Most handy people buy or want to buy more tools. Itself, when I go to the store with different tools, I look at everything for a long time, as in childhood in a toy store, I would buy up the whole store. The welding inverter is one of the most essential purchases.
The largest volume of welding for the inverter in our everyday conditions will still fall on the profile pipes. It is the most convenient material for the assembly of any metal structures in the yard, garage, in the country.
Lightweight material is good for everything, except for its thickness. For the home, we buy a professional pipe with a thickness of 1.5 to 3 mm. Much less often there will be a thickness of more than 3 mm, only if you take the material on poles or racks of serious structures.
It is difficult for a beginner to immediately cook such delicate things, there will often be burn-throughs. And the burn-throughs are even more troublesome to brew. Therefore, we try to cook with a gap. But pull-off welding has its own tricks. At the end of the article I will leave a link to the video, it shows how to make these breaks correctly so that the seams are like those of experienced welders.
Another condition for welding without burn-through is the assembly of structures from a professional pipe and its gaps. What gaps should we make to make it easier for us to weld?
Here is a simple table with the required gaps for different metal thicknesses. Look at the picture in the middle. There is just a recommendation for our case, a professional pipe with a thickness of 1.5 to 3 mm. We see that the maximum even for metal with a thickness of 5 mm, the gap is only 2 mm. This is without beveling the edges, because beveling the edges on thin pipes does not need to be done, otherwise you can turn the metal at the edges into foil!
So conditionally, for our home welding of structures from a profile pipe, a gap of no more than 1 mm is needed.
We saw blanks with a grinder, or a cutting machine. There they took away a little with a disk, there the marking was shifted a little by a micron. In any case, it is best to always mark before cutting the pipe to a size - exactly to the millimeter. How to postpone the size without taking into account this scanty gap. After cutting, it will still often work out.
So on a profile pipe, you don't have to bother with gaps, otherwise we will simply complicate the work of welding frequent burn-throughs. Saw exactly to size, do not subtract this millimeter when marking.
As promised video TERMINAL WELDING TECHNIQUE