Introduction to forge welding - basic blacksmithing

ford welding is one of those things that people get all freaked out about people think that it's some arcane mystery that has been lost to the ravages of time blah blah blah yadda yadda yadda that's nonsense Forge welding is a fundamental skill of the blacksmith it always has been and it always should be even if you're proficient with an arc welder or mig welder or TIG welder you should know how to forge weld it opens up lots of doors like welding on the reins on a pair of tongs instead of having to draw all this out to make the raids you have a power hammer that's not a big deal but if you're at a small shop and you don't have a power hammer Forge welding just saved me an hour on its most basic level Forge welding is really just heating up two pieces of iron based material wrought iron pure iron mild steel tool steel doesn't matter a lot although we'll talk about where it does matter some but you heat these up until they're near the melting point you heat them up to melting you're done and you've ruined everything but once they're sort of close to that melting point the surfaces are just starting to think about being molten they can be fused together under the hammer forged Welding should be every bit as strong as the parent material is you'll notice that I was welding at a gas forge a lot of people think you can't weld in a gas Forge and it does depend on the gas forge a lot of very simple homemade forges simply don't perform well enough to get up to welding heat they can if you do a good job of building it but the better the Forge the more likely this is a chilly Forge it gets up to welding heat I'm at 6,500 feet and I can manage the weld in this buy weld axes and adzes and throws and all sorts of things in this and it's absolutely possible the other option is to weld in a cold coke or charcoal forge for a lot of Forge welds the key to success is in the way you prepare the material for welding and that gets into a whole lot of different issues that I'm gonna try not to get into today we're going to stay very basic today the term scarf refers to the way the welds are prepared a thin area that blends in nicely in different welds need different kinds of scarf preparation today what we're going to do is something that is referred to as a weld and know that it's not an insult to anybody sexuality and you can keep comments about that kind of thing to yourself it's a blacksmithing term and it simply means stacking the material up on top of each other and it's not trying to blend a will that's actually creating a thick spot or a mass if you've ever made or wanted to make Damascus or pattern welded steel that's essentially a weld stacked everything up weld it together draw it out there's no scarfing necessary so I'm going to turn the Forge back on that's one disadvantage to welding in the gas Forge is it takes a while to heat up I don't want to lose all the heat that I had so we're gonna listen to this thing roar in the background I hope you can still hear me talk [Applause] regardless of what kind of a fire or Forge you're welding in there are some things that have to happen you have to have the heat if you can't get it hot enough you're never going to be able to well hopefully it's a little quieter if we come over to this side of a shop not only do you need the high heat to well and different materials well two different Pete's wrought iron welds much hotter the mild steel which well totter the tool steel depending on what you're welding your welding temperature will be different but you need a reducing fire that means the oxygen is being consumed whether that's a adjusting the air intake about a gas port or the blower if you've got a blower Pike Forge or simply having a good deep fire in the coal floor you have to consume all of the oxygen in your typical gas port it really is just a matter of adjusting the gas pressure and adjusting the their intake however that comes into your Forge but with a coal fire in the typical Forge is one that the air comes in this way the bottom blast Forge is what I have it can come in from the side and the rules are still more or less the same if you have a nice deep fire pot it's easier to have a reducing fire what you want is coal built up around the edge in this area right here is where you want your material if you're down in here and this is where your fire is if you're in this area that is an oxidizing fire there's too much oxygen you're gonna burn your material before you well up here it's just not going to get hot enough so there's a sweet spot where you want your material and that's the reason fire pots are built the way they are is it's roughly level with the top of the fire pot if you're welding in a a riveters Forge it really doesn't have a fire pot it just has a great here so you have to really make a mound of coal and get that up about 4 inches off that great to get into that reducing area so it's a good fire pot that's and a good blower that will provide that kind of airflow is very important the other issue is your fire has to be clean if you've got clinkers down here that aren't really consuming any oxygen while you're burning your fire you're going to still going to burn this and you're not going to have the heat clinkers don't consume oxygen they just suck heat out of the fire so you need to clean the clinkers out clean the ash out you need to have good cold good coke or good charcoal that will produce a good clean Heat that's absolutely critical for Ford welding that is one advantage to the gas Forge no clinkers no ash no sulfur no other impurities it's just a matter of getting it set right and knowing how to do that into your particular Forge that's unfortunately something I can't teach you for your Forge one enemy to forge welding is scale if there is scale in the joint you will not be able to get a good Forge well and that's one of the things that you use flux for it melts it's kind of glassy and it bonds with the scale and will help clear the scale out when you weld it will also seal the weld up so less oxygen gets to the weld surface and help prevent scale from forming so flux is really handy not absolutely necessary a lot of people will without flux and it's completely possible to do that flux isn't magic it just helps this is sodium borate it's anhydrous borax it's a pretty good flux but 20 Mule Team laundry or ex works as well it's really foamy but it runs down in the joint well there's things like easy well in this Iron Mountain Forge welding flux that you can buy from your blacksmithing suppliers they all work I don't think there's any such thing as a magic clucks way better than the rest of them and some of them have the some iron filings which can