Tig welding repair on a aluminum casting

Рет қаралды 2,481

Күн бұрын

In this episode we look at a tig welding repair on a aluminum casting. Have no fear I be getting into how to tig weld videos soon :0.
0:00:00 Intro and inspection
0:02:09 Why this is a difficult repair
0:05:52 How to properly prep aluminum
0:11:08 Lets weld
0:13:40 After weld inspection
0:15:02 Conclusion

Пікірлер: 76

@PaulSteMarie 28 күн бұрын

The welded repair is beautiful. Much nicer than splicing in a new piece.

@MrKingdavis13 Ай бұрын

I TIG welded the lower half of the triple tree on one of those cheap imported minibikes for children and the cast "aluminum" it was made from actually sparked when I was grinding it occasionally. I tried to keep grinding until the sparking stopped but every time I thought I was good it would spark again so I eventually gave up and tried to boil it out with the tig torch, it was ugly and a huge pain but I eventually got it to look half decent. I decided to add some good aluminum to the important areas so that the child could ride safely and that presented its own challenges with even more garbage coming out and the time spent was insane but the smile on the neighbor kids face every time I see him riding it was payment enough. Lol

@a-k-jun-1 Ай бұрын

Some jobs pay in ways money can't

@MrKingdavis13 Ай бұрын

@@a-k-jun-1 so true. lol

@makingmistakeswithgreg Ай бұрын

Awesome. Yeah, that aluminum probably had everything and the kitchen sink in it lol. That’s aluminum for you. Sometimes things that look terrible weld perfect, and things you think will be easy are a nightmare. Most of the time it’s a hope for the best situation lol.

@lmaximeraby6268 Ай бұрын

E6 foot valve mounting plate. It's for semi-truck air brake. There is indeed a plunger in the big hole. Probably the shaft was stuck and rusted and someone had to hammer it out. Ask me how I know 😂 Now every couple of months I desassemble the pedal and the plunger, clean and grease everything, the brake pedal is smooth like a new truck.

@makingmistakeswithgreg Ай бұрын

Nice to know. Sounds like a pita to get it out. I didn’t remove it, but there was clear evidence of a lot of heating with a torch lol. Got to love steel/aluminum mixed parts that get filthy and not greased. Guaranteed to get bound up lol.

@lmaximeraby6268 Ай бұрын

@@makingmistakeswithgreg yeah and in winter you are carrying full of deicing salt in the cab so its a very nice mixture for aluminium/steel part! And to unscrew this plate you have to get halfway under the cab of the truck with a frame rail and a big engine/transmission in the way haha Anyways very nice job 👍👍

@tinkering123 Ай бұрын

Great video Greg. Aluminum and casting. It's what my dreams are made of.

@garyrhodes7089 Ай бұрын

A Tig brazing Video would be very welcome as I have struggled to master this process

@makingmistakeswithgreg Ай бұрын

I did one video on the subject here kzfaq.info/get/bejne/pMeqmZiY1rDblqs.htmlsi=Yja-dKdpv-IjTM_a . Tig brazing is actually pretty easy provided you can tig weld. It functions just like tig on steel, you just use about 75-80% the amperage and keep the arc on the bronze. With aluminum bronze it helps to use a/c with tig and 90% DCEN (10% cleaning action).

@PonkyKong Ай бұрын

welding castings is so hard the aluminum bronze foundry I worked at stopped bothering. crack in a 300 pound casting? pour it again. This might be one of the hardest tasks there are to weld.

@makingmistakeswithgreg Ай бұрын

I have brazed a lot with aluminum bronze filler, but not on actual aluminum bronze material. With the filler wire I find it brazes much better running a/c tig with 10% cleaning. I bet a casting would likely be dirty enough that the little bit of a/c cleaning won’t be of much help.

@stan3819 Ай бұрын

air brake assembly. i like your video. very informative

@larrypalmer7136 Ай бұрын

Superb video with excellent camera work and great explanation of what to do and how to do it. Thanks for your video.

@makingmistakeswithgreg Ай бұрын

Thanks for the kind words 😀. Little jobs like that are what make welding fun, especially if you actually fix something 😀

@a-k-jun-1 Ай бұрын

A tip for welding aluminum to slow heat loss. Now before we start, you will have to ground the part and not the table. I put small parts on section of exhaust gasket material to keep the table from sucking the heat out of the weld. It's from the hotrod section at the autoparts store. Mr Gasket and others offer it. It's just a piece of high temp gasket about 6 inches wide and 18 inches long approximately. It lasts a year or so at my hobby garage and is well worth it.

@petar443 Ай бұрын

Not only that Greg is a great teacher and i learn a lot. But i always watch for some really helpful and useful comments. Thanks

@SouthernGround Ай бұрын

instead of the pin use a piece of ready rod, four nuts, adjust till part is lined up, clamp rod to base, grind your V's as you did and weld away. The ready rod just holds the part in place so it won't shift.

