Welding Tricks! How to weld Steel to Cast

welcome back to the dirt Head Shed this week we're going to talk about how to weld plate steel to cast steel this one should be pretty [Music] fun all right we're back in the shop working on Louis vtin my 2008 Ford Superduty and this video is actually going to be all about prepping brackets for getting ready for welding how to do that so that you don't end up creating problems for yourself later on and how to weld this plate steel bracket to this cast steel steering knuckle in the process that I go through so follow along this one should be pretty fun um it's going to be a lot of tech but it should be a pretty good one let's start with figuring out why that doesn't go in there all right we have a lot of work to do before we get into welding onto the cast steering knuckle over there we've got to prep this bracket and get it ready to go let's start by disassembling this I just had this one mocked up in order to make sure I had all the pieces and idea right all right here's the bracket how it comes from Barnes very similar to pretty much any other company that's selling stuff like this you'll have a little bit of slag left from where their uh laser cutter was cutting at so we're going to go ahead and step one is going to be clean off any of that slag um and then we're also going to prep these edges where we're going to be welding the steel that they use is basic mild steel but it's called pickled and oil so it really doesn't have much Mill scale on it but it does have sort of a hardened Edge or a crust or whatever you want to call it from where the laser cutter ran so I'm going to go ahead and clean those edges a little bit too that's the overall look that we're going for so now we can go ahead and weld this brass ET up so that it's kind of ready to go as a unit since I know this bracket is assembled correctly and that's like the right shape to go onto the vehicle it's time to start prepping it for welding we're creating a double Shear steering arm meaning the tab or the him joint here has tabs on either side of it rather than just a tab on one side so what we got to do is kind of continue assembling this thing with the he joints and parts but what happens every time you weld one of these things together it seems like they always shrink up like they never they never go apart and make it easy to get a he joint in and out of here they always seem to shrink together so we got to like do a little bit of work to compensate for that and that's what these things are for these are just shims that I made out of a beer can that I borrowed from a neighbor and uh we're going to use those in place basically to take up a little bit of space in with the heim joints here there we go we got our bracket sort of assembled I'm going to add shims on the other side some washers this bracket's ready to start welding let's go ahead and get the Meg welder out for this the welder I'm going to be using for all of the work today is this little Miller multimatic 220 this is a multi-process welder meaning it does MiG and Tig and stick welding right now we're going to do some MIG welding quar inch material let's see how we do clamp my table get my Mig torch out we're going to end up using a mix of M and TIG welding on this process but it can also be a mix of MiG and stick welding or all stick welding or all TIG welding this is just how I'm going to do it so let's go ahead and weld this bracket Up Get It prepped I'm going to start by welding these Tab and Slot sections on the bottom side of this bracket just kind of as a warmup make sure if I don't have my settings right I'm not doing it right where everybody's going to see it right all right Dave don't suck at welding today okay we'll try not why is my gas not on what is going on [Music] here oh my regulator was turned all the way down all right if you're going to do a bunch of welding on YouTube for the rest of the world to see make sure your welder's set up properly to start with that's better [Music] welding up these Tab and Slots is basically just a rosette weld you want to like make sure you focus your heat down on the uh the material inside of the hole get that hot enough and then as it draws up or fills in the hole it puts plenty of heat into the uh the plate on the outside of that hole now basically all we need to weld on this is this outer uh fillet weld this Inside Edge here um and then we'll wrap around the corners and we'll just put a little bit of a weld on the inside of these tabs [Music] oh nice for this little what looks like a little welder this thing really rips so I'm just kind of I'm really focusing this heat on the quarter inch plate and then I'm drawing it up to that 3/8 plate and even though I just have the welder set for/ quter in material it is running plenty hot typically when you're doing like a shock tab or something like this you don't really have to weld the whole Inside Edge but if you kind of wrap the corners and