TIG welding:
My ex-boss told me to make the joints between pieces I was welding as tight as possible -- until I couldn't fit a piece of paper between them.
That's what I've been doing.
It's not the best way.
When you weld eg. a pipe to another pipe, you tack-weld a single point on one side, then do it again on the other, so things hold together, and then you run a bead around the joint. When the two pieces of metal have, essentially, zero gap, that first tack-weld cools quickly and contracts, pulling the two pieces of metal apart where the next tack-weld should be.
You actually want a gap, maybe half a millimeter or so, and then things work much better.
It is possible to fill arbitrarily large gaps with a TIG and a bunch of filler, but it's very unpleasant.
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