Stick Welding for Beginners: How to Start SMAW Welding with 6013 Rods

morning YouTubers on today's episode we're going to be talking about stick welding

which I know a lot of you guys probably own stick welders the mold Tombstone welders or you got something around

I mean it's probably most common welding process that people at least have access to so I thought I would do a whole

series on how to stick weld this is going to be the first kind of introduction video

and then there's going to be I don't know a ton of them I'm not even gonna count how many at least 10 that are

going to follow this video where I'm going to cover as much detail on every aspect of it as possible because I want

to see you guys put down some real good welds with the process and get comfortable with it and become

knowledgeable I guess so let's get into it since this is an intro to stick welding

I thought well why don't we talk about what is stick welding so stick welding is a common term at least one that I use

for the s-maw process small which stands for shield metal arc welding you old school guys out there know it as arc

welding well I call stick welding all the same we're referring to the same process

with stick welding we use what's known as a rod and in this case it's a 6013 rod

all a rod is is an alloy which you can see it here that the part that's exposed that you clamp to

and it's an alloy rod that's similar to the base metal you're going to weld so if you're welding steel it's going to

likely be a steel alloy if you're welding stainless steel it's going to be a stainless steel alloy so pretty simple

in that respect well the rod is coated with a crushed up or

kind of mix of what's called flux okay what this flux does

is it does two things as you're welding and you strike your Arc in your welding the flux as it's exposed to the

extremely high temperature of the electric Arc part of that flux turns into a gas

that gas Shields a weld pool just like if you're wire welding like MIG welding your shielding gas

protects your weld pool well the gas that's created when the flux gets uh vaporized by the heat from the electric

Arc so that shielding gas Shields a well pool and then some of the flux

essentially melts off on top of the Weld and it turns into what's called slag and I got a piece here

that peeled off so and if you look at this it's pretty thick different rods have different slag types

and thicknesses that's something I'll go more in depth when I talk about that in another video but what you need to

understand is is that this leg protects that red hot weld so not only are you creating a shielding gas to

prevent the molten metal that you're depositing from being exposed to oxygen and then thus

having things like porosity and weld defects but you're also protecting the weld that is solidifying from oxygen so

that when you're done your weld comes out nice shiny and silver because it's not oxidized if you've ever welded with

say MIG welding and your travel speed is too fast and you're running really hot you're going to often notice that your

welds turned super gray and cooked well that's because the shielding gas is no longer on the red hot weld well in the

case of this with stick welding that flux turns a slag and protects most of the weld so

you can oftentimes run really hot with stick and you still have a pretty shiny silver weld that's unoxidized oxidized

free so that's uh pretty cool um again I'm not going to go in super depth on this I'm going to do a video

all about every common stick Rod so you get a better idea but I will mention the numbers on a rod refer to very

simple things so some rods have an e in front of it that means electrode the first two numbers which in the case

of this are six zero that refers to tensile strength 60 means 60 000 PSI tensile strength and

by tensile strength they take a chunk of this weld and then they pull it

and the pressure that a very specific diameter or machine size piece of it so in height and in width

the amount of pressure it takes to separate it is the tensile strength

so uh 70 rods so like 70 18 has a higher tensile strength than a 60 Rod Okay the third number which in this case is a one

the one refers to position a one means all position which means you can weld vertical up you can weld

horizontal so horizontal would be like this position so a one means you can weld

horizontally it means you can weld vertical up it means you can weld flat position and it also means you can weld

overhead however one does not necessarily mean you can weld what's called vertical down

so vertical down would be like where you start at the top and weld down there's a lot of reasons why you wouldn't want to

weld vertical down because it limits penetration but some rods even though they're labeled as a one rod they are

not able to be run vertical down you can run into slag entrapment issues but again that's more ahead of us where

we're at now and the last number the three that's referring to the flux composition

if you have multiple rods and they all have say a three as the last number they're going to be of similar uh flux

composition that uh really isn't super important to know but it does give you a heads up

like if you use a 70 14 and a 7024 they're probably going to run similar when you're actually welding simply

because a flux is similar again it's not an exact comparison there the last thing I'll

mention is every Rod that you're going to run into like your 6013 your 7018 your 70 14 70