@mkearn724 Ай бұрын

Nice video Greg. I don’t have much aluminum experience so I enjoyed learning. At first glance I thought…. If it doesn’t weld nice, it doesn’t seem like making a whole new piece from steel would be all that difficult. With those burr bits in the field I usually use hougen slick stick from the mag drill, keel (lumber crayon), or even wd40 to keep from getting gunked up. They also work very well for grinding wheels on hot dipped galvanize.

@makingmistakeswithgreg Ай бұрын

I will have to look some of those up. I have used wd40 with polishing aluminum, but not with cutting 😀

@JonDingle Ай бұрын

That's a tidy repair young man. I wouldn't have even considered gas welding aluminium with Oxy Actylene. I do have an AC/DC Tig welder but my skills are somewhat poor so I don't tend to take on any aluminium work, plus my eyesight at 58yrs isn't sharp enough at close up range for tig welding and my filler rod technique is lousy. However, Oxy Acetylene might be something I can do better with, can you do a video on gas welding because it is something I would like to learn about along with brazing. All the best!

@melgross Ай бұрын

You can use oxy/acety. But you need to be pretty skilled welding aluminum. Otherwise you’ll meld the entire thing down to a puddle.

@makingmistakeswithgreg Ай бұрын

I will have to do a video on oxyfuel welding and cutting. Melgross is correct, it does take a fair amount of skill to weld aluminum with it just because it doesn’t give much warning on hot vs too hot. The flame burns so much of oil out that for certain jobs (oil pans) I find it works pretty good. Tig aluminum has a very steep learning curve, the arc gap needs to be just right or everything turns to crap. Too close the metal jumps to the tungsten, too far away and the arc wanders excessively. It takes a while to find the balance.

@ypaulbrown Ай бұрын

best wishes on Memorial Day my Friend..........

@PioneerRifleCompany 29 күн бұрын

Great approach and well explained.

@makingmistakeswithgreg 26 күн бұрын

Thanks 👍. Luckily that casting was decently clean. When you get an oil soaked one it can be quite a nightmare lol.

@tallyman15 Ай бұрын

Love Tig welding. Nice work.

@makingmistakeswithgreg Ай бұрын

Tig is the best 😀

@thomassouliere7613 Ай бұрын

You won me over with "earning money for your beer budget"!

@makingmistakeswithgreg Ай бұрын

The beer budget is often a bit dry, so a bit extra wouldn’t hurt 😀

@sebastianleicht Ай бұрын

Cool, interresting and entertaining Video!

@derekbryant6137 Ай бұрын

I've done things like that with a mig But before I do that I sand blast it and then I set it in an ultrasonic cleaner And that water turns awfully dark but you're correct the optimum process is Tig and not everyone has a Pro pulse 300 HTP welder that does double pulse aluminum and when you do mig weld it the setup is different you can't just set the parts back together as they were f u s e that back together it almost a knife edge when you wire weld it the fitment that is with TIG you have to put it back together as it was I'm very finicky when it comes to repairs like this I would hardtack that in several good places and take a die grinder and put a u Groove in one side of it and then welded and if you wire weld it you're going to find that you have to as you probably already know take a die grinder and do a lot of grinding this is the only way that it would be successful because like with a TIG you can boil that stuff out you're going to spend a lot of time with a carbide Burr if you use a MIG this is just my experience good video

@makingmistakeswithgreg Ай бұрын

How well does an ultrasonic cleaner work? I have never used one and have been thinking about picking one up to make my life easier.

@derekbryant6137 Ай бұрын

@@makingmistakeswithgreg if it's really dirty like you were talking about in the video like internally dirty inside the metal not just maybe crusted on and just in the surface layers of the aluminum it won't go all the way through but it does take some of the hard work of having to sit there and cook all of that crap out of the aluminum for other things it removes dirt and grime fairly well but if it's a really critical part and I am fixing it to really fix it fix it I will glass bead dustless blast (water shielded) first and let it sit overnight in a bucket of acetone if it's a small part an ultrasonic cleaner is a good investment especially if you Tinker with old school cars which is something I do ones with carburetors on them love them old 318 Mopars

@johnverkler3962 Ай бұрын

Nice video! I should have guessed "commercial" parts like this were astronomical in price.

@arthurmoore9488 Ай бұрын

The funny thing is casting Aluminum, or rather ZA-12, is also an easy way to do this job, and takes less up-front cost than a welder or an Oxy-Fuel torch. 3D printer, melting furnace, casting sand, a wooden box, and ZA-12 metal to cast with.

@makingmistakeswithgreg Ай бұрын

It’s almost like they know it’s going to fail so the price is sky high lol.

