How To Mig Weld

If you are wanting to know how to mig weld you have come to the right place.  Here you can find some free mig welding how to tutorials that I have made.  Mig welding machine are now very affordable to most people.  There are heaps of little jobs that you can do around the house with one of the smaller DIY mig welders. 

Let me tell you now, mig welding is about ten times easier that using a stick welder.  Even if you are using gasless flux cored wire it is so much more easier to do that learning how to arc weld.

How to mig weld instructions

With a little practice anyone can do it.  Below I have added the links to the pages that will take you through learning how to mig weld uding a mig welding mahine.  This is a great place to start especially if you have never used a mig welder before.

 

1. Mig welder power connections.  Depending on where you live in the world you will have different power requirements for your machine.  Some places like in the USA have both 110 volts and 220 volts.  Here in Australia we only have 240 volts.  That is for single phase, and for three phase power it also varies as well.

 

 

2. Duty cycle of the welding machine  It is important to know what the duty cycle of your mig welder is.  This is especially important if you are looking to buy a mig welder.  You will need to know how to tell which machine has the best duty cycle.

 

 

3. Mig welding consumables  When you are welding there are certain parts on the machine that will wear down over time and will need to be replaced.  These are called consumables and every mig welding machine has them.

 

 

 

 

4. Mig wire There are various grades, sizes, types and specifications of mig wire that are used for wire feed welding.  Such welding wires are Co2 mig wire, aluminum wire, gasless mig wire, flux cored wire, stainless mig wire and the list goes on.  Find out which wire is best for your situation before you start mig welding.  Make sure you don't go and buy the wrong mig wire.

 

 

 

5. Putting the wire on  This tutorial shows you clearly how to put the mig wire onto the welding machine.  If you have never installed any mig welding wire before you can check out this guide.  It has photos and and easy to understand description of how to do it. 

 

 

 

 

6. Drive rolls The drive rolls or also called feed rolls are what push the mig wire along the inside of the mig welding gun.  There are a few different types of feed rollers you can get for mig welding machines.  For example, you need to use a smooth or v groove roller when using solid mig wire.  Aluminium mig wire and flux cored mig wires use different feed rollers.

 

 

 

 

 

7. Gas regulator  If you are welding with a non gasless mig welder you will need to use a gas regulator.  The gas regulator is designed to regulat the flow of the shielding gas so that it can allow you to weld properly.

 

 

 

 

8. Mig welding modes Depending on the model and size of your mig welder you may have extra controls that you can set.  On this page we look at the most basic of mig machine controls which are, wire feed speed, burnback control, spot welding mode, stitch welding, and continous welding modes. 

9.  You may also want to look at the most common welding positions, and what they are called etc.

Maybe you want to make some DIY welding projects around the house. Maybe you need to fix up some equipment on the farm. Or maybe you just want to get a career as a boilermaker, fabricator or welder.

Mig welding is the most widely used welding method to join bits of metal together.

From high end industrial welding robots running 24hrs a day right down to someone at home in the shed with a small gasless mig welder. Mig welding is here to stay.

Make sure you are wearing the proper workshop welding clothes, hearing protection and eye protection otherwise you will get burnt, blind and deaf.

Learn how to mig weld

The learn how to mig weld steps are found in the navigation menu bar to the right of this page.

Before you start to weld here are some quick welding tips below to get you started. If the steel that you are going to weld is not clean, you can have all sorts of problems. Penetration and incomplete fusion will happen. There will be a lot more spatter and it will be hard to make the perfect weld.

Quite often a lot of problems can be traced back to having a bad earth connection.

Here you can find a basic walk through of the components and parts to any compact wire feed mig welding machine.  Here I go through and show you step by step how to put on a roll of wire onto your welder. It's an easy task to do.

You have to put down small little tack welds first before you go an fully buzz up the work. This is so that you can hold the parts in place and get them square. Tacking is a way of controlling the effects of distortion.  Hopefully you should be able to learn how to mig weld steel with my tutorials.

To get started you can click this link here:  How to mig weld Part 1. Power connections