Performance Exhaust Systems: Gas for MIG Welder

Video Transcript

"You got two gauges on your argon bottle here. And I say argon; it's a mixture of other chemicals. It's 75 percent argon, 25 percent CO2. The reason you have this gas attached to your welder is the weld needs to occur in an oxygen free environment. Oxygen makes things rust, that's what it takes to rust things. Water just has a way of keeping it in contact with stuff longer. That's why we think of water as rusting things. So the weld needs to take place in an inert environment. So the gun of the welder has a tip here where the wire comes out, and that's controlled by pulling this trigger. The wire comes out the end that way. Around here there is a sleeve for this gas to come out, and it blows the gas on the weld as you do it. In order so that the weld can occur in a pure environment. Now, old fashioned arc welders don't have gas. The rod that you're using, the stick, is covered with a flux that burns as you're doing the weld. You've seen that where it makes a lot of smoke. That's because the smoke is displacing the oxygen and you get a pure environment if you weld that way. The cheap and easy way to do welding in a shop like ours is to have portable MIG welders like this, we have four of them."