Brazing Copper to Brass! 

The technical difference between soldering and brazing is temperature. Brazing is done at temperatures above 840f. Soldering is below that temp

Thanks for the Shout Out.......Paul 'Paulie' Brown

Just a helpful hint... copper and brass get soldered frequently in plumbing.. the call it sweating technically. I'm sure there is a million videos on it! The trick is it has to be very clean and you have to use flux.

Silver brazing (>840 deg) and silver soldering (< 840 deg). Use the paste flux. Black or white. The key: when the paste flux looks like water it is time to apply the solder quickly and exit rapidly. Old school notes: cadmium silver solder flows like a dream. They don’t make it anymore. But, you can still find it.

Silver solder or silfloss as some plumbers might call it is actually brazing, silver solder will stick to copper and brass but not steel, however, brass brazing rod will stick to steel and brass. We have silver soldered a brass fitting onto copper, just so we could then braze that brass fitting to steel pipe. We basically used the brass fitting and a bridge between 2 different brazing rods to connect copper to steel without threaded fittings.

get some eye droppers to apply that flux. to solder, you heat the metal up toasty and then touch the solder to the fitting without the torch and it melts and sucks.

I never did get the knack for soldering with wire. What I learned on was sheet silver solder and paste flux. Paste flux lets you position cut off bits of solder sheet on the piece more easily than liquid flux. This also allows you to tin a piece(coat it in solder), then clean and flux it for attaching to another piece of metal with a torch. Sheet solder also comes in different grades such as extra easy and hard. The difference is extra easy has a much lower melt point than hard solder does. You use them from highest melt point to lowest when soldering together things that require multiple pieces at different points in the construction. Nicely done. Keep adding new skills to your toolbox, Anthony!

❤ future copper smith😮

Nice. I'm amazed you were able to get anything resembling a bead on that, I know I couldn't. I always dip the solder in a flux paste but again, you look like you do a better job than me anyway, so keep doing whatever it is you're doing. The most important thing I've found with solder and brazing is cleanliness is almost as important as when TIG welding. Good job, any new skill we learn is great

looks good man! I prefer paste flux, & I dip the filler into it to keep a steady supply on the joint. In High school we used Boraxo soap for flux. Not the best but it worked ok.

Any time you want to do another moment when you have something new to you and your able to share that moment with me. I like to be there to see you grow as an individual or as a business.

Outstanding Anthony......

Cool video see a man of many talents. I’ve never done brazing before looks a very handy thing to know how to do. Great work 👍

Hard silver solder likes to wick into joints and really does not leave a bead. If you add too much you get a blob that runs all over the place and solidifies in place if you time your heat source, but not really a bead.. Flux is your friend, along with a stainless steel brush, as silver solder joints are prone to developing pinholes and crap the longer you heat and futz with the repair.. Silver solder is really mean to be done as fast as possible.. Bronze filler is what you want to if you want to leave deposits, but is prone to porosity and inclusions, so not the best for a fitting joint.. TIG brazing is a good technique if you want a bead, but it is just slightly different than TIG welding in that you want the arc on the filler and not on the base metal as you want the filler to melt and not the base metal (most people make failed TIG brazed joints because they try to do it like a weld and get strange incompatible alloys happening by melting the base metal and a brazing rod together, or they overheat the base metal and get hard spots).. Lay wire is the best for learning TIG brazing.

Awesome job, really appreciate your approach…I’ve never done this before…we’re going to learn together. Attitude plus talent equals success!

silver soldering is definitely a skill. i do it quite often to salvage hard to get hydraulic fittings and repairing stuff like you were doing there. its a good skill to have for repairing older equipment parts. if you do it a couple times you will be a pro in no time. you do waaay more cleaning and prep then i do lol good job

Great Finale Anthony......

I always keep my oxygen regulator on 20-25. Only time I crank it up is when I’m cutting 3/4 inch thick or greater. I would puddle on the bottom plate and scoop up to the top. I use a modified circle weave. Your flame @7:53 was off for some reason.

Pretty cool

Good job! Its always good to step out of your comfort zone and end up successful! Thats being a business owner right?

