How to weld with 7018: Lap and fillet welds 

The heat affected zone tells a lot. It’s impossible to have a clean line with poor consistency. Just like the sound being made while welding tells a ton. If it’s consistent then the weld is consistent. If the tone constantly changes, or you can hear an aggressive arc, something isn’t right.

@@makingmistakeswithgreg I've tried to weld with ear buds in to drown out background noise. Hasn't worked as well as I'd hoped because I can't hear what the stick/wire are doing.

Glad to hear that. Remember, everyone teaches themselves how to weld. You have it in you to be a solid welder. Just accept the fact you will be terrible at it for a while, practice, focus on being smooth/consistent, and you’ll get it 😀

Your welcome 😀.

Best of luck with the press, you got it 😀

Great questions. I have a video coming out soon (within a few days) that deals with how much weaker majorly defective welds are. I will also have some videos dealing with how much weld defects affect strength. That will provide a ton of info. However for the time being here is some info: Tacking is generally best done on ends because the fusion is generally better. If you place a tack on the middle it’s in your best interest to grind it down a bit. What can happen is as you weld over a non ground down tack you can end up with poor fusion just before and after the tack. The same thing can happen with start/end tacks, too, so it’s not a bad idea to “feather” them a bit to get better fusion. If the material is 3/16th and thinner it’s probably not a huge deal. On thicker material you will lose some strength due to the poor fusion. Another trick would be to run high settings suitable for thicker material, and “blast tack” it. If you do it fast you can get a fairly flat, small tack that is easy to weld over. It also reduces the hump you get when welding over a bigger tack. Beyond that when it comes to fixing weld screw ups, grinding it out may be the only option if it’s bad enough. Sometimes it’s possible to do simple repairs to fix things (like welding over undercut) but it really depends on how bad the defect is.

​@@makingmistakeswithgreginteresting stuff! I was instructed at one place working with MIG to tack small and hot a little way off the start of the seam, then weld over taking care to incorporate the tacks while maintaining bead dimensions. No grinding was allowed. This was about aesthetics, there was no consideration about strength, but the loads on those parts were pretty minimal.