help and some of them have no waraxe borax can be a problem after the well in that it can leave a film that you have to clean off but the other stuff isn't too bad but try different fluxes see what you like I use a different flux for different purposes the borax is real slippery gets down in the well but it also makes it hard for some things to stick if you're bringing two pieces together like I did at the beginning of the video and I prefer these for that kind of a well for our first florell we're going to make this very simple we are going to bring any pieces together separately we're going to keep them while attached I'm going to cut that a little more in half way through get a little wire brushing it's not critical this is something the flexible health clear out and I'm just gonna lay that over itself I keep borax in a little tin it's got a lid on it to keep the dirt and junk out and this will get down in there you don't need just tons of flux most people would weigh too much on if you leave this a little open you can get the flux down in there a little bit better and but if it is open seal it up now we need to get this up to welding welding heat is another one of those somewhat subjective things you frequently will hear lemon yellow is the color you would for welding heat and that's not a bad thing to aim for but you're gonna see color in your shop is slightly different than I see at my shop it also depends on the time of day and whether you've got light coming in windows or if you're working outside you're going to see things completely different depending on what the Sun is doing so you need some other telltale signs one of them is if you watch the surface of the petal you'll see the flux flow because it melts like molten glass but if you see the surface of the metal where there isn't plug starting to flow a little bit that's a good sign that you're getting close to welding heat if you see sparks coming out of the fire you are too hot or you have way too much air if you've got a hand-cranked blower and you're drinking just hard as you can chances are you're going to burn your material up without ever getting to welding heat think about our cutting torch words you get it hot but not welding hot and then you give an oxygen and that oxygen cuts through it that's burning the metal away and that can happen in your Forge even though you're not in welding heat you can burn stuff up so sparks are not a good thing if you're getting smart you're probably too hot if you are okay but it's better to come up the welding heat slowly this camera adapt the light in the Forge so you're seeing a much darker image than I am what you can see here is that the material is the same color as the inside of the four and for a gas board once you figure out how to set it to well that's a pretty good indicator that even works fairly well in a coal fire when the material disappears against the background of the coal and no longer looks like it's colder you're probably a heat the pace that turn it around and move it but if the joints critical what's up and down market before you go into the fire the initial well should be light fast balls starting at the end and working towards yourself and that's probably welded now I know it's welded but that's really all a weld is I'm going to refine that a little bit to guarantee that it's got a good well and that could be several layers of material buildup now it's okay at this point if you want to the wire brush particularly if you're not a hundred percent sure the well cook they're getting a little flux to make sure you can clear out all the scale isn't a bad thing if the reality is this well probably didn't now we go to what some heavier blows and is it this critical started with heavy blows you'll probably ruin your well but this is a real good way just to learn welding heat that's not something I'm going to use for any project it's just a the practice we'll all this is and you should do some of these just to learn how to will this well is good we can walk it in the vise and bend it and it will stay but starting to separate a little bit right but it's staying good down so that whole bench man and it would stay better so the weld isn't something that you're really going to do a lot of but there are some practical uses for it and I'll show you a real quick thing you can do with it here we're gonna take just a piece of 3/8 bar and put a point on it and then we're gonna bend that over I'm gonna leave about three or four inches out there I'm not cutting this because I want full strength at the tip here five and then we'll flush left what's on this we're gonna weld about the last inch and a half of it that the fire let it get hot we're just gonna weld that last into the half or so and I'm going to draw that out to a point not enough heat from welding you could get away with this this is another disadvantage to welding in the gas port is I have to get all of this hot to get into where the the good heat is and in a coal Forge you can just eat the end of it so for something like this I would certainly prefer to weld in a coal Forge but if you haven't figured it out all we've made is a real quick simple fire poker but here's our original weld and you can see where it's separated so this part wasn't welded but this is where it was locked in the vise so if this part wasn't welded it would have bent back here so that's that's a good weld for the most part if it was critical to get this you just go back and work on reweld Anette but it's just the sample and if you can get welds like this after three or four tries you should be real proud of yourself but doing this is a very good training exercise just a good way to practice a weld and it's all about getting the right heat and the right fire and the metal being clean enough when you come out to well here's our poker now and that uses that same weld only it doesn't need to weld all the way back but it also illustrates just slightly one of the problems with a weld like this you see if I can zoom in a little bit further and that is that it gets a little thin that you can see the weld seam in here and it's just a little thin right at the heel of the weld for the poker it makes absolutely no difference whatsoever there's still plenty of material for this to work and it's a good quick simple way to make a poker it's only took me two heats one to make this point and one to forge weld and draw this out and if you're doing really well you can finish this hook in that same heat but a couple couple of light heats then to refined it they're no big deal and if I wanted to refine this I could do a lot more to it I just for this exercise there was no reason to take that any further maybe someday we'll turn this into a