Cheers Luke! Thanks for all the videos you’ve produced this year ..... I’ve really enjoyed them. To you, your family and your lovely lady, I wish you a very Happy Christmas and health, peace and happiness for the new year.
I think your understanding of a full pen weld might be off a bit. The only application of such a weld I am aware of is joining two pieces end to end, be it a pipe, H beam, or plate. Both are beveled all the way through, spaced a given amount according to the application. If you're using carbon steel, you want to preheat the steel to around 500, and use the appropriate rod. I use a lot of 4140 and use a nickel wire or 8018cs. I hope it worked out for you none the less. The only way I know to fuse the entire plate to the face that I know of is to forge weld it. I'm pretty sure any way around it will leave you with poor energy transfer.
Oh jeeze where to start, I'm sorry but a bunch of mistakes were made, I'm not trying to be a buzz kill but you have to learn & I can try to help you some along the way, first off you don't want a gap in between your plates, thats just gonna take away from the weight of the anvil & let there be a bounce or vibration, you should have kept the plates flat & ground a 80 or 90 % bevel around it then filled it with a good bead, try doing a 60 rod pass first thats called a root pass, it burns nice & deep, then grind it out then cover it with 70 rod, you could even drill some big holes in the top plate, 1" or so then plug weld it ; if your gonna use rod for a spacer knock the flux off it, you had way more than an 1/8" gap there, the rod is the 1/8' piece ; if your gap is big enough to call for some additional filler always use welding rod, don't add odd ball steel to the mix, knock the flux off it then lay it in there, I've always had luck filling big gaps with a small rod, control the puddle & work it, then cover it with some bigger rod, I'm sorry I don't mean to be negative but its a long journey to get good at this crap, I've ben at it along time & many men have helped me along the way, never stop learning............. TIP: invest in a rod oven for your 70 & stainless rod, you'll be amazed at how smooth it will run ( you don't need it for 60 rod )
No one responded to you, but I'm looking to do the same thing and I appreciated your comment! I'm going to do a similar thing with a 1/2" plate of A2, but with better weld prep like you suggested. The plug welds are a great suggestion to deal with the penetration issues you get when you aren't forge-welding it on.
bosun1724 well U covered it pretty good. And totally agree with all u pointed out here. I too hate to be the buzz kill. But good teaching, if he listens. Thanks, now i don,t have to👍
i didnt sense any disrespect in ur comment man u said it respectfully, i consider those invaluable constructive tips because theyre coming from experience, id very much appreciate input like this. i wouldnt have known anything about which rod to use, i woulda asked dressel or somebody i dont know if i would have plug weld holes, in fact i would have ran the top of the pieces of track n bottom of the plate with the mill to get them flat so theirs no rebound n loss of energy, then beveled like u said n welded, maybe a single plug in the middle wouldnt hurt to keep it from bowing in some weird way over time n giving rebound n again loss of energy per hit
Luke Edward Mixter dude it's ruined next time bevel the sides to at least a 45 degree angle and weld it flat with no spacers make this a rule of thumb always bevel everything you weld from now on
Jon Flanagin + you mean a thousand. The rail should now be cut into 1" strips and bend tested. It will be shown to contain hundreds of impurity concentrations, some huge. Unacceptable. And Luke, nobody is trying to make you miserable, but teach. You will gain knowledge by a teachable attitude. Some of us have been around the block a few times, and again, we're trying to teach, not condemn.
Commenter Five thanks, I thought about doing something similar, if this had worked. I was just guessing that it would not really work. Perhaps it is ok to use as an anvil, but the weld is probably about 50% slag. Now enough of how it does not work, is there a way to make it work? And I am sure a 45 degree bevil won't work, because there is simply not enough material for this in this case. Can't weld in one go either. So what if you really clean all the slag off after each rod, would this work?
There is bound to be a huge amount of slag in between those plates. There is no room to control the stick, so there is no way you will get a clean weld. How do you clear the slag between passes?? It would have been best to machine and polish the 2 faces as flat as possible so they form a friction bond, and just weld the outside edges. Or at the most, drill 2 holes on each side of the vertical center plate, from the bottom, that you fill with weld to form a bond. Either way, i think this is a waste of resources. The money spent on electricity, electrodes, and man-hours, is enough to buy a proper anvil. Rail tracks are crap. I should know, i have a piece too. The only section that works half decent is the middle. The rest of the surface is unsupported, and thus will flex under the hammer blows, causing you to bleed energy. You will need to hammer your work twice as much to move any metal. And all the heat from the weld has killed the heat treat from that plate anyway...
never seen welding like that before (deep groove filling ) when you mentioned it i figured the plate would pinch the more you would weld the gap close clamping down on the weldingrod in the end , but it seemed to have worked whell
I'm glad you decided to weld the face plate instead of trying to forge weld. I was concerned you would ruin the anvil. I've seen this type of welding, if yours works with the welding Machine you have, I will go for it also.
I know this is a old video and I am no expert. But from what other blacksmith videos have said, that air pocket you have in between the plates is going to cause springing. You want solid hitting area. You want more mass in that ass your hitting.
Ive read that for full penetration welding you want to preheat the work to 400F, to avoid a steep thermal gradient that will create a lot of stress ... stress that may cause the weld to fail during subsequent use. Losing some points off your final hardness seems like a worthy tradeoff if it prevents the weld from failing.
looked like a lot of pigeon shit on there BUT iv never seen anyone weld like that before i would have thought a deep groove weld would have been better, but there again he is American
so, did you keep all the half rods from the first part, (when the rod got to short to reach the bottom) to use later as the gap got filled? Looks like an awful lot of work to stuff up the heat treatment most modern rail already comes with.
Good Job Luke......We do what we can with what we are given......pfft on the nay sayers! I am currently getting ready to fire my Wood Burning forge to make some knives as gifts.....building a Forge Barn too .....it should heat up good in there to ward off these cool days we are havin in the desert right now.....Merry Christmas and Good Wishes for the New Year to all! "When the Phoenix rises from the flames....is even more beautiful than before" ! ....persevere on!
Did u fire up yet for Blacksmithing? Weather is perfect! We fired the homemade Wood Forge on New Years in the New Forge Barn! Works great! Good Wishes to u folks! Im grinding down a rail to make an ASO....it actually is a lot harder face on it than i would have thought! Im going to buy the H Freight 15 lb anvil for the Hardee hole.....easier than drilling one in the rail!
My god just seen this .....I give you kudos for trying but ....and this happens to everyone stop ,listen and learn.....and the fact you've built the thing that builds things wrong means I wouldn't trust you to build anything.....once I saw the rods as spacers I spilled beer and I dont usually do that.....and even if you did that right ....no preheat ....no stringers ......nothing?
This is why he said he was going to grind the welds and HEAT TREAT 😮😅, do you watch the video on mute, or just too busy complaining and missed it 😕😞...
I cant weld for shit i taught myself on a shitty little welder but nothing i ever built has fallen appart , hes not building a bridge hes making something to whack with a hammer . Chill out!!
Luke Edward Mixter + You didn't show how you deslagged each pass way up between the rail and plate. And it takes a lot of practice to run an acceptable bead in conditions better than that. Try cutting 1" off the end of the entire work, and bend test it for certification standard, and you'll see you've made a mess full of huge impurities. Nonsense.
By trade im a welder not just a hobby guy but we all start out as one. The welds there sure as shit wouldn’t pass a test but they dont have to. If it holds together and you get a little bounce from your hammer than you got what you need. Interesting method and maybe has some flaws but who cares. If you can smack it it works right.