go in a little bit like this it helps keep a crack from forming later on this side I'm just going in about a quter half inch all right let's let that thing cool for a little bit and then we'll come back and see if my little shim trick worked I might have lied to you when I said I was just letting this cool I actually had to go over and check the live feed at King of the Hammers it is every man challenge day and a bunch of friends are out there R racing and getting rad in the desert all right all right let's go ahead and pull this thing apart and make sure it works the way I was hoping all right as we're mocking this up I can see that I do have a little bit of sanding to do on the tab over in this corner and then there's a big casting nub right here that I need to kind of sand that off and then this thing should drop into place perfect one of the tricks that I learned it it really was only about two years ago was how to test if you got cast iron or cast steel and basically if you can grind on it and it shoots orange Sparks it's cast steel now if I'm wrong about that feel free to tell me cuz I'm always down to learn something new but that was that was something that I actually I was talking with Ian over at big tire garage and that was kind of what he let me let me believe so I am going under the assumption that these are cast steel seems like cast iron is pretty much only used on uh like a bunch of plumbing fittings in like commercial use and in engine blocks we've got the knuckle prepped I got that uh bump sort of sanded off and everywhere that I'm going to be welding is clean you can see here the he joint is still a little tight right still kind of tight getting in there so what we're going to do is make sure that we don't have a problem later on by making a jack bolt this is kind of a cool trick so we're making this Jack bolt assembly go in here and basically all this is is a piece of all thread with some a nut on either end and washers and we're just using this to put a little bit of outward pressure on these tabs so so that as I continue welding or weld this into the car the truck it doesn't continue to shrink up on me this is like a really good trick for when you're doing shock tabs and things like that so you can see now with a little bit of pressure on the jack bolt that him joint fits in there freely we're going to leave this in here for the whole time I'm welding so I guess it's time time to really get ready for welding this thing and we're going to get into that here in a second one of the things that's important when you're welding cast is that the cast piece is heated up and warm I'm not sure the number that you're supposed to get it up to if it's like 600° or 300° or what but the idea is that you heat the material up so that when you weld it's similar in temperature to the plate that you're welding to it and then it's it's also important that you cool it slowly so I'm going to heat this piece of cast up probably about 300° I have an oxyacetylene torch you can also use like map gas or propane and then I also have one of these um temperature guns temperature gauges that shows the temperature of the material right now it's at 57° that's not hot enough so let's go ahead and warm up the areas where I'm going to warm up the areas where I'm going to be welding I should probably use a rose bud doing this but I didn't feel like swapping out the torch will also help kind of clean some of the contaminants out of the metal and it will draw the moisture out of it as well let's see where are we at uh it looks like we're 280 300° I'm going to call that good as far as ready to weld let's go ahead and grab the bracket this thing's still a little bit warm which is good we'll get that sort of in place that's it that's the spot it's still good to go all right I'm going to go ahead and preheat a little bit more just because I want this bracket I want the bracket about the same temperature as the uh cast iron as well I guess it's the fun part now now we got to weld it and I wanted to show you what I'm using to weld I am going to TIG weld this and I have this Rod here which is called super missile Rod it's made by Harris which is a welding supply company this is like a hybrid 312 stainless rod and it is designed for welding dissimilar Metals together dissimilar metals like cast steel and plate steel so this is my go-to I use super missile rod in 16th inch for practically everything I TIG weld it works great all around if you don't have a TIG welder this is the stuff to use right here this is Hobart cast iron Rod it's called Uh nickel 999 basically this is is a similar High nickel stainless hybrid rod and it is made for welding dis similar Metals together as well I actually used the nickel 99 on Mom spaghetti when I built the whole front trust for that thing the whole the plate steel trust that goes up and over the center chunk is all welded with that nickel 99 I ended up knocking the flux off of it and I TIG