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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday October 23 2019, @05:17PM   Printer-friendly
from the show-off-your-beads dept.

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Grind Your Welds With Pride, If That's The Way You Do It

To grind or not to grind? What a question! It all depends on what you’re really trying to show, and in the case of welded joints, I often want to prove the integrity of the weld.

Recently, I wrote a piece in which I talked about my cheap inverter welder and others like it. As part of it I did a lower-current weld on a piece of thin tube and before snapping a picture of the weld I ground it back flat. It turns out that some people prefer to see a picture of the weld bead instead — the neatness of the external appearance of the weld — to allow judgment on its quality. Oddly I believe the exact opposite, that the quality of my weld can only be judged by a closer look inside it, and it’s this point I’d like to explore.

So dear soylentils, do you even weld and if you do, do you grind your welds?


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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday October 24 2019, @03:19AM

    by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Thursday October 24 2019, @03:19AM (#911098) Homepage Journal

    Lots of fun pounding on red hot metal.

    Yes. Yes, it most certainly is. I've heated rebar up with a torch and beat it with a shop hammer for no other reason than the sheer enjoyment before.

    Unfortunately my oxy rig is still in storage back in OK because I won't have room for it until we get into the church we're turning into a big damn house. Never had a proper forge or a steel furnace but I do have an aluminum furnace and a lead pot that I use for casting random doodads and fishing weights.

    Brazing and cutting with a torch are the things I could pass as professional at. Mostly because I used to be a professional at them. A year or so back in the 90s I worked as a lot hand at a used car lot during the day then made oil well drill bits (the smaller, triangle-shaped ones not the big, multi-head ones) for the car lot owner's side business on nights and weekends. Slap a jig on the blank, mark it, two cuts with a torch (complex angle, done by eyeball and experience, had to be as perfect as possible to avoid getting chewed out by the grinding guy), then braze on the tungsten carbide cutting edges, and stack them up for the guy who ground and painted them.

    Brazing was never difficult for me though. I had to learn to solder copper line back in the army on account of part of the 52C MOS was repairing air conditioners. Brazing's largely the same but slightly easier as your materials don't heat or cool as fast.

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