Quote Originally Posted by Bob La Londe View Post

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.
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!