Rarer/less-known/different welding rods I have

[Gary Fowler]

So far of all the equipment I have, I dont have the first missile (yet) so I will just stick with my basic 6010/7018 which is about as many dollars as I want to spend for welding rods. I guess if I was welding as a business, I would need a lot of different rods. Incoloy 600 usually welded any unknown to unknown back in the days before nuclear metal analyzer except of course the aluminum and exotics like Titanium, zirconium, palladium etc.

Remind me sometime to tell the tale about the Palladium tool box I welded for an iron worker once using Titanium rods before he found out the value of it. It stayed hidden under a fab table for at least 2 years that I worked at the Celanese plant in Bayport Texas. Might still be there. It weighed about 20 pounds. Looked up the Palladium metal selling price today under precious metal pricing: $575 per ounce.

 

[yomax4]

Yeah, There are usually basic filler metals that can replace the niche items. I always wach the ladies Plasma Weld Gold Rings at one of the Jostens plants. Palladium is a new one for me. Bet you don't stick weld that.

 

[Gary Fowler]

I'm not sure what they used it for at that big chemical plant but the guy said he found the 4'x8' sheet of 1/8" thick plate in their scrap yard. We were fabricating a bunch of Titanium and Zirconium lines for some highly corrosive acid (no idea of the name but supposed to eat thru schedule 40 stainless in less than 1 minute). The Titanium welding rods (TIG) welded it just fine. Titanium has to be welded with internal and external purge and we fabricated a 1.5" wide trailer (small box contoured to the pipe size and filled with steel wool and SS screen)x as long as practical for each size pipe and used that for the Titanium. You only welded the length of the trailer and then had to stop and hold it in place till everything cooled off. If oxygen gets too it before the weld metal cools below about 500F then it hardens. I think that is how the Titanium coated drill bits are made. If it is contaminated, it turns from silver to straw colored on to a blue depending on the amount of oxygen it gets. We checked the welds for hardness using a needle sharp tungsten. A good weld you could scratch, but even slightly contaminated and you couldnt scratch it at all and brother that is hard when you cant scratch it with a tungsten point. Any thing that wouldnt scratch had to be cut out and redone. We also welded some Zirconium there and no one knew how to weld it and Brown and Root didnt have a welding procedure. There were 3 of us working on how to weld it. All we knew was a bit of info we got from the pipe fab supplier that it had to be welded in a complete inert atmosphere so we built some plexiglass boxes with rubber glove inserts similar to what you see on tv with scientist handling deadly toxins. We had boxes made for butt joints, Tee joints & 90 ells with several glove inserts in different places so you could position yourself to see the weld. Zirconium is very resistant to acid but it oxidizes easily when hot. Both the Titanium and Zirconium can be cut like butter with an oxy torch, if fact when it gets hot, you can literally swing the torch as fast as you can and it will cut. Then we had to grind off slowly at least an 1/8" of metal prior to welding. Grinding either material produced no metal dust as it all vaporized in the air and even a file could make sparks from zirconium. They used zirconium filiments to make old flash bulbs. We had on guy using a water cooled saw to cut a piece of it one time and the cuttings go hot enough to flash off like a magnesium flare. We didnt use that any more. Anyway after much experimentation we found a way to weld it but only in the horizontal position using Helium on the Tig gun and Argon in the box. OF course engineers made every field weld in the vertical position so we had two welds to make rather than one.

 

[OkieDave]

The combination of zirconium and Brown and Root sounds like you were working in the nuclear industry. What were you doing?

 

[Gary Fowler]

Actually I mostly worked in the Petro-Chemical division and a little in the Power boiler division early projects with the company. Luckily never involved with the nuke side, I spent 45 years helping to build refineries and chemical plants in Louisiana, Texas and California of which about 14 of those years were work outside the USA. Did a little 2 year stint with a small company called Nepco building electric generation facilities in California, New York and North Carolina and 16 months with CB&I building a LNG liquifaction plant in Peru but most of my time was with B&R later called KBR afer the Halliburton buy out of Dresser Industries who owned MW Kellogg. Halliburton merged B&R and MWK companies and subsequent public offering of KBR as independent company. Halliburton nearly ruined B&R in the process as MWK had about a billion$ worth of asbestos liability claims that bankrupted the then Kellogg Brown & Root but they hung together.

 

[Gary Fowler]

I guess I didnt answer the one question. I started out welding then later after being welding supervisor for about 10 years, I moved into the Quality Manager role. My last project was Construction Manager over a Nigerian Pipe Fabrication facility which was a small part (about $40 million of a $7 billion gas to liquids plant that turned NG into synthetic diesel fuel. When I finished that I retired but was asked to go to Algeria on a temp. assignment for some quality issues. Made 5 months on that 2 month assignment, now retired again.

 

[yomax4]

Just the kind of cool stuff I love to read about. Great Career, I hope you trained a lot of guys.

 

[cowski]

too my knowledge i have not used those rods.when i purchase expensive rods i like the certanium rods.i have not bought any in years.still have a few left from the last can.

 

[Shield Arc]

I wish I could remember the number of a certanium rod I once used while building a huge addition on a saw mil. The saw mil weldors had this rod I used to weld extension onto ship augers for the carpenter types, sometimes these extension would be 6-feet long, never had one break!

 

[Rock knocker]

Did a little 2 year stint with a small company called Nepco building electric generation facilities in California, New York and North Carolina

How long ago did you work for Nepco? Do you remember any of the Superintendents? How about Slick Rick?

They were actually pretty darn big, but not like KBR, CBI, CE or BW. They started as Bumstead and Woolford in Seattle in the '40's, as a erector of Riley Boilers. They eventually went national, and erected all manner of boilers, steam turbines and flue gas assemblies. Atlantic Gulf was started in the late seventies as the merit shop part of Bumstead. The Board sold it to Zurn, who needed an erector for their boiler division, in about 1983. The Woodinville office changed it's name to Nepco about then.

Nepco moved it's fabrication shop to North Carolina prior to 1989, then closed it.

Nepco was eventually sold by Zurn to Enron, who has subsequently sold it to a Canadian firm. It still has a presence in the Bothell WA. area.