Tig THREE, your THIRD TIG welding class.

This is a fast paced class.  Take welding for noobs before taking any TIG instruction. 

Until you have welded for at least a few hours, or, more realistically, about 50 hours, your brain is not very good at processing, (seeing) the arc, and this will make your first TIG experiance a bit like eating sixteen ice-cream sandwiches consecutively before attempting to speak Polish, Urdu, or Madaklashti, meaning, clumsy at best.  

MIG (aka wire feed, GMAW, FCAW, wire -feed) is much easier to learn, please start with MIG. It is fair to say that if MIG is a car, TIG (GTAW, or Tungsten Arc Welding) is more like operating a commercial airplane.  

If you like to floss with a cactus, or have a hobby of shark-petting we applaud your unrelenting commitment to unmitigated difficulty, and we invite you to try TIG without prior welding experience, because suffering will always have merit. We offer private instruction for this kind of experience, for to truly suffer, you must be alone...  

We teach TIG in a sequence of three classes in a total of nine hours. We teach with the expectation that you will learn the concepts needed to guide your further development. We can equip you with what you need to know, it will still take considerable practice before your hands can do what you brain is instucting them to do.  It requires fine motor skills and practice, and expletives, and practice. It truly requires some patience. 

Women typically excel at TIG welding as they often have superior fine motor skills.  

 We supply all gear and materials. You are welcome to bring your own helmet or materials. 

 This class builds directly on TIG TWO, please plan on taking all three classes in sequence. 

The bulk of the class will be spent welding aluminum in various postions. 

This class will focus on aluminum. By this point you will be much more able to recognize and interpret the arc.

We will discuss the varous types of Aluminum in detail, explain electrode selection, prep and cleaning and troubleshoting at length.

You will learn to recognize electrode contamination and how to recognize and correct operator error.

You will learn how to adjust complex welding machines to account for variations in material and work specificaiton. 

You will leave class knowing how to safely set-up and operate both DC and AC functions on a TIG welding machine. 

Knowing how to weld Aluminum is a very real and prestigous skill. It is difficult. We have the patience and humor that will make this as painless as possible for you as that is most frequently the goal. 

TIG class size is never more than six people, and it is typically fewer.  

If your machine weighs 60 lbs or less, you are welcome to bring it to class so that you can learn on your machine.  Please bring your regulator, leads and any power adapters yo may need for it. 

This is not a project based class, but you are welcome to bring material. 

In order to meet the objectives in this time-frame, we have to teach in a very focused fashion. 

We look forward to working with you. 

Available Machines:

(3) Everlast PowerTig 255EXT with water chillers, these are a very popular, full featured ac/dc Tig welding machine. 

Lincoln 200 tig w pulse unit. ac/dc, the perfect mid range TIG machine. 

Miller Diversion 180, comically simple ac/dc unit. 

Esab with somewhat strange Tig torch

Miller Dynasty 300 amp machine, an huge old transformer beast.