What is Stick Welding?
What is Stick Welding? Video
SMAW is a form of welding that's very common and one of the oldest and first forms of arc welding. So, shielded metal arc welding, commonly referred to as stick welding, is what you see most people do in the field.
S is the shielding. As we know, we always need a gas to push oxygen away. Well, that gas comes from the flux. So when the rod is burning, what it's doing is it's burning the flux around the center core of steel, and that's creating a bubble or an area of gas that pushes the oxygen away. That creates a safe weld zone for the weld.
The M in SMAW is very important, because that is actually the center electrode core of the rod. So when you go to use an electrode, there's a metal rod in the middle with the flux on the outside. That center core should match to material you're welding, whether it's mild steel, stainless, nickel, aluminum, copper, whatever it is, that core must be of the same type of alloy or content as your metal plate.
The arc is very important because of where you want the heat. If you have electrode positive, electrode negative, or alternating current, it will move the heat around, whether it's at the plate, at the electrode, or bouncing back and forth. Now, depending on the thickness of the material or the type of material, you may want electrode negative or electrode positive, but AC has a very important role because of arc blow. Shielded metal arc welding often will suffer from a condition called arc blow, which when the plate gets magnetized, it'll actually push the weld away from your direction of welding. This is very annoying. It can make for very tough welding. Having a rod that can do alternating current, or AC, eliminates the arc blow because it'll actually move it from electrode positive to electrode negative, back and forth at 60 Hertz a second, pushing away that magnetism and allowing you to have a nice, clean weld.
The W in SMAW is the welding portion. This is us creating a fresh homogenous weld out of the material, the parent metal that comes from the electrode itself, and making sure we have enough heat, enough gas to keep the oxygen away, and the right alloy mix to make sure we have a nice, strong, weld.