Put me down for a PDF
Done! I made a website and have an e-book version on there available.
(Don’t mind the name, just rebranding soon also )
Website building is definitely new to me, so it’s barebones right now. But it should be FunctionalTM. Please let me know if any of you all run into issues. I’ll get them sorted out as soon as possible. Might still be buggy on Mobile. I haven’t fully tested that yet.
(I’ll also edit the original post to add the link)
I have done plenty of brazing and O/A welding, but have never touched an electric welder of any sort. I am finding the book to be useful, interesting, well-written, and instructive. It has all the info I need to buy a machine and figure it out. Highly recommended.
My original plan was to start building with a good friend who is an amazing tig welder. Three years later and its still just me and my oxy-acetylene setup.
Just sent him this book to try and get his butt in gear
Thanks for making it.
Thanks a ton! Very good read, there were a few things I learned and a few confirmed ideas
Especially the one about the filler material. My suspicion was that the Weldmold 880/ER309/312 wasn’t the best choice from a structural point of view and you have now confirmed that!
Now the problem for me is: ER70S-2 (or WSG1-A in German norming) doesn’t seem to be available in Europe, for whatever reason! I can only find ER70S-6 which is kind of the standard filler wire for everything. I would really like to try the -2 though! Any euro based builder that can help me with a source for this filler?
Grabbed the e-book, thanks for making that available! I read over some of it last night (intro sections) before I did my first TIG welding class today and it was nice to go in not totally blind and have some base-line knowledge.
@ben.land101 Thanks for the e-book. Got it. Helped me to make sure about what I am doing is pretty according to your “standards”. Especially like the part on fillers.
Two issues/comments: - using heatsinks: correct me if I’m wrong, but - as they take the heat away pretty quickly, in general - the whole piece with a sink inside cools much slower, than without it. According to what you wrote - this should be actually good, not bad in terms of hardened regions.
Second one: as the book is available worldwide, be less US-centric Using only imperials is sooo annoying. Put mm in brackets in pdf (as it would be rather difficult in already printed paper), if you can, people in other countries will be really grateful!
As for adding metric in there, that was originally planned but I guess I just forgot! It actually would be relatively easy to add to print as well. I’ll do that one day, as I want to make a few other changes for another revision anyways.
With the heat sinks, they do eventually heat up and saturate, which then slows the cooling of the entire joint. But, two things: This doesn’t help at all for the first bit of weld if it starts at room temp.
And the most critical part of the cooling rate is from about 1500f (900C) down to roughly 600f (315C). Or in other words, from above critical temperature, down to the range of tempering temperatures.
So even if a heat sink has a good bit of heat saturated in it, say around 200C, there’s still a large delta there, and a large chunk of copper with it’s mass and crazy conductivity is still going to pull the weld down from molten to it’s equilibrium pretty quick, which could (potentially) be too fast.
I got the book a couple of weeks ago and found it really helpful. I’m a brazer with just a tiny bit of TIG welding experience and the book gave me a good idea of what I’ll want to buy to setup for TIG myself and how to get started. Thanks for publishing.
I think my plan is to take a local class to get some hand’s on experience, buy a welder so that I can practice at home, then take a class again for some more training. Thankfully there are some decent classes in Seattle.
For what it’s worth, one week ago I got a primeweld 225 tig based on a recommendation elsewhere on this forum. With zero tig experience I’ve been figuring it out with YouTube. Knowing how to braze and gas weld has helped a lot. Steel is pretty intuitive. Figuring out aluminum was challenging at first , but not as hard as I expected. So far, I’ve been comfortable figuring out 16 gauge and laying beads on scrap bike tube. I don’t feel like I need an introductory class, just more practice.
Finished reading through the book over the weekend. As others have said, I really wish I’d had this before I started welding - it would have saved me a lot more than the cover price. Even now, it feels like it’s going to prevent me following down a whole load of internet rabbit holes with stuff like exotic fillers and expensive tools. Great job Ben!
This book has been great for cutting through all the BS. I have always had trouble making the “frame builders” pulse settings work with around 1 pulse per second. I needed someone who knew what they were talking about to tell me not to keep going down that path. Rule of threes seems to work much better for me. Thanks for taking the time to make such a great resource!