Your First Weld: 6 Practice Exercises for Beginners

Your first weld won’t be pretty, and that’s fine. The goal of these six exercises is building muscle memory for travel speed, gun angle, and puddle control. Start with Exercise 1 and don’t skip ahead until you can repeat it consistently.

All settings below assume MIG welding on mild steel with .030" ER70S-6 wire and 75/25 argon/CO2 shielding gas. If you’re running flux-core, bump your voltage up 1-2 settings and skip the gas. Grab a stack of 3/16" hot-rolled steel plate (about 4" x 6" coupons work great) and let’s get to work.

Before You Strike an Arc

Prep matters more than most beginners realize. Dirty metal causes porosity, spatter, and ugly welds. Before every exercise:

1. Grind or wire-brush your steel until you see clean, shiny metal
2. Wipe down with acetone if you see oil or marker residue
3. Clamp your work so it can’t move (C-clamps on a steel table, or a welding magnet holding pieces in position)
4. Attach your ground clamp directly to the workpiece or the table, as close to the weld zone as practical
5. Trim your wire stickout to about 3/8" past the contact tip

Check your gas flow rate. Set it to 20-25 CFH. More gas isn’t better. Too much flow creates turbulence that actually pulls air into the weld zone.

Exercise 1: Straight Stringer Beads on Flat Plate

This is the foundation. You’re learning to hold a consistent travel speed, gun angle, and distance from the workpiece. Nothing else matters yet.

Setup: Lay a 3/16" plate flat on your table. Use soapstone or a metal scribe to draw straight lines about 1 inch apart across the plate.

Technique: Push the gun (point the nozzle in the direction you’re traveling). Keep the contact tip about 3/8" off the workpiece. Focus on the leading edge of the weld puddle, not the arc itself. Move at a steady pace. You should hear a consistent crackling sound, like bacon frying. If it sounds like a machine gun, slow down or increase voltage. If it sounds like a deep hum, you’re going too slow.

Goal: Run 10 beads that are straight, uniform in width (about 5/16"), and show consistent ripple spacing. Each bead should look like the one before it.

Common problems: Beads wander left and right (brace your arms, use two hands). Inconsistent width (your travel speed is changing). Excessive spatter (voltage too low or stickout too long).

Exercise 2: Weave Beads on Flat Plate

Once your stringer beads are consistent, add a weave pattern. Weaving lets you cover wider areas and is essential for filling joints later.

Setup: Same plate, same settings as Exercise 1. Increase voltage by 1V to 18-19V since your travel speed will be slower overall.

Technique: Move the gun in a tight zigzag pattern as you travel forward. Each zig and zag should pause briefly at the edges (about half a second). The pause lets the puddle wet out to the sides and prevents undercut. Your weave width should be about 3/8" to 1/2" total. Don’t get ambitious with wide weaves yet.

Three patterns to try:

1. Zigzag: Simple side-to-side while traveling forward
2. Cursive E: Small loops that look like a cursive lowercase “e” repeated
3. Triangle: Zigzag with a slight pause at each edge and the center

Goal: Produce a bead about 1/2" wide with even edges and consistent fill. The surface should show a uniform, fish-scale ripple pattern.

Exercise 3: Tee Joint (Flat Position, 1F)

This is where real welding starts. A tee joint is a fillet weld where one piece stands vertical on top of another, forming a “T” shape. It’s the most common joint in fabrication.

Setup: Tack one piece of 3/16" steel perpendicular to another, standing straight up. Use a welding magnet or square to hold it at 90 degrees. Run tack welds at each end (about 1/2" long) to hold the position.

Technique: Aim the wire right into the root of the joint, the inside corner where the two pieces meet. Your work angle should split the difference between the two plates at 45 degrees. If you favor one side, you’ll get good fusion on that plate and undercut on the other.

Travel at a steady pace. Watch the puddle fill both legs of the joint evenly. Each leg of the fillet should be roughly equal to the thickness of the thinner plate (3/16" in this case).

