Welding Wire For Automotive Sheet Metal

It s recommended to use a 023 or 024 inch wire for most light gauge sheet metal work.

Welding wire for automotive sheet metal.

Mig or metal inert gas welding aka gas metal arc welding or gmaw also uses a gas shield and filler material however in this case the filler is a wire fed directly through the welder. For thinner gauge sheet metal like 18 or 20 gauge we suggest 023 6mm wire in your mig welder. Because it will have you a lot more control over the whole process and it is more forgiving in case you do anything wrong. Automotive sheetmetal and structural welding are vast topics and it is not possible to give them anything approaching complete coverage here.

So you can keep the other hand free for manipulating your materials and other tools. When the material is 18 gauge and thicker you may be able to use a 030 inch wire. Ditch a 1 8 inch tungsten electrode for something much smaller like 1 16 inch tungsten. The majority of the sheet metal welding i ve done was with a 90 amp 110 volt welder.

This chapter concentrates on some of the fundamentals of welding sheetmetal sections and on a few ploys that that may make this type of welding easier for you to perform while producing superior results. The best two electrodes for welding auto body sheet metal is either ceriated tungsten or thoriated tungsten. As i will prefer to call it the best mig welder for sheet metal it uses a flux core wire and self release metal inert gas while welding preventing the oxidation of the welded area. Mig welding is the preferred method for most automotive bodywork and since sheet metal is the thinnest of metals a large expensive mig unit is usually not required.

To weld mild steel choose an american welding society classification wire such as er70s 6 which has a weld puddle that wets out nicely. Keep the stick out short stickout of your mig wire is important when welding any type of metal but especially sheet metal.