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heavy industry forge welding


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Heya, can anyone give me an example of forge welding being used in some sort of heavy industrial engineering? I need an example of industrial forge welding to subtley drop into conversation with a fabricator who (despite my best efforts remains) is frustratingly sceptical about forge welding. Me forge welding is too lo-fi to convince him, I need an example that'll really make him sit back and think.
Cheers

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IMHO the 'modern' commercial equivalent of firewelding is using the principle of fire welding but applied mechanically I.E heat to correct temperature, and apply pressure to unite joint and is known as friction welding or friction forging, which is being used extensively in many engineering applications as here 

 

In the 1970's I used to make tooling for these types of machines which were used to produce various components for the mining and motor industries.

 

This reference gives a good insight into what is achievable and materials that it can be used on. http://www.nctfrictionwelding.com/

 

There are many good videos on You tube showing the old timers making chains and anchors, such as this one, 

 

And more recently Bruce Willis and a team made a video of forging an anchor in the Shetlands 

 

That should give you something to discuss.

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Another form of solid phase welding done nowadays is explosive welding  and it can do some very interesting welds.

 

One example is welding steel and aluminium together that then allows for ships with steel hulls and aluminium superstructures to be built by welding to such bi-metal dividing line pieces using the proper arc welding methods for each metal

 

As for the low tech of forging; Robb Gunter used to be the blacksmith at Sandia National Labs and has done forging of Ti for satellite use.

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roll welded plate..........the wash zone (where the sea meets the structure) of the Japanese trans-Tokyo Bridge is titanium welded to the outside of steel.

Ammonia processing plants have zirconium welded to steel to save on costs for the interior of the pipe.

 

Many circuits are gold plated copper...all welded.

 

Explosion welded...many many products out there for that.

 

Also...have him look at his pocket change...all the silver colored coins are welded.

 

Ric

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I'm not sure "Friction Welding" qualifies as a form of "Forge Welding", ... but if it does, ... then it's use to weld forged Stainless "heads" onto Carbon Steel "stems", ... in the manufacture of Valves for Diesel Engunes, ... should qualify as a "modern" Industrial use of that process.

 

 

 

.

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At the foundry where I work our blacksmith regularly does forge welds that have to cope with high stress environments though I'm not sure whether or not this counts as industrial engineering.  I work in a bell foundry (as a mould maker, not as the blacksmith sadly) and as well as casting bells of all shapes and sizes we supply all the related fixtures and fittings, including the clappers that strike the bells.  Clappers were traditionally made from wrought iron though unless specially requested by the customer all modern bells are supplied with cast SG iron clappers instead.

 

This is a googled picture of some wrought iron clappers so you can see what I'm talking about.  These particular clappers have had a twist put into their shafts enabling them to strike the bell with a clean face as the balls do tend to deform after years of striking the hard bronze bells.

 

1057_1.jpg

 

 

When a bell is rung, the clapper strikes a bell once every 3 seconds or so, often for up to three hours at a time, this constant impact puts the wrought iron under a huge amount of stress and from time to time the shafts of the clappers will snap, that's where we come in.  Broken clappers are brought to the foundry and where possible the broken ends are cleaned up, scarfed and forge welded back together, with the clapper then jumped up (upset) or drawn down to give the correct length clapper for the bell it belongs to.  Sometimes because of the position or nature of the break it's not possible to weld up the broken halves and a new top end is forged from either pure iron or from the limited amount of "new" wrought iron that we have and forge welded to the remainder of the original shaft.  Our blacksmith has been doing this for 30 years and not one of his forge welds have broken in that time, though he has worked on some clappers more than once where they've broken at a different point.  Most of the clappers we work on were made in the last 150 years but every now and then we have some older ones come in, the oldest we've worked on were from around the 1300s, apparently that iron behaved beautifully under the hammer!

 

I hope you will find this interesting, though I don't know if it's the example of forge welding in the modern world that you were looking for, but it shows that forge welding still has a role to play, even if it's just repairing and restoring items from the past.

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Foundryman are your moulds made with patterns or do you use sweeps to make the moulds?  I am a Patternmaker and my textbook from my apprenticeship showed bell making with sweeps, but many of the things that used to be done by the moulder are no longer done that way and we patternmakers have to make full patterns and follow blocks or cores for things that the moulding could be cut in.by a good moulder.  Even for one offs.    

 

Back on track,  I used to forge weld on reins for steel mill tongs that were 1045 which needs pre and post heat for electric welding.   I could weld on the reins as quickly as i could have done the prep then pre heat weld grind and post heat. With the forge weld there was not a filler metal that was a different alloy which could flex differently.  There are ornamental forge welds that can be as fast or quicker than electric and they don't require grinding after the weld. Getting rid of grinder marks in work finished clear can be very difficult.  All that being said I very rarely forge weld anything these days.  Usually it is for "trying to do it the old way" reasons. 

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I'm jealous. I'm watching for wrought iron like I hawk. It seems however I will be naught but bones and beak for my wait. I'm not near the sea, or near a old railroad town. I can't find any. If someone would oblige to indulge my sense of curiosity and compare (in a very general sense, God did not make all wrought iron equal I understand) working 1018 to working wrought. Now let me probe further and frustrate even more so by asking hypothetically, can working wrought so many times work the silicates and other stuff out of it? If you worked the same piece of wrought so much would it just become near to pure iron? Or would it be lost in scale first? Or do the impurities (judging by the common opinion of the material I feel to be slandering it by calling said silicates impurities) not work out of the material with forging?

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We make our smaller hand bells, anything up to about 10" with patterns and cast in green sand, anything larger than that is made with what we call a "strickle" or "moulding gauge", which is basically a profile of one side of a bell, mounted vertically and rotated on a central axis to form the mould.  I guess this is what you mean by a "sweep".  These larger bells are moulded in loam, a sand/clay mixture which resembles mud, a much wetter than green sand casting would use.

 

I'm glad you like it so much Owen, I've picked up a few more pieces since then. That's one of the perks of my job, access to the scrap metal bins! I'd still like to see what you've made with it, how'd the seax turn out?

 

Sorry for the off-topic post,

 

Simon.

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If you are getting "fusion" as in melting then it's not forge welding; forge welding is a solid state process.

 

Hi Thomas, fusion, by fusion I thought I meant the uniting of the items into each other, maybe another example of the difference in English what we speak, or me being thick again.

 

The process goes,

 

the ends of the blade are cut off at 90 degrees,

 

they are then placed in the jaws and butted to each other,

 

an induction current is passed through the pieces whilst slight pressure is being applied,

 

when the heated section is at the equivalent temperature of a welding heat, and definitely not molten, the pressure is rapidly increased usually causing sparks to fly out as in the firewelding process, and the ends are united ( fused?) the joint is then dressed and annealed to give the flexibility needed when in use.

 

This was the nearest example relevant to use of firewelding I could think of in daily use throughout the world today, although users may not recognise it as such,

 

Spot welding also works in a similar way, clamp/ heat and apply pressure, joint complete, so what would that be technically classed as? No melting occurs, or does it? 

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