Goal: A fillet weld with equal leg lengths, no undercut on either plate, and full fusion at the root. Break test one: clamp the tee in a vise and hammer the vertical piece over. The weld should tear out base metal, not peel off the surface. If it peels, you didn’t get root fusion.

Exercise 4: Butt Joint (Flat Position, 1G)

Two plates lined up edge to edge. This joint is common in structural work and pipe welding. It’s harder than it looks because the gap and fit-up matter a lot.

Setup: Take two pieces of 3/16" plate. Grind or file the edges so they’re clean and straight. Leave a gap of about 1/16" between them (use a piece of wire as a spacer). Tack both ends.

Technique: Point the gun straight down into the seam. Travel steadily, making sure the puddle bridges both edges and fills the gap. A slight weave (1/4" wide) helps tie both plates together if you’re having fusion issues.

On 3/16" plate with no bevel, you won’t get full penetration from one side. That’s fine for practice. On real work, you’d bevel the edges or weld both sides.

Goal: A flat or slightly convex bead that ties into both plates with no gaps or lack-of-fusion at the edges. Flip the piece over. You should see some discoloration or slight penetration on the backside. If the back looks completely untouched, you need more heat or a wider gap.

Exercise 5: Lap Joint (Flat Position, 2F)

A lap joint overlaps one plate on top of another by about 1 inch. You weld the edge of the top plate to the surface of the bottom plate. This is essentially a fillet weld on a different geometry.

Setup: Overlap two pieces of 3/16" plate by about 1 inch. Clamp them flat to the table. Tack both ends.

Technique: The tricky part here is heat distribution. The bottom plate is thicker in terms of mass (heat sinks into the full plate), while the top plate’s edge heats up fast. Angle your gun slightly toward the bottom plate (60-70 degrees from horizontal) to put more heat where it’s needed. If you split the angle 50/50, you’ll undercut the top plate’s edge.

Goal: A smooth fillet that wraps around the edge of the top plate without burning it away. The weld should show equal fusion on both surfaces.

Exercise 6: Multi-Pass Tee Joint

Once you can run single-pass fillet welds, it’s time to stack beads. Multi-pass welding is how you build up larger welds and is essential for thicker material.

Setup: Same tee joint as Exercise 3, but this time you’ll run three passes.

Pass sequence:

1. Root pass: Run a standard fillet weld in the root, same as Exercise 3. Keep it slightly smaller than your single-pass fillet (about 3/16" legs).
2. Second pass: Run a bead on top of the root pass, along the bottom plate. Aim so the wire hits about half on the first pass and half on the base metal. Use the same settings but travel slightly faster to keep the bead thin.
3. Third pass: Run a bead along the vertical plate side. Same approach, half on the first pass, half on base metal.

Wire brush between passes. Silica from the shielding gas leaves a glassy residue on the bead surface. If you don’t clean it off, your next pass won’t fuse properly.

Goal: A built-up fillet with smooth tie-in on both plates, no visible gaps between passes, and a final profile that’s roughly concave or flat. Convex (humped) multi-pass fillets usually indicate you’re traveling too fast or not getting enough weave.

How to Structure Your Practice Sessions

Don’t weld for three hours straight. Your arms get tired, your focus drops, and your last welds will be worse than your first. Here’s what works:

• Session length: 30-45 minutes of actual welding
• Rest breaks: 5 minutes between every 3-4 beads
• Review: After each bead, stop and look at it. Compare it to the previous one. What changed? What got better?
• Repetition: Run the same exercise until it’s boring. Boring means consistent, and consistent means you’ve built muscle memory.
• Progression: Don’t move to the next exercise until you can produce 5 good beads in a row on the current one

Keep a scrap bin of your practice pieces. Look at them after a week of practice. The improvement will surprise you. If you can, break-test a sample from each session to check your penetration.

What Comes Next

Once you can run clean beads on all five joint exercises in flat position, try rotating your workpiece to do vertical-up (3F/3G) welds. Vertical welding requires a different technique (shorter arc, tighter weave, lower heat) and is where most beginners hit their second plateau.

Check out common beginner welding mistakes to diagnose the problems you’ll run into during these exercises.