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Welding water hardening drill rod

Mickey_D

Stainless
Joined
Apr 18, 2006
Location
Austin, TX
A customer came to me with an emergency job. Need to make a couple of dozen standoffs out of 1 inch rod that will be welded to a 10 gauge plate. All that I have on hand right now is a couple of sticks of 1 inch water hardening drill rod (the enco on sale variety) and I would like to avoid driving all over town trying to find something else. Can this be mig welded or I am going to end up in a mess? On the plus side, I will be working on this on Thanksgiving day, so the hourly rate will help with Christmas.
 
I have had very bad luck with this on some large swivel castors I was making for my garden cart project. Seems the metal crystalized and kept snapping off just above the weld. I finally used 1018CRS and the problem went away. -Mike
 
C1018 would be best, however, you can likely make do with W1 drill rod if you preheat them to 400°F before welding. Turn 'em blue, even :D Weld them while they are hot, and then just for insurance, post heat the thing to 600°F to draw out the temper of any hardened areas.
 
My weld engineer just took off for the weekend soooo. I'm thinking that you need an 850 F hydrogen bake on W1 then an anneal. We did some tool repair a while back and IIRC, we even got some special alloy rod and TIGed everything.

Like HFD said, it would not be first choice.
JR
 
I found some 1018 a couple of miles down the road. When I called he said they were out, but I decided to stop by and we found enough shorts in the drop stack to work. Thanks for the saving me from a mess.
 
For the record the water and oil hardening tool steel to mild steel base metal procedure I've used derives from the reccommendation of a real live weld engineer:

Preheat to 500, weld with 308-18, post-heat to 800-1000 degrees and allow to air cool. This results in a crack-free weld and machinable tool steel. Note small items of oil hardening tool steel may get quite hard if air cooled so insulate the post heated work in vermiculite until 300 degrees.
 








 
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