Gonna buy me a friction welder

woodlandfarms · Sep 25, 2014

dont need it, for sure can't afford it but way cool

I could watch these pipes forge together with friction welding forever

rswyan · Sep 25, 2014

My oldest - who is in the Welding Engineering program at OSU - spent a good portion of this past summer doing an internship at NASA in Huntsville working with friction-stir. Was fascinating to hear him tell about what he was doing and the technology involved.

Gary Fowler · Sep 25, 2014

Kind of along the same line as bonding plastic pipe except with that you use a hot plate to heat both sides then remove the plate and shove the two pieces together. It looks the same when finished as the hot plastic squishes out the seam. It makes a seamless joint for larger plastic pipe, no glue or couplings.

yomax4 · Sep 25, 2014

Also look up Stir welding. I believe ESAB had something to do with that. You can stir weld 2 flat plates together with no welding. Aluminum too.

cqaigy2 · Sep 25, 2014

Years ago before the interwebs, in high school metal shop, I played with friction welding. Some things welded pretty solid :thumbsup:, some not so much. :thumbdown: It was pretty interesting to experiment with differing speeds of both pieces of material.

roadhunter · Sep 25, 2014

Gary Fowler said:
Kind of along the same line as bonding plastic pipe except with that you use a hot plate to heat both sides then remove the plate and shove the two pieces together. It looks the same when finished as the hot plastic squishes out the seam. It makes a seamless joint for larger plastic pipe, no glue or couplings.

+1. Reminds me of fusing poly pipe.

Arc weld · Sep 25, 2014

Some rollers for undercarriage are made with friction welding.

flusher · Sep 26, 2014

Friction stir welding has been developed over the past 15-20 years and is becoming the favored method in the aerospace industry for welding large structures like propellant tanks. SpaceX uses FSW for the tanks on their Falcon 9 launch vehicle. NASA just unveiled a large FSW welding jig at the Michaud facility in New Orleans to weld the tanks on their new humongous SLS launch vehicle.

Blade Breaker · Sep 26, 2014

I once got some thin wall tubing to weld together just using a lathe. Never tested it to see how good it was but sure is fun.

Eclipse was showing this off a few years ago at Oshkosh.

The Eclipse 550 | Innovations and Green Technologies

woodlandfarms · Sep 26, 2014

first, Osh? hate you.

Second, VERY cool. WHen I saw that video I didn't think of this as being delicate... clearly it is.

I have always dreamt of a Vans RV-10.. that welder would make short work of it for sure....