Good evening there. You must be searching articles after articles about how hard is welding on the internet and how hard can it be with that anxious look on your face because… you work in a workshop and have some welding tasks assigned by your boss to complete?
Or maybe you just want to lend a helping hand to a friend in a construction site?
Whichever be it, you must be wondering what welding even is and how difficult it can be? There buddy, no worries. You’re at the right place for some guide!
Here’s below a complete A-Z on everything you would want to know about welding! Keep reading ahead to give yourself some confidence that you can easily do it by following our instructions!
Contents
What is Welding?
Let’s learn what welding even is in the first place!
What do you call a process of joining up two pieces of metal together? That’s what welding is!
Now you may ask, what sets apart the process of welding from brazing or soldering? You may have seen some workers try out riveting as well to join up metals together. All do the same job. Just that, welding is more natural and simpler than the rest.
By the help of welding, you can join two metals together in a number of ways. The most widely practiced style is by applying both heat and pressure. You can also Join Metal Without Welding.
At first, you will have to melt down your metal pieces and then join them together while in the liquid state as one piece. Afterwards, a metal filler might help you out to bind it all together more strongly. There you are!
You can either use only heat, but more efficiency some prefer to use both heat and
pressure. But you should keep in mind a few differences between welding metals and other similar techniques available.
Let’s take a look at soldering metals or brazing!
The metals will still have the same chemical and physical properties at the end of the day. But with welding, the metal parts will go through a few chemical changes. Don’t be afraid. We are referring to ‘good changes’ here. The strong forces of electrostatic attractions relating to a sea of delocalised electrons will allow your final metal to be even more stronger than the initial metals it was welded from. Now that’s a great advantage, isn’t it?
Different Types of Welding?
Welding metals is a versatile and a very vast process. You can weld metals in different ways.
Some of the common methods are explained below:
Wire Welding:
Just as you can guess from the name, this method involves the use of metal wires. You need to take a welding gun and put metal wires through it. This will help the welding process to be smooth without any interruptions. This continual process helps the welder gun to come up with sturdy and neat joints as the final products.
Guess what?
Wire welding is a quick process and saves a lot of time. It’s cheaper and experts say this method is more appropriate for beginners. As well, if you want to weld very thin sheets of metal, you may want to go for wire welding!
Stick Welding:
Welding doesn’t necessarily always involve big metals, you may have to work with smaller ones or just weld metals to repair them. In that case, stick welding is a true friend! You don’t use metal wires here; rather we go for stick electrodes! Yeah we know this process can get pretty slow at times but here’s an advantage of stick welding – you can easily weld old worn out metal pieces that have rust on them.
Tungsten welding:
Ever heard of TIG (tungsten inert gas)?
We often use it for repairing motor vehicles. Professionals with long term experience generally prefer this method? Why?
Because the process is more smooth, efficient and clean. If you want to join thin metal sheets together, you may want to go for this. This type of welding is more difficult than the other two, but if you can learn it properly and hone your skills over years of practice, you will go a long way.
How Hard Is Welding?
Actually, to be brutally honest, every new experience feels difficult at the beginning because you were not previously familiar with the thing. The same goes for welding! At the beginning stage, you may find things hard to deal with and mess up quite often. But practice is what makes a man perfect. The more training you can get yourself, the easier it will feel. Furthermore, just like we have said before, welding is a vast thing. The scale of difficulty varies from each welding type to the other.
Let’s take for example – welding manufacturers who are in charge of welding metal furniture’s will obviously find their job to be easier than constructors who build oil rigs underwater.
Not to forget another key factor that makes welding tasks feel like a cup of tea – the right tools! Yes, your tools are the soul of your job!
The thing with welding tools is that they play a huge role in determining if your task will go easy or difficult based on the complexity scale of use. Let’s say, you will need extensive training to be able to use the equipment needed to weld metals using tungsten inert gases.
On the other hand, you won’t require specialized training to use stick electrodes while welding!
Nevertheless, it all depends on your level of experience with welding rather than tools itself. Beginners will find it difficult – only natural. You will mess up once, twice, thrice or even more times and that does how you’re gonna learn.
As soon as you have gathered enough confidence, courage and experience, believe us welding won’t look so complicated! At the end of the day it will be worth all the patience and efforts!
What are the Safety Precautions in Welding?
Regarding the tools:
You will find different types of welding tools for beginners in the local markets. Some of the most widely-used are torches built up of oxyacetylene and clamps and steel rods. Some tools may be present at your home like saw and hammer. All these tools are very sharp and risky to use in an amateur stage. So be careful!
Gears and gloves:
Did you ever see professional welders work in a workshop live? You must have noticed that they always have their gloves on, so should you. As well, you can buy protective sturdy shoes and welding shields from nearby stores to be safer than sorry.
These are very very important because you will be working with electricity, high heat and temperatures with intense radiation that will be coming off from the metals. So it’s vital to keep yourself secured first! The more protected you are, your welding job will be safer and completed with higher efficiency.
Now who wouldn’t want that!?
Discipline:
Now this is something applicable not only for welding but every other task in the world!
You can make a safety list at home when you have free time. You can include ground rules to follow while you’re welding in the workshop. You can also write up clean up instructions to ensure your working environment is tidy and safe to weld anytime. In the checklist you can write up a few guidelines on how to keep your tools safe. Properly-maintained tools are life-saving! That’s why make sure to always keep your welding tools in the correct places they belong.
And make sure you place the devices in lockups to keep them safe!
Final Words:
Last but not least, no matter how inexperienced you are to welding, don’t stress over it even if you have recently started training for it. Welding metals is simple if you can properly maintain safety rules. We do not presume you will understand the job at the first glance. Take your time to learn. So practice, and strive effectively.
You can even pursue it as a career because a large number of local markets and overseas industries have a high demand for good welders. You can undergo additional training in your leisure time under professionals to help you learn faster!
Good luck!
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