Repairing Thin-Wall Square Tubing

[bigdeano]

With 1/16 rods I sometimes cut them in half. Makes them much easier to control. With about 30 amps they will do a good job on .062 metal with a little practice.

 

[Beltzington]

Well I went by a local fab shop and took a welder off a $1000 project to find me a $10 piece of metal, nice folks. Now I have the metal I am going to get all the holes drilled before I attach it to the feed control arm. Initially I am just going to bolt everything together to insure fit and function and than decide if I need to permanently attach it. I like the idea of brazing, I think for this type connection it would work better than trying to arc weld the thin-wall tubing. I might mention that I was at the top of my welding class in high-school but that was 40-years ago and the hands have forgotten what the brain remembers. Appreciate the advice.

 

[MossRoad]

You could also put a solid piece of filler inside it like a plug. Then weld the thin walls to the solid. I did this a few months ago. Someone had one of those cheap dual basketball rims over nets kind of game, like at the fair, but in your basement. One of the rims cracked off. It was too thin for my skills, and I wanted to beef it up a bit, so I found some round stock that was a bit smaller in diameter, slipped it inside the thin tube, and welded it shut. Worked great.

 

[TractorGuy]

11 gauge 1-1/4" square tube should fit over it.

 

[yomax4]

Get some small rods as mentioned above. You have a welder, May as well learn how to use it..

 

[crazyal]

Since you have the metal it doesn't matter now but in the future I would try to find metal that could go inside the thin wall tubing. I find it's much easier to weld thin steel that;s on top of thicker steel as I can run the bead close enough to the thin steel where it gets welded to the thinker steel without worrying about burning through. If you do burn through you still have the thicker steel under the thin stuff so you just adjust the bead.

 

[Beltzington]

Well... I did some welding on the control arms tonight and it came out worse than I imagined. I had some 1/8" rods so I did some practicing on the bent tubing I had cut off and was able to run a decent bead without burning through using 70-amps but when I attempted to join the new and old tubing things went south, bead wasn't bonding to both pieces of tubing and also melted the ends of the tubing. Couldn't even make it look good with a grinder but fortunately the welds are only holding the two pieces together not structurally important. Clearly I need allot more practice before submitting my resume to Boeing. Going to just bolt the new legs to the old control arm and call it a day, that way I can easily replace them if they get bent again.

Thanks for the advice!

 

[flyerdan]

What happens is that when you run a bead in the middle of a piece of steel, it has material on all sides to act as a heat sink and wick off the puddle heat. When you get to the edge, as in joining pieces, you lose half of the heat sink and the excess will blow out the thin material. That's why we always sleeve thin stuff if we can.

 

[yomax4]

In this job it would have made a case for for an inexpensive 115v Mig. Even if it was just for innershield.

 

[Texasmark]

I don't have the volume to go with TIG but did buy a gas MIG. Just today I was working on a job with 6011 sticks making a big mess, deep penetration, splatters and slag all over. Put it away, got my MIG out and nice and pretty, no spattering, nice control, super welder.