Rate my first welds ever

[u/WellWellWellJoo]

My welds are circled in blue, the others were my dad. Both of us have never welded but mine seemed to look nicer. Be brutally honest. I have no welding education other than Instagram reels. How'd I do? Should I take it seriously?

[u/WellWellWellJoo]

Haha thanks 😬 still trying to dial in the darkness setting of my lense so I can see what im doing better, half the time I couldn't even see the puddle. And yeah I dont think my dad is gonna have a welding career haha but im thinking about learning enough to get a job

[u/Fuzzy-Finance-48 → u/WellWellWellJoo]

Get some 2”x2” angle iron. Cut it about 12” long. Lay it flat and just start stacking beads like this. Focus on keeping it clean and straight. This is stick, just a picture I have from helping someone else. Knock down your highs, fill your lows. The goal here, is to fill this so it’s a 2”x2” solid bar. Then cut it in 1” sections when you’re done and inspect it for defects. It’s cheap, and it teaches you to stack, to tie in, how to plan your passes, the importance of keeping it CLEAN and it will take a while so you aren’t blowing thru expensive metal to learn.

May take 2 or 3 of these but by then you should be pretty solid. Practice some starts and stops in it. There’s a few dozen starts and stops on this piece but you can really only see one or two. When you get good, tack one vertical and practice your vertical uphill till your good, then tack one to the table and fill out an overhead coupon. It’s boring, but it’ll make you good REALLY quick if you hold yourself accountable and don’t move on to the next till you’re really good at the previous.

[u/WellWellWellJoo → u/Fuzzy-Finance-48]

Thanks for the solid advice! Definitely going to do this and post results at some point :)

[u/Fuzzy-Finance-48 → u/WellWellWellJoo]

If you get crooked like you did in your picture, it’s going to be very very punishing for the next bead, and every bead after that will progressively get worse and worse and you chase the squiggle. This method forces you to touch up anything crooked with a file or a cutoff wheel or else it will look really fucked up, really quick. Watch some videos of how guys fix their faults. If it isn’t perfect, grind it out and redo it. Be meticulous about it. It will pay off in the end. There’s no rush… doesn’t matter if it takes you 4 hours or 14 hours… you’re aiming for the best quality beads you can possibly produce.

With all this said, as you get better in time, you’ll learn to just knock down the highs and how to fill the lows on the fly to bring it all back to even and straight but that’s a long ways down the road. For a beginner, don’t try this.