 5356, sample is 4" long. This was done with an ancient AirCo Cav II CV machine and a Miller 30A spool gun, second generation. Somewhere around 13-15V, and who knows what wire speed is; it's all a 'feel' thing with old machines. The arc noise sounds kinda like a pissed off bee. Anyway, Bob, back in the day before 'pulse' anything, you had to run what you brung and make it work. This is the same weld you see on a lot of tin boats WAY before the advent of pulse. You could build a fuel tank 10' x 10 x 10' ' this way and out of the same thickness material but no one would like how it looked in the end and keeping it tacked together would be nigh impossible! After the base material warms up, the weld looks much like automatic TIG, not as clean but close. Also, as one can see, root penetration is very extreme. No weave, straight ahead. The big issue is a human one: how good are you at holding?

That outside weld is similar (mine isn't as pretty) to what I get with .125 5052 and .030 5356. That inside weld explains a lot. That is a huge build. I just instinctively don't trust a weld that has such a huge build up to have good penetration. If that is what an acceptable inside fillet is going to look like with that size stock I am going to have to rethink my methods.

I do not hold exactly all that well. I try to do any aluminum welding in the morning after I've had breakfast and I feel good.

Bob, in the example, there is only one weld: the set-up is corner to corner and the weld applied to the outside. The picture of the inside shows weld penetration from the outside in. There is no inside fillet. Here is a pic showing cross section of the weldment. When building fuel tanks that are only welded from the outside, you can't get any better than this: complete root penetration. Welding the inside would be completely superfluous, not mention, in many cases, impossible. Now, if this were a chine on a boat, one would not want the penetration to be that strong but still present. You'd then cut it out (the penetrations) and a fillet applied. The reason being is that rounded shape of the root penetration in the picture has created stress risers where it sharply angles back into the root and would not be good in presence of flexure, as a chine is subject to. But if you're building tanks, you'd be a very happy camper to get so much from a single pass weld.

I build a lot of tanks. I'm 65 years old and don't have the hand I once did. I've built a trough that has a slot cut out of the lower corner that gives about 3/8" clearance to the top and side of a tank exposing 24" of corner to corner weld area. It has a piece of UHMW pipe slotted and clipped over the outboard edge for the gun to slide on. With my "hog trough", I can make a beautiful weld 20" long on .190 in no time, spraying. Stops cut out with a electric die grinder and a single flute cut, oval, carbide bit.

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Your comments about over penetration and stress risers goes along with Pollards (in his book on aluminum boat building) comments on the subject and his insistence that marine welds need to be back chipped and back welded. The problem is neither you nor Pollard address the difficulties of welding the thinner materials common in smaller boats. I had just assumed you back welded that, and couldn't imagine how you got such a huge build.

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Originally Posted by Bob La Londe

Your comments about over penetration and stress risers goes along with Pollards (in his book on aluminum boat building) comments on the subject and his insistence that marine welds need to be back chipped and back welded. The problem is neither you nor Pollard address the difficulties of welding the thinner materials common in smaller boats. I had just assumed you back welded that, and couldn't imagine how you got such a huge build.

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Bob, for the life of me I still don't know what the heck it is that you are trying to accomplish! Please show some pictures. Are you saying that you are building or repairing thin skinned boats? You know, there is a reason that boats under .100" are riveted and not welded. Imagine a Boeing hull 737 that was welded.

A Waco 2050-16 is .080 and all welded. I do note that the welded Trackers seem to all have .100 skins now, but in the past they had thinner hulls. I recently rebuilt the collapsed bow of an older welded Tracker (a 16 footer rater for 60hp) that had .080 skin. Its certainly do able, but I can't believe they are doing it by welding a couple inches, and walking away for several minutes to allow it to cool before coming back and welding the next couple inches. Nor are the welds pretty enough to indicate they were robot welded. Even on 0.100 I can't run continuous beads very far. If everything is just perfect you can get maybe 6-8 inches before its to overheats and drops out. I am looking for something better.

I was told that a pulse MIG was the way to do this, but it sounds like from the way this conversation has been diverted that an Everlast pulse MIG can't do it.

(Actually to be fair Tracker is probably robot welding on their newest boats. They have gotten so big compare to other aluminum boat manufactures that it makes sense for them.)

Kempy, burn back is controlled on aluminum by turning the adjustable burn back control to 0. This will help.

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Originally Posted by Bob La Londe

A Waco 2050-16 is .080 and all welded. I do note that the welded Trackers seem to all have .100 skins now, but in the past they had thinner hulls. I recently rebuilt the collapsed bow of an older welded Tracker (a 16 footer rater for 60hp) that had .080 skin. Its certainly do able, but I can't believe they are doing it by welding a couple inches, and walking away for several minutes to allow it to cool before coming back and welding the next couple inches. Nor are the welds pretty enough to indicate they were robot welded. Even on 0.100 I can't run continuous beads very far. If everything is just perfect you can get maybe 6-8 inches before its to overheats and drops out. I am looking for something better.

I was told that a pulse MIG was the way to do this, but it sounds like from the way this conversation has been diverted that an Everlast pulse MIG can't do it.

(Actually to be fair Tracker is probably robot welding on their newest boats. They have gotten so big compare to other aluminum boat manufactures that it makes sense for them.)

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Robot or manual makes very little difference. If your parts are not pre-heated to soak temp, you will need a spoolgun with remote control, or a machine with a programmed mode. Once you build some heat, you can back off the current(wire speed) and rock on. True, standard or pulse on pulse would help, but it is by no means required. At the moment Everlast has several standard pulse models, but no pulse on pulse models, that I am aware of. You might call to check the industrial line as I have heard there are other machines there, that are not listed on the website.