Welding Ti next week!!!!

[JSGAuto]

Background - Hobby machinist/welder. Engineer by trade.

I am working on a project at work that may require Ti welding. (still in design phase, may be cast). My boss mentioned MIG welding Ti. I hadn't heard of it before. Apparently my group (before I started working there) perfected the process to do production MIG welding. Being that he is a cool boss, he immeditly called the weld shop, and set up a time for a demo. The welders seemed trilled with my interest in the process and offered for me to try it out!!!

I am so excited!!! Didn't think I would ever have the opertunity to weld Ti!!

Seems I am making some new friends down in the weld shop as well!!

Sorry to bore everyone, I am a garage hobbist at heart...things like this excite me.

Jim

[davidh]

and where are you ? ? ?

sounds like a great opportunity for you

[macona]

Precision Cast parts would weld their ingots together with a Maxstar 350 TIG with a cold feed wire feeder. I cant imagine how much a spool of ti wire must cost.

[huntinguy]

My dad used to weld Ti years ago (around 40 + in fact). It was done with a tig set up. I have seen some of his work. Pretty cool.

I hear "they" are developing a friction welding process for welding Ti that is almost stronger than the base metal. I guess Ti is getting so expensive the process is being designed to use scrap to make parts that will be machined later.

[JSGAuto]

I'll let you know how it goes!

I am in Northern NJ

[JSGAuto]

Mission accomplished.

I welded lots of beads, and metal together today. Asked a million questions, and had several demos.

Tried Ti MIG, Stainless MIG, Mild Steel Mig, and AL Mig. I have done AL and of course regular steel, but I couldn't pass up the opertunity to try with a professional looking over my sholder. All with top of the line equipment. Amazing what a 20K machine can do compaired to my 1K stuff! The torches themselves were must more robust and comfy to hold. The machines were prograble, pretty neat, had an LCD dysplaying all the parameters. Interesting too, he mentioned that they are not loyal to one machine, and like to have each brand in the shop, as some do better jobs then others.

Got demos in robot welding...wow thats cool! Watch a few of the Pro's weld, TIG in particular, wow, amazing how fast they go and produce such a high quality weld!

So Ti welds fairly easy (comming from someone who had professional advice as I did it, and the machine set up) welds produced are extreamly clean. Looking at the puddle is weird, like 3 spining things looking back at you! Quite a unique sound too!

All in all, it was a lot of fun, and educational of course. I don't want to know how expensive this was, given the cost of Ti.

Oh, and I did ask. A 10lb spool of Ti is $800.

[macona]

When I was working on some machine at Precision Cate Parts I was in their rework areas. In once section they had 4x8" chambers about 4" high that the parts were set in and urged with argon to weld. They dont even bother with gas cups and the like then.

There was another chamber they had set up for doing a swivel base from howitzers. It was a Flexible rubber/vinyl fabric coated tent about 8' cubed. It was dropped around the part from a hoist and sealed with clamps at the bottom. It would take about an hour to get the thing filled up. When it was the tent was bulging at the sides from the weight of the argon.

Cant imagine how much it must cost to fill that thing up every time...

The welder had a acrylic window to look through. They would just tape a welding lens to the window. The parts were set on a table that could rotate and raise/lower through pneumatic motors.