You can tig that with bronze tig wire

In brazing, the filler metal must have a liquidus above 840 degrees, but below the solidus of the base metal. The filler metal is distributed between the closely fitted surfaces of the joint bY capillary action. LIQUIDUS- is the temperature at which a metal or alloy becomes completely liquid or melted. SOLIDUS-is the temperature at which a metal or alloy begins to melt. CAPILLARY ACTION- is the process in which a liquid is drawn into the space between two tightly fitted, "mating" surfaces.

solder and braze should suck into the joint for "penetration" like you discovered on your test piece it doesn't sit on top like a bead of caulk

2:55 @Meltin Metal Anthony have you ever considered trying out a Welding Helemt PAPR System like from Miller, Lincoln, ESAB, etc?

what you are doing is Hard Soldering....Soft Soldering is a lower temperature, like Propane or MAPP gas with a lead based solder..... .Brazing is a higher temperature. with a copper/zinc or copper/aluminum filler Tig Brazing is normally done with a Copper/silicon filler or a copper/aluminum filler as the copper/zinc tends to boil off the zinc due to the high temperature of the TiG arc ....hope this helps....Paul

Nicely done

Hell yea Rockstar! you ain't afraid of nuthin!

Hold your torch further away, you don’t want the oxygen to push the puddle, just warm the metal. Keep the blue flame a few inches away.

MMA you never cease to amaze me at your can do attitude. Another great video, that was very educational.I wonder if I could use a plumbers B tank to do this type of welding? ☮☮☮☮☮

Brazing uses the grain structure of the metal with a softer metal filler that gets into the grain structure and holds the metal together Where as welding melts the metal and makes it one piece. You could weld it but would take a lot of heat and probably copper nickel filler rod I weld over furnace brazes with hastelloy X or W and it works well as long as the braze filler is based with nickel. Good luck! Great content!

Not sure if this is going to become more common but brazing and soldering if fluxed right the sweet only flows to the heat. Alsoa wet paper towel is your friend when doing multiple places in heat zone like welding. Like welding flux on rod helps brazing more so. Stay bright 8 is good to keep on hand if your in soldering business

Woo hoo success

You might try Harris flux coated 45% most people call it blue rod

BTW Scott Rabbi taught me how to TIG

7:10...you need a little more O2 in that flame....will give you more heat.... .shorten the acetylene flame just short of a neutral flame like you would use for steel welding....

The "sucking" you're observing while silver soldering is called capillary action.

Bro that’s bad ass I’m a weld/fab guy and have never gotten the chance to do.

i think IC weld did some brazing on a gas tank

I like to Tig weld bigger joints as to brazing but that’s just me lol

Tried brazing copper too brass once ended up soldering it as it's nearly impossible. I had an old timer tell me that it can be done but it takes a lot of practice

I have always associated brazing with the long skinny white filler and soldering with flux and bare filler. However others have provided a better answer. Love that you are always trying to improve your skill set. On a practical note, I probably would've used JB Weld and walked away. When are we going to put up a stair?

Settings for welding tips, acetylene was pretty close, 4-7 psi is where I'm usually at. Oxygen 5-10 psi is the range I've always stayed in - I believe 40 was Tommy Chong high. When I taught, students were usually set at 5psi and 5psi, adjust as needed. You made a very good atempt and hats off to you for learning new skills. :) I likely would have removed the parts (de-solder or un-solder I guess) then cleaned and started fresh. (Btw, I greatly prefer tig brazing)

Meltin, Meltin, Meltin... I haven't missed a single episode and have enjoyed every one since I subscribed..but this one. So filled with incorrect terms and unknowns about the process used. The term Silver Solder gets thrown about these days to mean "silver bearing tin based soft solder" (lead free plumbing solder). In classic terms (before the current misnomer took its place), silver solder refers to what is more properly identified as silver brazing. It comes down to melt/bond temperatures and filler metals/fluxes. In accepted terms, temperatures up to 800F = (soft) soldering. Above 800F (usually 1100 to 1400F range) = silver (hard solder) brazing. It does appear in the video view at 1:06 that the joint was soft soldered (likely lead based if so), based on the color and width of the bond metal. However, you could soft solder over silver braze, if that were the case, but not visa-versa. My guess is that you were using Harris STAY-BRITE, which has a 4% silver content that you mentioned in the video. So here's the "GO Fnck YOURSELF" moment - do some research into what you're putting out there. Since a lot of it was overdubbed, you certainly could have gotten things strait and you had welderpaul to run your jargon against. Now I know what to do, you don't have to say it ;-) Keep on burning rod, etc. but learn some more about how to solder and braze.

I woulda went at it w the tig and some silicon bronze. Might of scrapped it.

That's almost the way we repaired radiators a long time ago we used muriatic acid for cleaning flushing it off with water dry it thoroughly with the torch then use a solder paste with bar of solder and torch we even had an electric heavy duty soldering iron and it worked each mechanic was required to have one in our tool box we worked for a citrus company they had about 25 Massey Ferguson farm tractors ranging from 48 to 150hp and a whole bunch reckless drivers

I do have a question/comment about this job and that is if fitting was a surface mounted fitting and being a fixed only with silver solder wouldn’t the better repair have been to heat the solder up and removed the fitting, then clean the fitting and cylinder it is attached to, then flux tin and solder the fitting back to the cylinder

progress on the house would be neat! which you may already have on another channel of yours. Do you have another channel besides this channel?

you can tig braze using ac or dc

I’ve only done brazing one time and when I did it just looks like I put a blob of metal on their can you make dimes when brazing or not really

If you will put some flux on the wire, it will take a little better into the joint.

