Stick Aluminum Together Without a Welder.

foreign Fabricators thanks for tuning in today we're gonna be taking a look at Amazon's cheap solution to sticking aluminum together we're going to find out if I wasted thousands of dollars on TIG welders or not now I know there's a lot of you guys anticipating our belt grinder build that's going to be built with the remainder of our table saw Welding Table but that is still in the works I want to take a little bit of time and make sure that the design is halfway decent for the materials we have to work with and just kind of come up with a good solid solution not totally Haggard something together for you guys so let's get started with this stuff so what we have here is some alumaloy is the brand from Amazon and these are brazing or soldering rods and technically I think it's soldering because the instructions say these things Mount at around 725 degrees something like that and I believe the definition of brazing is anything above 840 degrees supposedly all we need is these rods something to clean it with got a stainless brush here and a map gas or propane torch let's give it a go and see if they're worth their weight okay so I've played with these things a little bit already and something that I've noticed is that you definitely have to heat up your base metal so we're going to be standing our piece off of this heat sink or the Welding Table first we're going to do a quick little clean with our stainless brush now you can use stainless brush to clean your aluminum add some acetone probably wouldn't hurt to get any oils prep that material and then like I said you're going to need a map gas or propane torch and I will link all this stuff in the description below to Links if you guys are interested in trying this stuff out whenever we see what kind of results we got [Music] now something I've noticed and playing around with this stuff is it does not really break through that oxide layer itself so it works a lot better if you actually get in there and agitate it just a little bit to break up that oxide layer let's heat the other side up and go around it actually flowing out real nice getting there and just kind of agitate that to break that oxide layer off the top now if we're using a flux probably would not be required to agitate it and get in there but since we don't have a flux and supposedly you don't need it on this stuff I'm just going to kind of get in there and break that oxide layer up so that it can bind to the base material a little better and it doesn't look too bad we got a nice little beater on there we're going to let this guy cool off and then we'll beat on it and maybe throw some water in it and see how it's sealed and performed just while we're waiting on that I want to show you just kind of what these things look like it's very similar to TIG Rod they're not actually around they're kind of oval shaped and they look like they've been kind of like cast or poured into some sort of form or mold but they were roughly around an eighth inch or three millimeters in thickness and then probably about 18 inches long now I know there's several brands of these guys to choose from but while we're waiting for this let's actually break open some more coupons and just do a straight t-joint to torture test as well use some of our weld medals online coupons these are great for practicing your actual TIG welding and I've got a 10 off coupon that I will leave down in the description for these guys as well okay so we're gonna let this guy cool off so we can flip it around and do another little clean fillet on the other side but while we're doing that I kind of want to read off some of the specifications that this stuff has just so you've got an idea and I will leave this whole thing down in the description so you can read the specifications but they really tout this stuff they say that you can use it on aluminum you can use it on pop metal you can use it on aluminum pot metal galvanized steel no flux needed antiques toys gutters rims I don't know if I would recommend recommend rims soldering your rims together does not sound like a wise thing to do um Refrigeration coils belts housings I will leave all this stuff up to your discretion whether or not you try it on that but supposedly this stuff comes in at 39 000 PSI which is kind of impressive for a solder joint and yada yada I will leave this entire thing down here for you guys to read in the description below if you guys want to see the specifications on these things but this looks like it is cool enough that we can flip it over and do the other side [Applause] all right foreign okey dokey so this guy has cooled off we're gonna stick it in our little Vice here and we are going to do the water test see if she is sealed up filler up to the brim there and as you can see we're looking pretty dry here and oh oh maybe not we've got the tiniest bit of seepage right down here you can see some moisture come through right there in the corner so I probably just didn't get quite enough heat into that side that's the big thing of soldering is both pieces have to have pretty equal heat for everything to wet in properly but now we're gonna take this thing and beat on it and just kind of see what kind of abuse it'll take let's set it up in the Vise here and so as you can see here we're crushing our tube but we have not delaminated anywhere so that's pretty good I wouldn't necessarily use it for any structural application but there are definitely some applications maybe patching an aluminum hole or something like that let's take our flat joint here that's pretty good we bent that piece over completely and we don't have any sort of delaminations on either side I want to stop and give a quick shout out to Hyperlite they sent us out some LED lights to give a try and hopefully improve your guys's viewing quality I want to say a couple things these were pretty good quality lights but there were two notes that if you decide that you want these lights that I would take note of they do not come with any plugins or Outlets so something you'll have to purchase yourself and the pigtails they come with are only two feet long to go between each light so you might have to get some more wiring if you want to spread those out and daisy chain them but overall they're good lights there's a discount code and Link in description let's get on with the video so now both these things were both pretty clean coupons we had some brand new stuff from weld metals and then we also had our chunk of round tube here but I want to do some more kind of seasoned aluminum and maybe even just kind of like a more real world application so I've got a dirty old license plate here well scrubbly a little piece of that maybe puncture a hole in it and see if we can't patch it poke like maybe a 3 16 ish diameter hole through it so that's a thin lies not the most beautiful thing but plug the hole up another thing I mentioned was it was compatible with galvanized steel so I got this hanger here and I just want to give it a go just see if it'll do what they say it will foreign okay so we have this thing cooled down pretty much now and this is our galvanized truss hanger to our aluminum and it's tearing a little bit see what happens see if we can delaminate it take my all here and this is only 16 inch I'm going to break my oh let me get some heavier dude this is only 16 inch aluminum plate to 16 inch galvanized steel or pop metal but oh there you go it finally just delaminated okay we were able to separate it I mean it was actually pretty strong you can see how much this was a flat plate and I had to deform it and lift that up that much before it actually delaminated from the part so I'm actually semi-impressed for having those two dissimilar Metals so just for clarification this is soldering it is not welding the primary two difference is welding is more of a molecular Bond and soldering is more of a mechanical Bond well so when you're welding aluminum together you are melting your two space metals and adding a filler and those things are all mixing up molecularly and melting together and becoming one in themselves whereas soldering it's more like glue you're relying on a mechanical Bond so that's why it's really important for stuff like this to get better results to actually do good prep work so maybe do a little bit of sanding scuff it up and make sure you get all of your oxides off and decontaminate it from any oils and stuff just like you would do when you go to glue something overall I think these are a success I'm definitely going to throw some in my in my emergency kit when I'm Wheeling off-road and stuff like that and I could see the application of this being used in some real finite stuff I mean like this guy here it's still hot you can lay down a nice clean small little low profile bead and if it's something that's got to be held together and isn't structural it may be more visually appealing or maybe even more possible with a solution like this so like I said before I'm going to leave links down in the description to all these things that we used here to make this happen in the event this is something that you want to try out or use yourself now I appreciate all the love and comments we've been getting on the DIY welding fixture table and we are definitely going to be continuing that series there are more build videos gonna be coming out to make that even better so stay tuned for that the belt sander and all those things I really appreciate all the ideas and the support I've been getting for that so once again if you guys want to see more fabrication content click some of the links that are going to pop up here if you want to be notified of upcoming videos hit that subscribe button and ring the bell so that you will have notifications turned on and go build something guys

Channel: AM Custom fab

Views: 18,112

Keywords: aluminum welding, aluminum brazing, welding aluminum

Id: CpVYbKWIbBY

Length: 12min 32sec (752 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 06 2022