Name: Stick Welding: How to Read the Puddle
Uploaded: 2025-08-14T06:20:27.000Z
Duration: 6 min 6 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

What we're talking about today is what will take you from being able to kind of stick things together to really laying down a bead that you're going to be proud of.

What we're talking about is how to read the puddle and take the clues that it's giving you and adjust in real time.

Watching that weld pool behind your rod is what's going to give you those subtle clues.

So we're going to look at what it looks like when it's going right and when it's going wrong and how to correct those things.

The first thing you need to understand is looking at the weld pool is going to be different with different electrodes.

And so you have 7018, which is my favorite rod to run, and you run this here.

You can see that there's a well-defined weld pool and the slag really follows right behind it.

However, when you're running other rods like a 6013, it's much more difficult because that slag will sit right up over the molten metal.

So it's a little bit harder to distinguish 6011 or 6010.

You're going to be able to see it freezes right away, but you do have a little trailing edge of red metal under that thin slag that can be confusing.

The next thing that's important, and it may seem obvious, is where you put your head to look, right?

Because you need to have a good perspective to be able to judge what's happening with the weld pool while still being able to track the weld seam in front of you.

Now a lot of people might want to watch from the front like this so you can see where you're going and you can see where you're going really well, but then it's hard to see that weld pool.

Now watching from behind, you can see the puddle.

However, it's difficult to see where you're tracking on the plate and difficult to really gain a perspective of what's happening with the puddle.

So I like to watch from a right around 45 degree angle coming off the back edge of the weld pool like this, and I think that gives me a good view of the weld pool, some nice perspective, and I'm also able to see the weld seam tracking in front in my peripheral vision to make sure I'm on track.

You may find that a different angle works well for you, and that's just fine, but play around with it and find what gives you the view that you need.

Now obviously in a lot of situations, you're not able to line up as well as we are here working on the bench today because you might be welding overhead or vertical or in different awkward positions where it's hard to see, but just take a second to think about, okay, what am I going to be looking at and will I be able to see the puddle to get the clues that it's giving me?

Now right here is how the weld puddle should look as you're running along.

You can see it's even between both sides.

It's filling in completely as I weld along and giving me something really nice, and I'm happy with the result that I got here, but several things can go wrong.

The first thing that can go wrong is biasing one plate.

Now this can come from both your rod angle as well as the position of your arc.

Now the interesting thing is that these two things often work together, right?

If I tip my rod up, I'm going to move my arc the opposite direction, right?

So if I tipped the rod up toward this top plate, I'd be focusing the rod on the bottom plate.

And here I'll start off running even, and then I'll tip that rod up and it'll be biasing the bottom plate.

You can see the weld pool right there is really focused on that bottom plate.

It's not sitting evenly, and it's no surprise that because the weld pool becomes the weld that I actually have an uneven weld after the fact, and that's not going to give me the strength that I want on the top.

So if you see that weld pool isn't sitting centered, you probably need to shift your position and your angle up to true it up.

The next thing that comes up is your travel speed.

Now the travel speed, and your amperage plays into this as well, but your travel speed as far as technique goes is what will control the size of your weld.

Now if you're welding along here and you're moving really quickly, it's going to give you a smaller weld, and the opposite would happen also.

You'd get a larger weld if you're welding too slow.

And this is one of the big challenges that gives people an inconsistent result is just varied travel speed.

So if you keep an eye on the width of that weld pool, try to keep that as even as possible by moving at a consistent speed all the way along.

Now here's a really common mistake among beginners.

It's not well defined like the other weld pools that we've seen, and what's going on here is the arc length is too long, and that's not putting the metal deposit right evenly between the two.

So when we finish this up and take a look, not only does it look a little bit sloppy because I couldn't control it very well with that long arc length, but it also gave me quite a bit of undercut, which is where the weld comes up and is recessed below the plate next to it, making it thinner and not as strong.

So that is something to avoid and to watch for.

If you see that the weld pool isn't well defined like we're seeing in those good examples, then you may have too long of an arc length.

And the other interesting thing about this is I was running the same amperage with that longer arc length, and it really gave me a lot of undercut.

It seemed like it was running way too hot, where if I hold a nice short arc, then I'm able to run at that amperage and everything is nice and controlled.

So now head out, run a few welds, and remember that the weld pool becomes the weld, and look for those clues that it gives you so that you'll be able to make those adjustments on the fly and come out with a nice slick bead that you're going to be proud to say that you made.

Hey, well if you learned something here, if this helped you out, please let me know by hitting that thumbs up below, and we'll see you next time.