24 60 11 all those right every one of them runs a little different I call it a personality but everyone welds a little

bit different some of them are a lot easier to run and make a really good looking weld than others like 70 24

you could probably be uh deaf blind and drunk and probably still run a pretty nice looking bead with that very

forgiving Rod versus 60 10. if you don't really know what you're doing it makes very ugly welds

so that's all things to consider but my video is coming up where I talk about each Rod specifically will really help

you out with that that's far above where we're at now so let's move on so you want to get started with stick

welding awesome it's a great process very versatile it has its limitations and it has its

strength so the first thing you want to concern yourself with because obviously I'm not

there with you is you need to figure out what polarity your welder can weld on if you have an older Lincoln Tombstone or

Miller Thunderbolt or something like that a lot of those are AC only where they cannot output DC

if you have a newer stick machine or stick capable machine odds are it can output DC and it probably doesn't output

AC but you need to identify what polarity your welder is capable of putting out

if you're AC only you have to get rods like I have here which is 60 13 60 11 or 70 18 that says it will work on AC

there's a couple other rods like I think 70 14 will will check on that later those are all AC capable rods generally

speaking most people with AC only machines will either weld with AC 7018 or 6013 very common very versatile rods

so that's what you need to stick with if you have a DC machine then you can pretty much weld with any Rod because

all of them will run on DC now you have to mine your polarity though because some rods most of them prefer dcep where

your stinger is on the positive and let me give you an example when you buy rods if you pay attention to the

packaging like your and these are 60 10 5p not the plus 5p plus they say

DC positive so this particular Rod is 6010 will not run on AC but 6013 like I have down there will

again verify before you buy because you don't want to buy rods that won't work for you

with that said today I'm going to start with 6013 rods and I know a lot of you guys out there

don't like 6013 you don't generally weld with it I'm personally one that pretty much never welds with it the reason

being is that it really doesn't do anything that 7018 rods or 60 10 doesn't for me so I don't really

have a reason to use it but the awesome thing with this rod is that if you look here it says here we

go 60 13. is that this will run on all polarities meaning dcen dcep and it'll also run on

AC so by following along with me your results should be pretty similar to me despite what welder you're using and

honestly once you learn how to run these it's not that bad it's just a little different it's not what I prefer it's

not harder it's just a little bit different of a weld pool so that's where what we're going to start with

so before we get started I thought I would show you this I found this in a toolbox that I was cleaning out today

and it just so happens that I could use it I've owned this it came as a part of a set and I've never really used it but

what it provides could be useful to you and today I will actually use it so I don't know what amperage I should be

running these 6013s down there at well this gives me a great chart all you do is you slide your little

pointer up we're running 60 13 rods we're running an eighth inch which is 3.2 millimeter and this even

gives you details like it says what polarity it runs on so electrode positive or electronegative it also

works on AC let me get that in focus for you position is all position and then

penetration it lists is low which that's all pretty accurate and it gives you your recommended amperage range so 80 to

130 is our recommended amperage I'm going to start at 90 and we're going to see how it welds

so there you go get one of these if you uh run a lot of different rods or just as a

little guide very helpful so you got your test played in front of you if you don't have one what I would

recommend is a somewhere between 6 to 10 inch by uh you know six to ten inch square piece of Steel this is a piece of

c channel junk I had laying around you want to clean it all nice to Bright and shiny metal you don't want to be welding

on rust or Mill scale because that can cause a lot of issues that you can't determine is it because of the material

your welds look bad or is it because of your skill level so this takes away any question as to what's causing the issue

now the hardest part about stick welding for most people is getting the art started

once you get it started most people can kind of weld a bead of sorts but it's very easy with some rods to get the Arts

it sticks at the start now my machine I can have what's called hot start and stick stuck where basically the hot

start boosts the amperage at the start making it less likely to stick which is awesome and then if the machine detects

that I've stuck the rod it kills the output so that it's very easy to break it off

your machine probably doesn't have that that's all right I've disabled all of that so I'll be welding essentially with