Bcup 5 grade3 braze rod will tig it. Navy trick

Temperature is the only difference 800 ish below is soldering. Above is brazing both don't melt the parent metal

I have herd of tig brazing before but I have never tried it

nice

get the powder flux and dip your rod in it

Soldering uses lead brazing uses silver Sauter that’s the difference

Do you have contact info for John the welder repair man from old magne gas in Clearwater?

You could tig braze with ac high frequency. Silicon bronze would have worked well here.

Yeh I learned to solder and braze before I learned to weld..... that is pretty much how they taught us As technician I do a lot of soft soldering Yeh soldering and brazing is a different game .... a game you should learn to play. The only diference between silver soldering and brazing is that Brazing uses bronze or brass, they are near identical processes just differeing metals and chemicals. . we are talking more a general heating rather than the focused heat when welding. Ya realy not looking for a bead like you do in welding Though on long joins it can be like running a bead. . yeh the silver solder you had was a lot smaller and softer than I would expect for that size work, we generally get silver solder in sticks like brazing rods, It's EXpensive. . if using a liquid flux, get ya self a flux brush, it allows you to put the flux where you need it. The paste fluses can be easier to use because they will hang on the surface. Often the paste fluxes are a powdered flux mixed with water though some come as paste. . with solder and braze, the filler is idealy more a concave fillet rather than a convex bead. . Having a clean well fitting joint is what you want . the solder or braze will pretty much run where the flux goes. . The other thing I think you found is that sometimes you can reflow a joint with the addition of flux and filler . like in welding, the oil was giving you some trouble. . Yeh get yaself some scrap material and get some practice. You can do and fix things with soldering and brazing that you can't weld . one thing that, I found interesting was TIG and ARC brazing ... wow .... I saw that on weld.com. . As Austin Ross says .." learn something new every day".

Try your hand at lead welding great fun

Silicon bronz tig wire would have worked

whoa.....40 psi O2...you only need about 8 psi for O2 and 3 or 4 psi for acetylene

How common is it that you have to travel to be a welder?

Awesome job on the video there Anthony 👍🏻👏👍🏻 with you also thinking to about the TIG welding part of it you might of got the same result with the TIG welder the difference being is your using electrical Arc as your heat instead of oxy-acetylene??? But who knows I've never personally have experience with copper and brass brazen them together I have used some silicon bronze and I think the other one I have is silica aluminum it's all kind of cookie. But I do have to give you props for the great results you got for being a rookie doing it... You kind of almost go on the motto of what I do you can't fuck something up that's already fucked up!! 😁😁

I call it put something together you ain't never put together before if it holds Hellyeah if it don't need more practice

Hey, I think you should do a segment on chlorinated brake cleaner and welding. I was working on my chipper probably a month ago and I used an old canna brake cleaner didn’t have a label on it. I don’t know if it was chlorinated or not. I think it possibly may have rained on it and I use WD-40 over the top of it but please do a public service announcement about that shit because I had no idea.

😎👍

You were soldering using a lead free solder. Many times people will mix the terms between soldering and brazing, when brazing use the term brazing filler, not solder.

Excellent. Recently I have had increasingly more jobs that require brazing. I guess that is what happens when you specialize in pre-WWI race cars....

Well,first off?if no one's said it?:you're doin great,man-and I'm not trying to blow smoke up your ass;soldering/brazing is a big challenge when you first do it. 2nd: off hand-(cuz it's kinda my thing tbh)I'll hit ya w the nerd-stats: -Antimony is the name of the other element -"capillary action" is the molecular process that's taking place during the soldering/brazing processes:it's what sucks and sticks(hey-O!)everything together,Physics/Metallurgy/Material Science-wise -and in my experience(don't tell any fuckin engineers I said this!)???---the more flux,dude??? The BETTER!!! one thing I always remember,especially when I'm doing this exact same process,is to heat-then flux!heat!-then flux! Even if you're in the middle of your joint. Js Sorry I couldn't be of more help- I spent the whole damn day getting ready for my new welding job(like a 9-5 gig),and I spent the day Aluminum stick welding a canoe for my buddies kid-so I'm a bit buzzed. Lol But damn good for your first time Anthony! No shitting,man! ❤️😈🤘🤘🤘