The only thing I haft to say about welding rod is packaging. Normally, welding rod is welding rod, there is a set of min specks they haft to meet and they all pretty much work just as well as the other (Suffice it to say, there is some top quality premium rod out there that is a bit better but that is besides the point unless your doing something structurally supercritical and not overbuilt). At any rate, the one thing I always tell people asking me about any brand of welding rod is look at the packaging for that brands 7018 rod. 7018 rod is sensitive to moisture being a low hydrogen type, so it is important that the rod remain dry and as a result the packaging needs to be of reasonable quality to assure your getting good fresh rod. So what I have always said is if they give enough of a care to make sure there 7018 is in a pretty good air tight sealed pack than, they care enough to make descent rod. If the packaging for there 7018 is complete rubbish (and I’m not talking about beat up by shipping and customers, I’m talking genuinely cheap), there rod is probably only barely built to spec.
Having said that, I have only run into one case of truly cheap packaging for 7018. It was some cheap china rod from some local welding shop. They carried Lincoln and other weld rod but the guy had a shelf with rod labeled “economy”. Needless to say, the 7018 on that shelf was in a black cardboard container and when I took the top off the container the rod it’s self was only loosely rapped in paper and in a plastic bag that was folded but not sealed over the top. The rod had yet to reach it’s expiration date and had turned nearly black with moisture (for thaws of you who don’t know, the older and/or wetter 7018 gets the darker the flux turns), all I could do was chuckle at how cheap it was. Than a welder walked in saw me chuckling at the rod stuck up a conversation with me and stated that he had bought some in a pinch and had put it in his oven to dry out, when he went to use it the flux just fell off like powder in most cases and he compared it to welding with coat hangers when it didn’t. I think the box was labeled “Thunder Rod, China’s #1 welding rod” or some junk like that, he only had it in 7018, 1/8”.
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