SUCCESS!!

After burning, literally, through a bunch of sheet metal, I have gotten some decent welds.  Not perfect. Not things of beauty.  But good penetration and decent looking ridges.

All during my practice if I got a decent puddle, I promptly burned a hole in the coupon.  I either burned holes in a lot of metal, or had very poor welds with no penetration.

Today, there was breakthrough.  The furthest set of coupons was the first set that had good welds. However, if you look close, you can see that I had some blowouts while doing the tack welds at each end.  The weld itself is pretty consistent and has good penetration WITH NO HOLES!.

The middle set is another good weld.  Plus I managed to tack both ends while blowing a hole in only one end.

In the closest set of coupons I used a bit of RG-45 rod while doing the tacks.  NO HOLES!  And, a pretty good looking weld.  Not quite as good as I want to be before I start welding up fittings, but certainly a workable weld.

Getting here has been quite frustrating, but I am elated at the moment.

Now for a bit more practice!