You don’t have to apply a lot of force or be aggressive to get a nice clean bead. In fact, that often has the opposite effect. Instead, just try to slow down and listen to what the material is trying to tell you. As a new welder, it’s easy to get overwhelmed. The welder is loud, it’s bright, and it seems like everything is happening so fast that your hand is moving before your eyes even have a chance to focus. So take some time to practice the movements of welding before you start trying to actually weld anything. Place two pieces of scrap metal together on your welding table or work surface and take a good hard look at the seam.
Try practicing beads on a flat piece of metal. Before you start trying to weld anything together, just run a few beads on a flat piece of scrap metal. This will help you relax a bit and allow you to focus on your arc length, your travel speed, and your torch angle. Each bead should be relatively short. You should be able to remember everything about how you laid down that bead. After each bead, stop and take a good hard look at it. If the bead is kind of tall and ropey, that could mean that you are moving too slow or not holding the arc steady. If the bead is thin and stringy or irregular, that might mean you are moving too fast or not keeping your hand steady.
Many new welders try to weld for too long of a time. This can cause their form to deteriorate and their hand to tighten up, resulting in a bead that keeps getting worse and worse. Instead of doing this, try welding in rounds. Spend about 15 minutes working on one single aspect of your weld. Let’s say you want to work on keeping a steady travel speed throughout the length of the bead. The first 5 minutes of that time can be spent setting up and positioning your metal, the next 5 minutes running 2-3 short beads, and the last 5 minutes examining those beads and running one correction. This will help you keep your attention up and allow you to see if your problem is really in your hand or if you are having trouble seeing where you are going or if you are starting the arc poorly.
Don’t change too many things at once when you are trying to make corrections. Many times new welders will run a bead and not like the way it looks. So they will change their torch angle and their travel speed and their hand position and their power. All at once. Then run another bead. This makes it very difficult to determine what actually made the difference. Change one thing and leave everything else the same. If your bead is coming out too fat, try adjusting your travel speed before you mess with anything else. If your starts are coming out rough, just practice your arc starts for a while on some new scrap. It may seem like busy work, but that is how your body learns these new movements. It is better to make small adjustments and repeat them than to make large changes out of desperation.
Getting feedback on your welds is an important part of the learning process, but it needs to be constructive feedback. Simply telling yourself that it looks like crap, even though it might be true, isn’t going to help you very much. Instead, try to use more descriptive language. Say that the bead is sitting a little high or that it is varying in width or that you notice more spatter at a certain point or that it seems like the puddle is running away from you. If possible, lay down 3 beads with the same settings and circle the one that looks the best with a piece of chalk. Now think about what was different about that bead. Maybe you kept your wrist a little steadier. Maybe you were able to see the puddle a little better because your helmet and body were positioned correctly. These are the things that will help you to improve.
Don’t worry so much about laying down a lot of weld. In your first few times out, it’s more important to develop some control that you will be able to maintain when you are working on more complex joints. Clean your metal well, don’t be afraid to burn through a little scrap, and always have a goal in mind when you are laying down a bead. Some days your goal might be simply to make the next bead a little better than the last. That’s okay. You don’t need to have perfect results, but try to approach your practice in such a way that your mistakes have a reason and a solution.