Welding woes...frustrating!!
As many of you know and have discussed with me I am fairly new to welding I welded in high school with a stick welder pretty efficiently but mig and flux core is pretty new. I bought a harbor freight flux core a little over a year ago and have played with it some and have had success with it. But it seems like when I'm playing with it or practicing I can make really nice welds but then when I go to actually work on a project it goes all to hell. Today I was welding a patch on a rusty part of my frame I cut out all the rust cleaned the area good and cut a piece of ankle to go over the hole. I made first weld and it looked really good. After that all hell broke loose. One thing I noticed was that my vertical welds looks alot better than the horizontal ones. I cannot get a bead to form going horizontally it's like it just splashed off. I tried different wire speeds with no help. I read that a 4 or 5 was ideal for what I was doing I couldnt get a puddle with that speed 7 or 8 seems to do better but it still seems like I'm not getting any penetration. Here are some pics the vertical one to the left was my very first weld it looks pretty good to me. The rest are garbage. Yes I cleaned the metal between every weld. It is dirty in the pic because I just finished my last weld and it started to rain so I put my tools up and snapped a few pics. Any help is appreciated.
As many of you know and have discussed with me I am fairly new to welding I welded in high school with a stick welder pretty efficiently but mig and flux core is pretty new. I bought a harbor freight flux core a little over a year ago and have played with it some and have had success with it. But it seems like when I'm playing with it or practicing I can make really nice welds but then when I go to actually work on a project it goes all to hell. Today I was welding a patch on a rusty part of my frame I cut out all the rust cleaned the area good and cut a piece of ankle to go over the hole. I made first weld and it looked really good. After that all hell broke loose. One thing I noticed was that my vertical welds looks alot better than the horizontal ones. I cannot get a bead to form going horizontally it's like it just splashed off. I tried different wire speeds with no help. I read that a 4 or 5 was ideal for what I was doing I couldnt get a puddle with that speed 7 or 8 seems to do better but it still seems like I'm not getting any penetration. Here are some pics the vertical one to the left was my very first weld it looks pretty good to me. The rest are garbage. Yes I cleaned the metal between every weld. It is dirty in the pic because I just finished my last weld and it started to rain so I put my tools up and snapped a few pics. Any help is appreciated.