finished very simple little poker but the problem if you get too thin is in something more like this pair of tongs and the weld on these I did a much better job of making disappear you can see just a little bit of the scarf right there and just a little bit right there and that's pretty common and old stuff to be able to see those signs of the world if you get too thin doing this if you have not properly prepared the weld joint then that's a weak place in your tongs you actually want that to be a fairly heavy place in your tongs and not a thin spot so the next time we talk about welding we'll talk about preparing the joints so that when you are through forging them that they are the right dimension and not too thin it's real easy in a well to get things to thin even this you can see this is a lot thinner than the original bar if we needed this is five-eighths bar if we needed an inch and a quarter total width I would have had to have done something to guarantee that I didn't lose too much material making the weld so that's an important concept but we'll talk more about that later another practical place you can use this style of welding is something like this lock this is an antique I don't make locks I wish I knew how but you can see this build up right here this is really quite small the for the internal mechanism but the bolt that slides into the door needs to be heavy and secure so the Smith that made this did just what we did it's a weld it was doubled back welded down on here and done probably it's wrought iron in which case it would have been a higher heat weld it a little bit easier than the mild steel but you could do it in mild steel so that's a practical example of what you would do with this kind of a weld now when you're welding the flux like I have mentioned is somewhat akin to molten glass it's hot it's liquidy it splatters it goes everywhere eye protection is vital a leather apron is really a good idea I don't always wear it but I have a whole bunch of t-shirts with a nice burn line right across here where the flux splatters and my clothes would last a lot longer if I wore the apron all the time it's also why I'm wearing the kind of cheapo welding jacket these are pretty available and they're fairly sacrificial and I'm wearing a brand new flannel shirt my wife gave me for Christmas and I don't want to ruin it the first day in the shop so I put all this extra stuff on not absolutely vital you see people weld and t-shirts and shirt sleeves and bare hand it all the time it can be done sooner or later you're going to get little burns on the back of your hands it seems like scale always wants to to land right in here if you're not wearing a glove if you're wearing a glove it seems like it always wants to go right down the cuff of a glove so it's half a one six dozen to the other or six and one half dozen of the other however you want to look at that whether you wear a glove or not I'm still wearing one to protect the the finger doctor's orders so it's sort of up to you what you wear the better protected you are the fewer burns you're going to get and the longer your clothes are going to last but the leather apron for welding I think is really a good idea and if you're balm like me keeping something that's a little bits of scale that fly off overhead from hitting your ball head it's kind of nice one of the viewers had asked for a little better look at my paper towel holder here I will actually build one of these maybe early next week that'd be a nice simple project while we're getting back to normal around here it's just a bent bar this half-inch bar it's got a place for two bolts here so it's solid on the wall it's got a little kick up so the paper towels don't fall off the end but that has to be small enough so that the roll will go over the end look paper towels with no edge but it works it works pretty well and you can do all sorts of ornamental things to a paper towel holder like that nothing to do with welding just answering a viewers question that's it for this morning just a real quick introduction to Forge welding remember you can Forge weld at a gas Forge you can Forge weld at a solid-fuel Forge like coal or coke it's just a matter of what you have and learning how to use it good clean fire proper temperature properly prepared materials and flux doesn't hurt I've mentioned that flux helps liquify the scale and carry it away it also helps seal up the joint but it also helps lower the welding temperature ever so lately and that can be a benefit it also helps clean the surface because it erodes it just a little bit so if you've got some scale stuck to the surface from a previous heat there's a good chance that will help clean that away for you but don't count on it as a miracle cure more flux isn't going to make it weld it's either going to weld or it's not and flux may help it weld a little bit easier and may help you get the scar stuck down a little bit that wants to cool off fast but if it's not going to weld it's not going to weld and adding a gallon of flux isn't going to make it well that just makes more clinkers in the bottom of your fire it has also said that the older the blacksmith the lower the welding temperature which means getting it to that sparking temperature isn't necessary and as your experience grows you will start to realize that you don't need to be that hot and you can back it down a little bit and start seeing what a lower welding temperature is and you'll do less damage to your material and less damage to your project if you don't have it at such a high heat so thanks for stopping by I hope you can get out in your shop and try some little practice forged welds I hope you liked the video if you did I'd appreciate it if you give it a thumbs up love it if you hit that subscribe button feel free to share it with your friends New Year's coming up so if we don't do any more videos have a happy new year but I think I'm going to try and do at least two more maybe one more this afternoon one tomorrow and maybe even one New Year's Eve that we'll see in the meantime like I said have fun

Channel: Black Bear Forge

Views: 1,120,570

Keywords: Wondershare Filmora, forge weld, forge welding, fagot weld, welding, fundamentals, basic, beginning, beginner, blacksmith, blacksmithing, how to, howto, scarf, gas forge, coal forge, anvil, technique, skills, blacksmith skills, process, black bear forge, fire welding, welding technique, forge welded, basic blacksmithing, forge, introduction to forge welding, forge welding basics, forging, blacksmithing for beginners, blacksmithing skills, how to forge weld, smide, how to forge weld steel

Id: j814AqiKVvE

Length: 26min 28sec (1588 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 28 2017