How easy is stick welding with no experience? I want to make a simple cart using bicycle forks
How easy is stick welding with no experience? I want to make a simple cart using bicycle forks
How easy is stick welding with no experience? I want to make a simple cart using bicycle forks
Get a welding textbook and watch some technical demonstrations.
Safety is your No1 priority.
First time I ever welded I gave myself arc eye and was laid up for 2 days from the pain. The second time I burnt myself.
It's not so easy as it seems. These bycicle tubes are thin, and welding of thin metal is harder.
Fairly easy, fairly dangerous, and easy to make a beginner mistake and melt away parts of your tubes. If your design is like your pic you’ll save a crazy amount of time and money by just finding the right size elbow connector, or like in the pic, use a handlebar or seat post clamp
Stuff the pipes with sand. Not water, steam can explode.
>How easy is stick welding with no experience?
About $50 in scrap metal. and $30 in welding rods.
>Bicycle forks
It is made out of thin metal which is super tricky to weld with stick.
Use 3/32 or 1/16 6013 or 6010.
Stick is not appropriate for very thin tubing and noobs just blow holes. A cheap 120v flux core machine is more suitable.
An oxy-acetylene torch is ideal and you can braze instead of weld which also makes it easier to change your mind (just melt the braze). Noobs fear OA for no informed reason but it's widely used by bicycle builders and both gas welding and brazing are very easy to learn.
Stick welding sheet metal is just asking for frustration, I had to stick weld a roughly 18” diameter chimney pipe, I swear it must’ve been about 18 gauge sheet metal, lowest the welder my company gave me for the job went was 20 amps, I was there for hours stuck welding one bead at a time to prevent blowing right through it.
Op, either learn tig or go get a mig welder, they’re much easier for sheet metal work.
For wire welding a MIG or converted FCAW (converting old Weld Pak 100s is easy and cheap, and they have great arcs as good as my industrial machines) running .023 wire will do nicely.
Flux core wire is inherently too thick for quality work on metal thinner than the wire.
20A is too little, even for 18 gauge.
But yeah, thin metal and stick welder is a pain. I'd say bicycle frame is the thinnest you can weld with stick without committing a murder afterwards.
Other thing is that you can weld tack after a tack, makes welding thin metal much easier.
I'd recommend brazing rather than welding. Joints will still be strong enough for your applications but the process is much cheaper and easier to learn.
Get a good helmet and practice welding on scraps of the same gauge of metal you want to work on. The main thing is to penetrate the metal with heat but not burn a hole in it. Also, with stick welding, you'll put a layer of flux on the outside of the weld. You'll need a chip hammer or a claw hammer to break the flux off but only if you need to reweld over your original weld.
Tbh I'm not the best at stick welding but once I got a wire welder my beads turned out looking much better. I still have to stick weld occasionally if I'm working around the farm though and not in the shop.
I'm not a welder but it looks like a little shitty flame coming out of a nozzle that you use to melt or cut shit with? Am I missing something?
With slag you drag
Keep your sticks dry and always wear a helmet
Consider joining tubes using epoxy glue, you expand the tubes put in the glue and slide in the other tube
What about epoxy and glass/carbon fibre?