forge welding

[jimbob]

Any of you guys use a small piece of iron on your forge table to make that quick weld on small pieces?...if so what do you use and about how big is it(the piece you weld on on the forge table)

[m_brothers]

What do you mean? Are you talking about forge welding or welding? Your post seems to confuse me.

[bruce wilcock]

if its only a small weld a sledge hammer head in the hearth at the side of the fire ,for veryheavy work welding in a hearth without a hood ,we dont lift it out of the fire roll the piece over and weld it using other fires to heat the other parts.

[jimbob]

that sounds like a good ideal thanks Bruce

[ThomasPowers]

for small pieces you can sometimes weld in the fire by squishing the two+ pieces together with a pair of tongs and then removing it to clean up with the hammer and anvil.

Preheating the hammer and anvil helps for small work too.

[Jmercier]

An alternative to this that i've seen is a person who uses a small (4 x 4 x .5) piece of plate which they stick in their forge to heat up nice and hot when doing forge welding, they pull the plate out and sit it on their anvil nice and hot, and then take the pieces they're forge welding and hammer ontop of the small plate, so that the anvil isnt sucking away heat from the weld. Seemed to work really well. ( The guy used a hold down on the plate so it wouldnt jump off the top of the anvil )

[Don A]

On a variation of what Thomas said above, I have, in the past, set an old bench vise on the forge (several inches from the fire pot) and used it as a sort of mini-press for welding chain link from 1/4" or smaller stock.

This gets me a good "stick" between the pieces, then I re-heat and finish up on the anvil.

Don

[mcraigl]

I have a piece of steel that is 3x3x2.5". On one of the faces I've cut a 60 degree "v" in it. The other faces are just flat, but will eventually get different shapes when I figure out what I need. I sit this thing in the fire when I'm making up some coke for the welding process, once I've got enough coke and the fire is cleaned out/up I'll set it next to the fire and weld the small stuff on it. Really helps a ton. The "v" works great for welding up cable, it seems that the 60 deg. vee is just right for forcing the strands together when struck.

[jimbob]

that sounds like a good ideal how deep/wide is the V ?

[mcraigl]

I made the "v" just a little bit wider than the cable I was welding up. So it doesn't bottom out. You end up with a nice triangular bar when you're done that you can then forge to whatever dimension you need. I let the depth be controlled by the width and angle, so I didn't really pay much attention to it. Probably ended up just a tad less than the width of the cable I was working on.