Raise your hand if you love cleaning up weld spatter.

(We don’t see any hands up.)

Grinding off spatter after finishing a weld is no one’s idea of a good time. But did you know you can limit or even avoid the time and costs associated with spatter altogether? Read on for tips to help you keep spatter at bay so you can spend more time doing what’s important.

Caused by metal thrown free from the welding point to land on nearby surfaces, spatter reduces efficiency and increases overhead in your assembly line. Welders need to clean up the weld after they’re finished, and excess material is wasted each time.

Many welders consider this part of the territory. Visual cues like sparks or sizzling sounds are the ways many people learned to weld.

“They’re so used to that, and when it’s not there, they question the quality of the weld,” says OTC DAIHEN Regional Sales Manager Chris Sharp. “They’re used to welding on sound and seeing the sparks fly.”

The bad news is, these signals are actually signs of an imperfect weld - and they themselves create spatter.

Why would you spend time and money removing part of what you worked so hard to apply? And how do you reach a point of having minimal spatter in your welds? Here are three tips for reducing spatter from your production line welds.

If it's not set correctly, your voltage setting can significantly increase spatter. Low voltage settings will cause spatter because the wire is repeatedly short-circuiting in the weld pool, causing small explosions at the tip of the wire.

This short-circuiting is normal for short-arc MIG welding, but if arc voltage is set correctly, you can typically keep the expelled spatter to a small size and avoid it sticking to your workpiece or surrounding fixtures. On the other hand, a voltage that’s too high can also produce excessive spatter due to extreme arc force.

The amperage of the arc is determined partially by the length of the stick-out, or the amount of wire that is beyond the contact tip that creates the weld.

If the stick-out is too long, it can reduce amperage, throwing spatter out of the weld because it's not penetrating deeply enough into the weld. If it's too short, it increases amperage, throwing material out of the weld due to the force of the arc.

Ever considered that your welding machine - whether manual or robotic - could be causing the problem?

Consider welding machines with special features to minimize or virtually eliminate spatter. With the advent of ultra-high-speed electronics, some of today’s welding power sources focus on spatter reduction because of its costly impact. They also offer other benefits that improve total weld quality and they easily justify the investment.

Read more about spatter here >>

OTC DAIHEN has spent decades developing advanced technology that makes welding easy and produces high quality every time.

There are three main ways we’ve done this:

• Synchro-feed for our robotic platforms. This proprietary, exclusive technology uses the pulse of the welding arc combined with the pulse of the wire feed speed and direction to deliver pulse tip transfer.

Hundreds of times each second, the arc is extinguished and the wire advanced to gently place the formed droplet in the weld puddle. This results in an ultra-low amount of spatter, fine control of heat input and thinner weld application supporting much higher-speed welding.

• Low-spatter mode for steel welding on manual and robotic power sources. The advanced welding processor inside the power sources monitors and manipulates the arc every 20 nanoseconds. That’s three times more often than the nearest competing power source.
  
  

• WavePulse II for all materials on manul and robotic power sources. The original pulse-on-pulse technology has been improved to include optimize waveforms for aluminum, steel and stainless steel. The wire feed speed pulses to match the welding waveform for an additional level of control.

Sharp explained that DAIHEN technology doesn’t just produce high-quality welds - it’s easy to use.

“During an aluminum welding demonstration I did, we called over an employee to try the machine out, and he produced a great-looking weld,” said Sharp. “I joked that it was probably the best weld he’d ever created. And he said, ‘I’ve never welded aluminum before.’ When we do aluminum demos with our technology, we get that jaw-dropping effect almost every time.”

By keeping these tips in mind, you'll be able to reduce spatter in your welds in no time, improving productivity and reducing overhead.

Interested in learning more about the technology DAIHEN uses? Visit our full product library to see everything we have to offer.