welded it on but if you have a stick welder it will work just fine so let's go ahead and get going on this uh super missile Rod there will be a link to that stuff in the bio but yeah that stuff is amazing so let's get cracking before all this stuff gets cold and I got to like reheat again I've got my TIG welder set really high this thing set at 190 amps which is uh higher than I've ever used it I usually probably weld around 125 amps and Below all the metal is still hot and ready to go let's see if we cannot suck at TIG welding today I'm going to go ahead and get the outer Corners hit first with this [Applause] thing and Tack those Corners all in this is a really big gap to fill for a TIG weld but this uh super missile Rod actually kind of melts at a lower temp so it fills really good we'll get four corners tacked on this thing that way hopefully it doesn't move around on us at all let's start welding this thing up there's really no screwing around on this when it comes to uh working fast you can see I've got my short Cup on the back of this thing or a short uh I got a short piece of tungsten in there and a short cap so I can get in here as well as possible I'm going to try and weld the hardest spot first and see how we're doing I'm sure a lot of guys are going to be like oh you can mig weld it I've done it 100 times it works you can mig weld it I wouldn't say that it's like the best way to do this process but I know it gets done successfully so I'm not going to argue you on that I got to go sharpen my tungsten I totally boogered that up the inside of the brackets are welded up pretty well I ended up having to change tungsten cuz I needed a bunch of stick out and my other tungsten was way too short for inside of there so we've got a long a long cap on it now and a fresh blue tungsten we let that one rest we'll run our vertical over here on the side and then we'll do the underside and we'll probably end up going back over and doing a second pass on just about everything as clean as I got this stuff it is still some dirty cast iron or cast Steel it is hot my fingers are on fire we're on the home stretch now I got all of the welding in place like the first pass so now we're going to go ahead and just bust out this top cap and hope that it ends up looking great I'm stoked so far I am not the best TIG welder in the world but I'm trying I'm practicing a little bit here and there man everything's [Music] hot this little machine is just cranking the amperage almost feel like this top cap I could drop the amperage way down cuz it is it's like able to cut into this cast steel like it's nothing Pinkie is on fire ah that looks good this is awesome go ahead and get this inside one here before I found this super missile Rod I used to I used to buy just a 312 stainless rod and I would buy it from McMaster Car and uh that stuff worked really well as well for this [Music] job that run right along that edge is a little ugly just cuz of the amount of contaminant in that cast [Music] steel I'm pulsing the throttle the foot pedal a little bit there trying to get a smooth oh flash myself that's looking good I love this stuff so fun [Applause] see if we can get a good run around this spacer tube you'll notice I'm also running kind of a big cup on here it's a furic uh number 10 cup I believe no this is a 12 this is a HOA 12 and basically that large cup and it being a gas lens means that I can run the tungsten stick out a little farther and still get good gas coverage on the weld that allows me to get into these kind of like hard to reach reach spots and not have the gas coverage be garbage I think we're good to go that worked out really well got this plate steel big old honken 38 plate welded success y onto this cast steel knuckle what a fun one here's the last of the tricks you want this thing to cool down it's not running out my nose here's the last of the tricks you want this thing to cool down as slow as possible some guys will keep heating it and like cool it really slow that way some guys will wrap it in ten foil I am going to take this fiberglass welding blanket and I'm going to cover this thing up and I'm going to walk away I'm going to let this thing cool nice and slow and check it out that's pretty good in my book I am not the greatest TIG welder I'm not even hardly a good TIG welder but I got that arm on there and it's going to be strong and good to go the super missile Rod is where it's at if you can't get that you can use 312 stainless Rod if you don't have a TIG welder you can use this nickel 99 stuff for Hobart again I bought this at the welders or I bought this at the tractor store it's made for welding cast iron but it works great for all kinds of dissimilar Metals thanks for following along that was a fun little tutorial in the old dirt Head [Music] Shed

Channel: The Dirthead Shed

Views: 120,624

Keywords:

Id: ulnLodO67zU

Length: 22min 52sec (1372 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 02 2024