The Haynes Welding Manual
Basics of Gas, Arc, MIG, TIG, and Plasma Welding & Cutting. The Haynes Manual for selecting and using welding equipment.
Welding is a process critical to our present state of civilization and technical advancement, yet little understood and most often taken for granted. Unless exposed to the building, machinery or automotive trades, the average person never realizes how much we depend on the welding process, which is a fundamental part of the process of building most of what we depend on daily, including vehicles, buildings, appliances, bridges and a great deal more. In fact, once you really start to examine the objects around us, it’s hard to imagine our world without the welding process.
Architecturally speaking, we might all be living in one-room wood or adobe-brick houses if it weren’t for welding. Certainly all large commercial and residential structures are built with a considerable “skeleton” of welded structural steel, and even most singlefamily, wood-framed houses are built using some welded components, even down to items like the electrical outlet boxes in the walls. Anyone who has watched the construction progress of a major highway improvement like a bridge or tunnel has seen the helmeted weldors, unsung heroes of the construction process, spraying a shower of sparks from high on a scaffold while they join metals to hold critical loads.
Sitting in an airport terminal recently with some time on our hands gave us something to think about. Virtually everything around us involved welding in some way. There was a large rack of telephone books in stainless-steel racks, each carefully TIG-welded and sanded, a post office box that was made of welded steel, the telephone stall had welded components, and the seats we were sitting on were part of a welded-steel structure that held eight seats. Everywhere you look in the modern world, you’ll find examples of how widespread and important is the use of welding techniques and equipment.
Much of our Haynes audience is familiar with the automotive world, and here is a field where construction and repairs made by welding are absolutely essential, in fact essential to virtually all forms of transportation, from bicycles to cars, trucks, trains, aircraft and space vehicles. Even if we could go back before the “horseless carriage” was developed at the end of the 19th century, we would still need some form of welding to return to horse-drawn transportation, in welded brackets for harnesses and wagon components.
Contents
- Chapter 1 Introduction
- Definition of welding
- Development of modern welding
- Welding today
- Chapter 2 Types of welding
- How it works
- Metal alloys
- Oxy-acetylene gas welding
- Arc welding
- MIG (wire-fed) welding
- TIG (heli-arc) welding
- Duty-cycles
- Plasma-arc welding and cutting
- Practice and training
- Chapter 3 Oxy-acetylene gas welding/cutting
- The basic gas process
- The equipment
- Getting started
- Flame adjustment
- Gas welding
- Welding with filler rod
- Brazing
- Oxy-acetylene cutting
- Heating with oxy-acetylene
- Chapter 4 Arc welding
- Comparing duty-cycles
- AC, DC or both?
- Rewiring for an arc welder
- The arc process
- Safety considerations
- Beginning arc welding
- Types of joints
- Choosing electrodes
- Chapter 5 MIG welding
- Shopping for a MIG welder
- Choosing shielding gas
- Choosing wire
- Learning MIG welding
- Chapter 6 TIG welding
- The equipment
- The process in action
- TIG-welding aluminum
- Chapter 7 Plasma cutting/welding
- Plasma-arc welding
- Plasma-arc cutting
- Choosing plasma cutting equipment
- Using a plasma cutter
- Chapter 8 Safety and shop equipment
- Chapter 9 Building a utility trailer
- Glossary
- Sourcelist
Language: English
Format: PDF
Pages: 171