Is this wire solid welding wire or a flux cored welding wire?Here is a quick bit of information to help you find out if you have a spool of solid welding wire or a spool of flux cored welding wire. If you are new to the whole welding thing you might just not know what the differences are between the two types of welding wires. The most common solid welding wire is more than likely a copper coated ER70S-6 spec wire. The most common gasless flux cored welding wire by my guess is a single pass E71T-GS spec welding wire. So if you want to find out how you can tell the differences between these two welding wires read on.
How to tell if it is solid or flux cored welding wire. The solid mig wire I just mentioned will be coated in copper, and it is solid all the way through. The flux cored wire is not copper coated and is hollow on the inside, it is filled with welding flux. See the picture to the left, well the solid wire is on the bottom in the photo and the flux cored wire is at the top. You can see the copper coating on the solid wire.
This photo shows the actual spools of welding wire. The smaller one on the top is a gasless flux cored welding wire. The bottom spool is a copper coated mig welding wire or mag welding wire. MIG is metal inert gas, MAG is metal active gas. So the majority of standard grade mig wire is copper coated. You can get what is called copper free welding wire, which looks very much like the flux cored wire. But most people use the standard ER70S-6 wire.
Flux cored wire snaps in half
If you take a bit of flux cored wire, it will actually snap. As it is hollow it does not have much strength and therefore it breaks. The hollow part is then filled with the welding flux. You can just see in the photo below how there is an outer part to the wire which is the actual metal wire, and the center or core is filled with flux.
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