no features just as likely most of you so what I'm going to do is the first part of this I'm going to start the arc

a few times stop let it sit start the arc and I'm going to show you the actual process now what

you want to do is you want to get it close like say within an eighth of an inch bring it

down just a little match strike like this and you notice

I'm bringing it off the plate if you just push it down and then drag it it's going to pass enough current to

weld the tip of the rod right to your plate and then it's stuck okay you don't want to do that so you bring it down and

up and you notice how I keep that little bit of an art Gap there but about a sixteenth of an inch so I bring it down

and up bring it down and up where you get in trouble like I said is you don't want to do that

foreign as you saw I was able to start the rod multiple times deposit a small little

tack weld kill the ark and then move on and I did three four of those as you saw an initial start the rod actually stuck

I was able to very easily break it off and then restart uh in a lot of cases if you really stuck

that Rod you're going to want to remove this Stinger off the end of the rod and just let the rod tip cool and then break

it off if you stick it really good and then just yank it you're going to end up breaking the flux off the end of the rod

and then the rod you're going to have to clip back up higher otherwise it's going to be junk

so as you notice so the initials start a little bit harder but once it got going the restarts are a lot easier now some

rods that's not the case like with 7018 you're going to have a lot harder time on restarts with that Rod than this rod

and I can show you why so when you look at these two rods this is a brand new one this is a used

one if you look that exposed Steel rod is all the way out at the tip this guy

has a built-in art Gap essentially so when you restart with this it holds a proper Arc Gap and when you strike it

like a match it's not going to stick because the rod isn't actually touching the metal like a

brand new Rod so very easy to restart so now that we got these tack welds here and my recommendation honestly would be

to sit and do like a whole coupon of just starts once you can get your starts real good

then you can move on to actually running beads because your starting is going to be arguably harder than beads but what

I'll do I'll fill up this whole plate with starts and then we're going to move on

foreign so as you can see we got essentially a series of tack welds and that's really

all that we were aiming to do is create little welds just from the start and then cutting the arc out and starting

over when you can do this right here then you're not going to have any issues starting a rod

now you saw 6013 very easy to restart the rod after you stop one of the things you probably noticed as well is when I

start let it run just for a second when I snap out I kind of and that's exaggerated but

I kind of whipped the tip of the rod a little bit a couple times it actually maintained an arc all the way out here

that's kind of undesirable but if you do it fast enough it'll break the arc and not only does it break the arc but the

little molten ball of like Silicon or silica I think it's called silicon silicon the little molten ball of metal

and silicon on the end of the rod will go flying off of it which makes restarts much much easier if I just stopped and

then kind of I don't know long arced it to stop it and then try to restart it wouldn't be as easy on the restart

because that ball is on the end you'll really notice that with 7018 rods where you'll sit here and the rod won't

restart and that's because you got that ball on the end so develop a little flick of it just to get rid of that ball

and break the arc but when you can do this you're ready for the next step so what we're going to do we're going to do

a little little welds and we're going to take a look at that so the goal now

we're going to run about two inch long welds in order to do that we're going to start the art just like

we did once the arc initiates we're going to slowly drag the puddle

that is visible back for we'll make it about inch inch and a half somewhere in that ballpark

and then we're gonna break out of it just like you did for the tack weld for the starts and break out of it now rod

angle is very important with this if you try and weld with a straight in rod angle like this slag especially with

this Rod is going to get in front of it the flux is going to run in front of your weld pool and that's going to make

your weld bead kind of entrap that slag we don't want that so we're going to focus on a slight

angle and I'll show you on the camera here we're aiming for something like this

technically you could run it as far back as this and make a weld and depending on circumstances you can almost be straight

in but we want a drag angle you don't want to be pushing this stuff and we want a slight drag angle this is

what we're going to be focusing on and then as far as angle here if you tilt this back like this you're

going to end up pushing that molten metal more over towards this so I would recommend trying get it as straight up

is possible if we're welding this way try and get it here or a slight angle like this

as your Rod shortens and this is simulating its shorten if you start out with an angle like this

and that Rod gets short all of a sudden you're going to be welding like this with your stinger that's not good so

