Frontispiece illustration: Hardfacing with MIG
Photographs by Andrew Pearce unless otherwise credited
Book layout by Liz Whatling
North American technical editor Brian T. Yarrison CWE, CWI
Marked photographs on pages 18, 19, and 98 courtesy of ESAB North America.
Copyright © Andrew Pearce, 1992, 2007.
North American Copyright © Andrew Pearce, 2012. Published under license.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission of the copyright holder.
First published in Great Britain by Old Pond Publishing Ltd., in 1992 as Farm Welding and then in 2007 as Farm and Workshop Welding.
First published in North America in 2012 by Fox Chapel Publishing, 1970 Broad St., East Petersburg, PA 17520.
ISBN 978-1-56523-741-4
eISBN 978-1-60765-122-2
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Pearce, Andrew, 1948-
Farm and workshop welding / by Andrew Pearce.
p. cm.
Rev. ed. of Farm welding / Andrew Pearce. 2007.
Includes index.
ISBN 978-1-56523-741-4
1. Welding. 2. Farm equipment--Maintenance and repair. I. Pearce, Andrew, 1948- Farm welding. II. Title.
TS227.P3935 2012
671.5’2--dc23
2012004024
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eBook Version 1.0
Because working with metal and other materials inherently includes the risk of injury and damage, this book cannot guarantee that the activities in this book is safe for everyone. For this reason, this book is sold without warranties or guarantees of any kind, expressed or implied, and the publisher and the author disclaim any liability for any injuries, losses, or damages caused in any way by the content of this book or the reader’s use of the tools needed to complete the activities presented here. The publisher and the author urge all readers to thoroughly review each project and to understand the use of all tools before beginning.
Contents
Any Old Iron? Metal Identification
Sections
1 Shielded Metal Arc Welding (SMAW)
2 Gas Metal Arc Welding (GMAW)
Welding Cast Iron
Pipe Welding
Hardfacing and Gouging
Taps and Dies
Drill Sharpening
Appendices
What’s in a Name? Process Terminology
Useful Conversions: Electrodes and Cored Wires
Introduction
Almost anyone can weld. All that’s needed are basic hand/eye co-ordination, an idea of what’s going on and a little guided practice. So far nobody has come up with a book that grabs the reader’s hands and says ‘do it like this!’, and until someone does, pictures are worth a lot of words. So pictures are the heart of this book, forming a visual guide for beginners and a fault-finding service for anyone who wants to improve.
Although far from the last word on welding (plenty of other sources have much better claim to that), the advice here is practical and aimed at the farm welder. Use this book for reference, dipping in and out to find snippets of info, the occasional hint or maybe a way to get yourself out of a problem. It’s not for sitting down and reading in one hit … unless you have a particularly high boredom threshold.
So what’s coming? Ten sections. Arc welding mild steel is first, covering equipment, rod selection, plant set-up and work in various positions. And, as most people trip up on the same problems, there’s a look at common faults and ways to fix them.
Section 2 deals with GMAW welding, a process increasingly favored in workshops. Then it’s the turn of the farmer’s most flexible friends, gas welding and cutting.
With the basics sorted we can move on to trickier stuff. First is TIG work – material-wise the most versatile of all techniques, yet also the one that takes most manual skill – then the increasingly affordable process of plasma cutting. Next come welding pipe and cast iron (both useful weapons in anyone’s armory) followed by hardfacing, which