This is the first time we’ve covered welding brass on this blog, and WeldingTipsandTricks.com has given us a great start on this topic. Over the summer, Jody (the head honcho at WTAT) uploaded a short tutorial on TIG welding brass. The transcript is below the video if you need it. Enjoy!
Hey, here’s a really quick welding video from WeldingTipsandTricks.com. This is about TIG welding brass.
[PROBLEM] Now this. . . the weld did not come out like I wanted it to. Thankfully, it’s going to be all machined off anyway. What it is is a warn area on a hole through a brass plate, and all that wear area you see here should be metal. It should be a nice square hole but a bearing seat turned loose and got all ground up.
[STEP 1] So the first thing – because this thing has been in a nasty environment – the first thing you do is clean it up. Get the crud cleaned out the little groves that are worn in there.
[EQUIPMENT] And we used a Dynasty 200 DX inverter, and I’ve found that pulsing as well as manually pulsing the foot pedal is the way to get this done. I’ve actually also found that welding backwards helps a lot sometimes.
[PROBLEM WITH BRASS] This is brass, so brass has got zinc in it. You need a respirator. You need some ventilation: it’ll make you sick just like galvanize will. As far as welding goes, zinc is a problem because it out-gasses and wants to blow up on your Tungsten.
[STEP 2] So what I’m doing here – I’m trying to stay, keep the heat on the puddle on the weld metal and not on the base metal. So I hit it with a little pulse, a little blast of amperage, or I dab a little rod in there then get back over the puddle. That seems to work ok for building up areas. It doesn’t look very pretty. It didn’t lay down a pretty bead at all, but you’re able to get something done. This, like I said, this is going to be re-drilled, re-machined, re-shined up.
It’s aluminum bronze filler metal and I’m running there on AC and that makes for a really good match when you can’t see anything. I’ve done several of these, and even though the weld doesn’t come out pretty they all clean up really well with no defects or anything like that.
So, I’m not going to make you watch the whole thing. This is just a basic technique you can see. What I’m doing, again, about 30 pulses a second but I’m also manually pulsing the foot pedal. You can go to the website page and find out more details, settings, as far as shielded gas and electrode and all that kind of stuff. Alright, thanks for watching. See you next time on WeldingTipsandTricks.com.
