Alumiweld vs Aluminum Weld: Was My TIG Welder a Waste of Money?

hey welcome to the shop so i've always been curious about these filler rods that you can use just with a propane torch to repair aluminum have i wasted a small fortune on welding equipment for my home shop and i should just spot a torch from the plumbing aisle let's find out all right so let's talk about the difference between welding and what we're doing here which is actually not welding it's more of a soldering process now you might call it brazing but this actually happens at a temperature below 840 degrees fahrenheit or 450 degrees celsius which makes it a soldering process now when you do braise or solder something rather than melting the actual base metal your actual part you heat it up and then you use that to heat a material that melts at a lower temperature than it does and then that will bond to your base metal and create your joint but you don't actually melt away or affect the boundary around that joint or your base metal when you're welding you actually heat it up so look here on this tig weld as i run along i'm creating a pool of molten metal before i add any filler metal to it right and then i can move along as i weld where with this i won't be creating that weld pool so let's go ahead and set this up with a 1 8 inch plate set up in a t joint and i've just clamped everything together here i'm going to use my propane torch and start heating it up and as i heat it up i'll just keep trying to add this rod until it gets hot enough that it'll start to melt and when it does i'll think back to reading the instructions and it shows to use the rod to break up the oxide layer and kind of rub it on there so once it's hot enough to melt it i'll just move back and forth across here and it's actually creating a nicer joint than i expected not a bad little fillet right on there so that went better than i thought now to give us something to compare to i've gone ahead and welded up one side of a t-joint here and we're going to just try to bend these open and break them from the root side just welded on one side just to see what happens here with the little weld joint i've got it clamped in and you can see the aluminum starting to bend around so it's holding up at least a little bit then i'll turn it around and keep working on it with my hammer and it snapped right into you can see that it failed right through the middle of that little tiny fillet so it was bonded really well to both sides that fill it just wasn't large enough really to hold the load that we needed let's try the same test with that tig weld and i can work on this quite a bit and because it's that larger fillet weld and it's welded clear into the root of the joint there i can bend this clear over uh basically without having anything come apart so definitely uh when there now what if we were to use the aluma weld on both sides so i've got another one set up here and i'll go ahead and heat it up and apply the rod here on the front side like we did before let it flow right in there and then i'll go around on the back side and it's basically hot enough to do this already they'll use the torch a little bit and heat it up and get everything in place so now that that is put together you can see it's really not a bad looking little joint for what it is i'll go ahead and pound around on this and see what happens there and it bent clear over and held up so while we can see that there's some strength here what we don't know is how would this hold up if it was bent back and forth in an actual application or if there's corrosion around we don't really know how that's going to work out but anyway it's holding up and it's stronger than i kind of expected it to be now let's try this out on a lap joint so lap joints are really where brazing and soldering processes often excel but the way that this works here where you've got to break up that oxide layer that's floating on top of your material it's kind of a strange phenomenon but i've set up a little lap joint here and i have started to apply some of this material here as i heat it and it's wicking its way in um and and forming on the top i mean it's super strange how you can see it kind of work its way underneath that oxide layer and break it up i've taken this lap joint and broken it apart and you can see where the aluma weld traveled up underneath that oxide layer but it wasn't able to get in and actually join the two together because it wasn't there and that's kind of the way this works without using any kind of a flux or anything like that on aluminum so it's different than if you were to be you know brazing something where you had a flux in there and it could break up that oxide layer you kind of have to mechanically do it let's play with that a little bit so i've set up a piece of material here and i am heating it up until i can just dab a little of this on we can see how that travels underneath that oxide layer and i'll keep pushing that in here you can see this thing blown up like a balloon here uh underneath that oxide layer it's really kind of fun to play with but that just kind of shows how it works and then i can push this around and break that up manually so really to get a good joint it seems like you do have to have access to be able to break up that oxide layer a little bit to make it bond so let's take a look at the classic demo that they show on the commercials here and so i have a pop can and a punch here i'll knock a hole in the bottom of it and then start heating it up it's not quite hot enough to melt the filler metal but looks like it's getting hot pretty fast oh no it got on fire a little bit anyway i guess maybe i need to turn my torch down just a little bit for this uh more delicate material but let's try it one more time here i've got the torch turned down a little bit and i'm starting to to melt my luma weld on there and it is actually bridging over that big hole so that's kind of cool i mean typically i would replace my pop cans rather than trying to repair them but still pretty interesting anyway so we got some stuff gooped on there let's let's test this repair out and see how it holds up so i'm adding some water in here just to see and uh you know it's dripping out the bottom so i don't blame that on the illumina world i'm i'm new at running this and maybe he didn't quite get everything washed in there just right but you know in all reality it actually worked better than i expected it to and i think you know what maybe there will come a time when i want to pull some out to to do some little repair or something like that who knows but for now i'm going to stick with the welding for the most part hey well thanks for tuning in today if you liked this video let me know by hitting that thumbs up below and we'll see you next time

Channel: TimWelds

Views: 287,079

Rating: 4.8586369 out of 5

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Id: xR5UyoLxofo

Length: 7min 29sec (449 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 24 2021