Thread: Tig Welding courses? Tafe courses?

Hi just wondering if anyone knows about the Tafe courses for Tig welding? I'm only interested in learning more about Tig, and don't want to do an entire welding course,which is expensive and time consuming.
Yes I realize that experience is a good teacher but I'm wanting to learn more about the setting up of the machine and understanding control techniques.
Are there any private colleges or businesses out there?

What about this one
https://wsi.tafensw.edu.au/course/ga...of-attainment/

. This course is suitable for the general public or anyone wanting to develop basic welding skills. There are no pre-requisites for this course.

At 18 hours for $1200 - I guess it is time consuming and expensive but if you are starting from scratch with TIG then 18 hours sounds like a reasonable time to me.

I'm far from anywhere near a pro but I know enough that it takes a lot more time it seems to understand what is going on with TIG. You can't really just have someone tell and show you what to do.

You then have to do it and get feedback from an instructor, then go away and practice, then go back and get followup instructor feedback, and do this over and over.
This is why videos etc are still limited in what you can learn from them.

Exactly why I am looking for a course, many thanks for your time to reply.

I'll probably get flamed for this, but hey

My suggestion is
https://www.youtube.com/user/weldingtipsandtricks

I did a Tig welding course at the local tafe, was a couple day course from memory, cost a couple hundred. The classroom content was a joke, seemed to be designed at people that had never seen a Tig welder before and certainly never used one. This is a tig torch, this is an earth lead, you run a shielding gas, ect

Workshop wise my learning was how to diagnose their poorly setup / abused tig welders, and the one useful thing, feed the filler wire faster. If you can keep the filler wire up to the weld you can run it hotter as the filler wire cools down the weld as it goes in.

I run a foot controller and set my max amps at 20-30 amps per 1mm of material in steel, around the same in aluminum but being aware that the initial pool will take longer but as you progress through the weld you either need to back off the amps or move faster...

Originally Posted by MasterSpoon

I did a Tig welding course at the local tafe, was a couple day course from memory, cost a couple hundred. The classroom content was a joke, seemed to be designed at people that had never seen a Tig welder before and certainly never used one. This is a tig torch, this is an earth lead, you run a shielding gas, ect

This is a shame.

The last time I did a night school TAFE (stick) welding courses was in the mid 1970s at a Farm School in country WA for a princely $15 a term. The course was geared towards farmers - there was a lot of galv pipe involved. The bloke that ran it was one of the farm school manual arts teachers but before that was a mechanic/welder who did his apprenticeship with White Trucks in the US. There was no curriculum. The course was 3 hours a night for 12 weeks and after a basic safety talk he went around and assessed us individually and those that already has some working knowledge were set to practice and he took the newbies aside for more detailed instruction . After he got the newbies going he spent all hs time one-on-one with each student, watching each student and correcting their mistakes. There was no exam or assessment or certificate. This bloke was one of the best teachers I ever met and being an ex teacher I have met a few. After we had all practiced various joints and welding positions we were able to work on any projects we liked as long as we provided the materials. Now here was the best bit. Once you had done a term you could repeat the course as many times as you liked for $15/term and you could just come in and use the gear on more or less any projects you liked. That year I made all manner of stuff, Vehicle stands, BBQs, Car ramps, HD shelving frames, helped some of the farmers weld up gates etc.

Do you have a machine already riverbuilder? Because I'm 100% self-taught and I learnt everything from the internet and mucking around. Luckily my industrial machine is tolerant of any stuff-ups I made but it's kind of hard to stuff up anyway. If you're interested in learning online, feel free to ask questions on here and there are a few American forums too with lots of tig guys. E.g. what are you interested in welding and what problems have you encountered?

Yep Jody of welding tips n tricks is the best on YouTube and the matching forum is really good without the boisterous crap, you can learn enough from his channel to get started on TIG and on to more specifics.

Don't waste it on a course. $1,200 will basicly set you up real well with a good welding kit and plenty of wire. Then, as they say, hit YouTube and your away.

I've got my Kemmpi mig set up and have been using it for aluminium, but the tig is much nicer and neater for the work I'm doing. I'm going to buy a Kemmpi master tig MLS 2300 acdc machine. My main reason for doing a course is to learn about settings and adjustments on the machine, which is why I am keen on the Kemmpi but so much of the tweaking is automatically done for you if you wish, the mig is a brilliant machine. But yes I will be mucking around and experimenting.

Originally Posted by riverbuilder

My main reason for doing a course is to learn about settings and adjustments on the machine

Unless your local courses are very different to mine then you probably won't learn anything about adjustments on the machine. The one I did they didn't even look at pulse settings. Was just how to weld 2 pieces of metal together.

Wonder if you might be better off to try find a local master Tig welder and make friends with them / pay them to give you some lessons.

Absolutely. If you were in my neighbourhood I'd come over and help you set it up, even if just for the chance to play with a sweet Kemppi.

Unless you're really doing some technical stuff (in which case an instructor might not know any more than you) there's not much to set up. Aluminium tig? I'm all steel but the times I've mucked around with ali quickly led me to believe what I'd already read - pulse isn't really used. Frequency and balance adjustments alone achieve the results you need. I tended to use either 60Hz or 150Hz frequency. With more time I might dig deeper into different ranges but with pulse on steel I tend to use two extremes that work for me too. Factory start and end parameters should be good. Balance in the 65% range. Get a pedal. And you're good to go, adjust from there.

What specifically are you doing that makes you think tig will be better? Surely you're not interested in different waveforms or different amplitudes per phase or other exotic settings?

Originally Posted by MasterSpoon

Wonder if you might be better off to try find a local master Tig welder and make friends with them / pay them to give you some lessons.

That's what I did for TIG. I had half an hour with BIL (Ally boat builder) and hour and a half with a bloke from the mens shed who was a Welding inspector and Tafe Instructor and they got me going pretty quickly. My TIG has memory storage for settings so I got them to set me up some settings and have just taken it from there.

There was a group earlier this year that did a course at Gosford tafe, so not too far away from you. One of the guy's employers paid for the whole shebang, no charge for the other participants, believe it might be ongoing - till he gets his ticket...might be worth a query? The contact at tafe engineering up there was Vic.

Quality of the teachers can be quite varied I suppose at tafe, usual problem with youtube and self-taughts, miss out on the bollocking and rap across the knuckles required.....and end up with ingrained bad habits! Destructive tests done on the welds in that environment are very illuminating too.