@wither8 Ай бұрын

It's strange that the pivot pin was designed with steel, and the bracket was alum. Usually, it's designed the other way (the pins are intentionally softer) so the pin shears off and is easy to replace for this very reason. My snowblower has a shear pin so when chunks of ice or get lodged in the auger assembly and the engine is going at full tilt, a pin (really a bolt) safely disconnects it from the driveshaft. Your welding skills never cease to amaze me. Hey, I'm looking at the HTP PulsePro, but can't tell if it does spray pulse arc...it can Pulse (obviously) and it seems like it can spray, but their documentation isn't clear. Can you make heads or tails?

@mkearn724 Ай бұрын

I’m sure if you gave htp they would answer any questions you may have. I hear that their customer service is amazing, or you could possibly reach out to @ZILAwelds here on youtube

@_hector__ Ай бұрын

220 amps doesnt seem like its enough juice for spray arc, primeweld 285 can do it but barely

@makingmistakeswithgreg Ай бұрын

It definitely was designed to fail lol. The pin had so much rust on it looked like it had barnacles on it. I was given it in parts and my first thought was “get a new one” lol. So the pro pulse 220 would be able to handle spray at a very limited capacity. It was designed as a 200 amp welder with very intermittent output at 220a. Spray welding with .035 wire starts around 200a with c10 gas. With pulse the limitation becomes heat input. If you pulse at its max output of 220a you will not have 220a of heat input, you will have less than that. Which means you would likely drop to an unstable version of spray depending on settings. The main benefit to pulse on that machine is the ability to weld out of position (vertical up and overhead) while putting down clean welds without having to weave. Running uphill with normal mig takes quite a bit of skill, pulse makes it far easier with better results.

@dennisyoung4631 Ай бұрын

Ozzy Beer? (Bundaberg is an Oz brand.) Cleaning - 99% isopropyl alcohol? (Can get this at Fred Meyer’s, 2.49 for 16 oz - about 60% of Acetone. (Acetone for final cleaning?) A preliminary cleaning can be done with a mix of rubbing alcohol (70%) used to rinse out “empty” bottles of liquid dish soap. You want it to look like Windex. It really gets rid of grease and dirt.

@danielsplayhouse3804 Ай бұрын

That's a bus accelerate pedal! I repair a bunch of them there out of blue bird bus.... Me and my primeweld tig 225x stay busy with little aluminum repair like that....

@makingmistakeswithgreg Ай бұрын

A bunch of jobs like that will definitely keep some money flowing and fill in a bunch of time 😀. Pretty much any A/c tig welder can do it which makes it even better. Have you found they commonly get broken? The amount of corrosion on it was significant (it was cleaned off before I got it).

@danielsplayhouse3804 Ай бұрын

@@makingmistakeswithgreg you're definitely correct on that it's nice when you get any kind of little aluminum welding repair it's an automatic hundred dollar bill..... 😆😆😆

@michaelwhiting878 Ай бұрын

I love the soap trick for the burrs! If one doesn’t have an A/C TIG available, can this type of repair be done with TIG Silicone Brazing like when repairing cast iron assuming good prep is performed first as you stated? What other options would there be for a durable repair if not?

@melgross Ай бұрын

No. Silicon bronze brazing rods melt below the melting point of iron or steel, but is higher than the melting point of aluminum. There are aluminum brazing rods. Often you’ll see an Ad for them saying welding, but it’s soldering/brazing.

@michaelwhiting878 Ай бұрын

@@melgross Thank You Do you think those aluminum brazing rods would be strong enough to do a similar cast aluminum repair? I’ve seen those, but thought they were a gimmicky very low quality solder. I understand the differences between Welding, soldering and brazing, and their approximate working heating temperature ranges, but I’m not familiar with aluminum brazing. I’ve done cast iron repairs with silicone bronze via TIG, but back in the day we used standard brazing rods and a good old oxygen acetylene torch. Brazing done properly is amazingly strong!

@melgross Ай бұрын

@@michaelwhiting878 the ones I’ve got are an aluminum alloy of some sort. How strong they are depends. How strong is the aluminum alloy to begin with? Usually, you don’t know that. If you built it up somewhat, it should be fine. Brazing works well on iron because the iron isn’t that strong to begin with, so the difference with the braze isn’t that great.

@makingmistakeswithgreg Ай бұрын

I have never used the aluminum bronze brazing rods without flux that I have seen advertised. I will have to do some testing with them to see how strong they are. They might (with an oversized weld) be able to make a successful repair on the part. I know fluxed aluminum welding rods with a oxyfuel torch could do the repair. Also, I just saw two emails from you in my giveaway email box. My primary one is trashed and I have been missing out on a ton of emails apparently. I will be responding on the one from my giveaway box shortly.

@paulkurilecz4209 Ай бұрын

Great video with a wonderful explanation. Am I correct in assuming that you used a 4043 or similar filler rod?