having a slight angle this way is okay because as it shortens as it shortens you'll wind up a slight

angle like that towards you that's okay but try and keep it as neutral as possible

thank you [Music] foreign

now if you look at that the first start a little bit harder I don't have hot start enabled or anything so it's a

little bit more difficult to get the rod to start but the first one a little bit harder second one if you look at the

beads the second pass is slightly wider than the first the primary reason for that is this

plate got preheated a little bit and then that helped it wet out so it flattened the bead out a little bit

but they're very close to one another now if you notice let me really get in here

you see how the end of my weld kind of terminates and it somewhat flattens out there isn't like a ball that's because I

snapped out of that Rod really fast out of the arc and that left that ideally that's what you want because the

flatter that is and almost like a kind of divot the easier it is to restart on that and then weld through

so you really want to snap out of the The Arc at the end of a weld so what I'm going to do now

I'm going to do a restart and then I'm going to start welding through and we're going to do

another inch and a half inch and a quarter weld for both of those foreign

[Music] I didn't sit here and just beat the Daylights out of this I remember back a

long time ago when I was learning to stick weld I had to wear earplugs not from the welding but everyone in their

boots were just I don't know if they're using jackhammers or what but just beating the

Daylights out of it well you don't need to do that especially with this Rod I mean the flux the slag

practically peeled itself off so let's look at what we got here no my restart on the first one here not

the best I'll take the blame on that I should have started a little bit ahead

of it and brought it back and I'm a little low on the amperage you can tell by see how that's kind of roped

up there not enough heat in this well the preheat on the plate helped out a little bit and you can see where my

tie-in looks like there was almost no restart there that's what you want to aim for

this video isn't really going to cover too much in depth on how to perfect restarts I have a whole video that I'm

going to do on that but just understand that you know restarts are part of life like stick rods are only so long and if

you go your whole welding experience or welding practice never doing restarts that's completely impractical for real

life like you you need to get good at it so don't fear it it just takes practice so again down here

a little bit on the cold side once plate warms up looking a little bit better I snapped out of the arc fast which left a

little divot here you want to get in the habit of that and what I'm going to do is I'm going to continue to do this all

the way out and then when I'm done we'll talk about what we have there all right so I just completed

the first set of welds so you can see some of the starts and stops very good like they tied in very

well some of them not so much overall though really not that bad especially because I don't run this Rod

very much and we're running a little bit on the cold side one of the things that you can really notice here

is that when you look at the side profile of the bead you see where the start and stop it kind of tends to hump

up a little bit and that's really has to do because amperage or running is a little bit on

the cold side so 90 amps with this rod on what is about a quarter inch maybe a little bit bigger especially when it

comes to the end it's a little bit too cold for this if I bumped up the amperage a little bit the

tie-ins would have went a little bit better like especially you can see here or not terrible not the best but a

little bit more amperage would have tied that in better when you're capable of doing something

to this level doing your beads your starts and stops then you're ready to move on and I know you might not want to

hear this and that's if you can't really do starts and stops that well

you should focus on doing that I know you don't want to do a whole plate of starts and stops to get to this point or

close to this but once you master this stick welding is going to be infinitely easier for you trust me on that

you know you have to remember that I've burned a lot of rods and uh over the last I don't know a bunch of years so

where I'm at here is likely a lot further ahead than where you're at if you're just starting so Focus till you

can get this then move on so our next step after getting this looking pretty good which we're there

I'm there already is we're going to run a whole rod end to end now I'm not sure what the 6013 if I'll be able to use one

rod and make it all the way to the end of the plate but I'm gonna try to so that's what we're going to work on

so a quick tip here one of the good ways to gauge if your Rod will make it is on a flat weld like this if you compare the

rod length to the length of the weld if you have at least 20 percent left of the rod if you lay it flat over your metal

length you're going to make the whole weld now on fillet welds that won't necessarily work simply because you're

depositing more metal than just a bead on plate but in this case we're well over it so this should be able to

complete the whole weld without having to do a restart not that you should only use full rods

that's not the point of this but always use whatever you got so if you need to restart on this that's fine