Mix Gas

[bjdenommee]

Morning Guys

Yesterday we set up shop in a large water pumping station, in the process of our setup our machine were moved around quite a
bit. When we got our tig unit up and running we ran into trouble with poor quality welds. My first thought was someone assembled the system with the wrong gases, this proved wrong the Tig unit has the only pure argon gas.

We are welding sc 20 steel piping for roof drains, tig set up with root pas and stick cover pass works out nice and looks great.
Back to the gas can bottles when moved around be disturbed enough to screw up the quality of the gas?

I checked all of the connections as well as the grounds, checked all gas connections and torch connections.

I replaced the torch with another one from my shop and the welds were the same junk with bubbles in the materail.
We moved the machine to another area in the building and tried again with the same results?

Whats next?

[John C.]

Might be a bad batch of argon. Try a new bottle

[Guest]

You seem to be looking at the gas...you say your tig unit was disassembled and reassembled on site? Could it have been possible for condensation to form in the gas line? Moving from cold to warm will do that. I see you're in Massachusetts, so I'm thinking that could be possible.

We had a situation here when we installed new weld stations, with new hoses made in Taiwan that were cleaned with some kind of weird chemical that was making our welds turn black. The gas had a stink to it too. We changed hoses, and the problem went away.

Moving an argon bottle won't hurt the quality of the gas.

BTW, welcome to the forum.

[bjdenommee]

tig

Hi guys

yesterday I went thru that whole machine from hoses to connectors, replaced the torch again and had the same results.

I returned the Argon bottle to my gas supplier and got not a refill but a new bottle of pure Argon, works much better.

As said the supplier called me back late yesterday PM and they examined the bottle and found rust from condensation inside the bottle.

I figure from the temp changes and moving the bottle around the rust entered our system and was cousein the problems

I am planning to reassemble the tig today and use the new gas and give it a run.

Talk later and many thanks for your input.

BJDenommee
TYngs Ent

[Mike Sherman]

What's interesting about your problem is that I have mobile trucks with bottles on them that are constantly being moved. In all of my years of being associated with welding, only once have I positively had a bad gas bottle. And truthfully the gas was okay, it was just mislabled. Please follow up with your problem/solution.