@makingmistakeswithgreg Ай бұрын

4043 is what I used. There are a bunch of fillers that could work, but I find that 4043 tends to work good on small jobs like in the video 😀.

@paulkurilecz4209 Ай бұрын

@@makingmistakeswithgreg Yes it is. My understanding is that Silicon based Aluminum alloys are most often used for casting alloys. A rod that you might want to think about using is 4943 as it has a higher as welded strength than 4043 and has fluidity like 4043.

@Bondodon1849 Ай бұрын

If you get a burr that loads up with aluminum soak it in a Lyle solution for about 10 minutes and all of the aluminum will be dissolved and the burr will be undamaged.

@makingmistakeswithgreg Ай бұрын

That would sure beat using a small file to pick all of it out lol.

@michaelc9507 Ай бұрын

Gregg I did a repair to a cast aluminum track burner assembly my co worker dropped and broke it. The Blue Demon rods 4043 and cleaned it with acetone. There is a trick I’ve watched a guy using tig machine on DC with the 4043 1/8 rod as filler with success.

@makingmistakeswithgreg Ай бұрын

So you can weld aluminum with DC, it’s a sooty process. The main limitation with DC aluminum is the fact you really need helium to get it to work properly. Helium has become absurdly expensive as of the last few years (especially the high purity that’s required). One thing I have never tried is using fluxed aluminum welding rods with tig as an emergency repair solution. I know aluminum stick rods work (but are hell to run lol.).

@TheDom0 Ай бұрын

Hi Greg, If you pre-heat the part would that help with impurities or would it just get the puddle started quicker? I like welding Aluminium when the jobs come in but have never welded cast.

@makingmistakeswithgreg Ай бұрын

Preheating works really well on thicker material. The power required to weld 3/16th and above aluminum becomes ludicrous so preheating will massively help with getting a puddle going. On thinner material it’s not a big deal, but it can still help by burning off filth on the surface. That becomes super important on things like oil pans and stuff that held oil.

@TheDom0 Ай бұрын

@@makingmistakeswithgreg Thanks Greg

@user-ul3vu4ks2p Ай бұрын

looks like a brake pedal out of a Peterbuilt-They're usually corroded to hell

@makingmistakeswithgreg Ай бұрын

That’s what a bunch of people have suggested. Apparently they are well known to be a mess of corroded metal lol.

@Boodieman72 Ай бұрын

Good job AC TIG machines aren't that expensive anymore.

@makingmistakeswithgreg Ай бұрын

That’s a huge benefit today vs years in the past. I am glad there are so many functionally decent a/c tig machines out there, the average person can likely afford one and get building cool stuff 😀

@melgross Ай бұрын

With that design, the pin shouldn’t turn at all. The pedal turns on the pin, while the pin remains stationary. Those aluminum ears aren’t bearings. If the pin turns, eventually the pin will grind right through the aluminum. For burrs, there are aluminum cutting burrs.

@lmaximeraby6268 Ай бұрын

There is a spring pin that hold the shaft in the steel pedal, so there is no steel on steel rotation. The shaft rotate in the aluminium. Not a bulletproof design lol

@melgross Ай бұрын

@@lmaximeraby6268 that’s a bad idea. I’d never design something that poorly.

@lmaximeraby6268 Ай бұрын

@@melgross yeah you are right, and above all considering the price of the assembly! Would you think bronze sleeve in the aluminium would be a better design? On the other hand I changed this plate 10 years ago and there isnt too much play doing stop and go city driving, so we could say it is doing ok haha.

@melgross Ай бұрын

@@lmaximeraby6268 well, you know how it is, not every one will fail. But it just looks to me to be not well thought out. Sure, sleeves would be much better. Also the two flanges could easily be made thicker. Engineering is interesting. When they designed this part, it seems as though they either winged it, or used the minimum possible material they thought would work. I usually add an additional 20 to 50% to the safety factor.

@lmaximeraby6268 Ай бұрын

@@melgross not only that, but this part seeing frequent humidity and boot full of deicing salt, the pin should have been made of stainless steel. The spring pin is almost garanteed to be stuck, and if there is a rust buildup on the shaft, if you have to remove it then you are almost shure to break those ears. I clean and grease mine every couple of months to avoid these issues.

@arthurmoore9488 Ай бұрын

No AC tig machine for me. Oxy-Fuel it is. Lie, which is what some drain cleaners are, will absolutely eat aluminum. It's the easiest method I've heard to clean files and carbide burrs. If you're feeling spicy, you could even add a few extra things, boil it, and do some hot caustic bluing.

@makingmistakeswithgreg Ай бұрын

Interesting, that might just be worth it. I have a burr that’s loaded with aluminum and sitting with a file picking it out doesn’t interest me lol.