Spiritburner
New Member
- Messages
- 5
- Location
- Sitges spain
Hiya all, new user here .
Firstly I do have experience of Mig, MMA, Basic Tig , Oxyacetylene welding, Brazing, Silver soldering and normal low temp soldering
Now that I am retired I want to continue my hobby, which is making old style Trench Lighters and very small camping stoves fueled by Alcohol or Meths in fact some of them are so small they're worn as jewellery in some places, They all work though that is the main item, anyway I make these items from Copper & Brass and sometimes with thin titanium, I have a mini machine shop at home which has a Beader/flanging tool, a slip roller which I use for making cones and cylinders and a press roller which I used to thin down any copper or brass if I'm unhappy with the thickness. I also have a small metal lathe with a mill attached for machining brass and copper stock and the odd piece of soft mild steel. It's only a small machine, but it does work very well.. I also have a large Woodlathe and I have actually been spinning brass on that to form cylinders, which works quite well.
The metals I use need to be around 0.5 mm in thickness and using the above tools I fashion and fettle them into the designs that I like however I've always had trouble not with the soldering, but I'm unhappy with seeing the actual soldering joints so I've been looking at solutions to try and get away from actually soldering and more fusing the base metals together.
I don't need them to be deep, penetrative welds because as I said the material is an absolute maximum of 1 mm and normally in the region of 0.5 mm to 0.75 mm, on the lighters though I tend to use 1 mm as it needs to be a bit stronger.
What I'd like to be able to do is join these together and then grind or sand down the joint so that if I'm lucky enough you actually won't see a joint or it will only be minor.
I have tried this with a small tig welder that I already own and I cannot achieve what I'm looking for with that machine. I'm suffering from blow through and despite the low amperages it's capable of I still cannot get it down low enough to prevent holes appearing or I end up with a blob of copper or brass.
What I have seen on the Internet over the last couple of years is this plethora of cheap Chinese inverter Tig welders that have this "Cold" function ability which I think is probably more like a type of spot weld. I have tried that with my own welder but without success. Now I know these videos are rubbish. They are sped up. The arc flashes in most cases are removed in post production so it gives the impression that there are none and of course the penetration is probably zero or if you're lucky, maybe a millimetre , you never know because these girls that seem to do the welding with no PPE and fancy nails never turn the piece of metal over so you can't judge the penetration and of course there's a lot of sleight of hand going on I think.
I think I understand how this type of " cold" welding works, they obviously use a timer circuit somehow to break the cycle to create a type of spot weld, there's also I have seen a timer for sale on Amazon that pretty much enables you to do that with an existing Tig welder and that is actually under €100 and I've seen some videos by what appear to be actual welders using this to re-create what the Chinese videos show.
For me, if all it does is fuse two thin metals together that's all I need I don't need it to be deep penetrative welds, I just need the two base metals joining so that I can then grind or sand down the joints to make them hopefully disappear more or less.
You'll see a photo below and you can see that in that photo. I make a small cylinder which has been capped on each end a few holes in it to allow the alcohol to burn then there's a small brass cylinder which holds the fuel and a couple of small copper or brass pipes that connects it all together. At the moment I do all of this with silver solder and then grind, sand and polish it and then age it using various chemicals to give it the effect that it's been used or is of antique appearance.
What I'd like to try and do is weld it using one of these welders or the Amazon timer but I don't know anybody that has used this type of tool or anyone that can give me any idea as to whether this would actually work well or if there is an alternative.
So I'm after a little bit of advice please I don't need a welding machine to go above 1 mm because I already have a three phase mig welder along with a MMA inverter and an old tig welder. I have my own bottles of pure argon and an enriched argon mix for stainless steel welding. I still have my original ship welder from like 50 years ago when I was a teenager welding bits onto cars. It actually still works believe it or not. These were mainly used before I retired and most of the time they just sit there but I'm loathed to get rid of them just in case but none of them will work for me to do this very thin metal work. I have to be able to join the metals and they have to be sealed because they will hold fuel.
This is a very old hobby of mine and I've been doing it for a long time and I'm now 63 , retired early due to mobility issues and I'd like to speed up the process a little bit and if possible earn some money from it as well. I'm also a Wood Turner and I also play with and build CNC machines and over here in Spain I also build CO2 lasers for people who want to predominantly cut or engrave wood and acrylic.
I also have a couple diode arrays which we are experimenting on to produce a colour engraver for stainless steel and titanium, currently I make the frames for the CNC machine is using 4040, 2040 and 2020 aluminium profile which I would like to weld together so I'm aware that I will need an AC Tig welder when I look at this new cold machine assuming I go down that route.
I'm sorry this is long and boring but I just felt I needed to get the messages across in one go. If you are able to give me any advice at all I would really appreciate this. Please though welding is not my skill set. I can do it and I can do it reasonably well, but I've never been trained in it professionally I bow to those who have much higher skills fun my own. I'm an Engineer, well that's what the letters after my name say when I used to use them in a professional capacity, however most of my working career was not actually spent getting my hands dirty and it's only in the last five or six years I started to use a lot of the skills that I learned at university and my subsequent 5 year apprenticeship and I love doing it.
I've got a good few years left in me and this is what I want to do. It's damn hot here in the summer in Barcelona and luckily my workshop is nice and cool all year round being mostly underground and to be honest this keeps me out of the way so my wife tells me and I'm happy with that..
Many thanks
Neil Scott
Photos below give you an idea of what I make. I started off by copying but more and more now the designs are my own.
Firstly I do have experience of Mig, MMA, Basic Tig , Oxyacetylene welding, Brazing, Silver soldering and normal low temp soldering
Now that I am retired I want to continue my hobby, which is making old style Trench Lighters and very small camping stoves fueled by Alcohol or Meths in fact some of them are so small they're worn as jewellery in some places, They all work though that is the main item, anyway I make these items from Copper & Brass and sometimes with thin titanium, I have a mini machine shop at home which has a Beader/flanging tool, a slip roller which I use for making cones and cylinders and a press roller which I used to thin down any copper or brass if I'm unhappy with the thickness. I also have a small metal lathe with a mill attached for machining brass and copper stock and the odd piece of soft mild steel. It's only a small machine, but it does work very well.. I also have a large Woodlathe and I have actually been spinning brass on that to form cylinders, which works quite well.
The metals I use need to be around 0.5 mm in thickness and using the above tools I fashion and fettle them into the designs that I like however I've always had trouble not with the soldering, but I'm unhappy with seeing the actual soldering joints so I've been looking at solutions to try and get away from actually soldering and more fusing the base metals together.
I don't need them to be deep, penetrative welds because as I said the material is an absolute maximum of 1 mm and normally in the region of 0.5 mm to 0.75 mm, on the lighters though I tend to use 1 mm as it needs to be a bit stronger.
What I'd like to be able to do is join these together and then grind or sand down the joint so that if I'm lucky enough you actually won't see a joint or it will only be minor.
I have tried this with a small tig welder that I already own and I cannot achieve what I'm looking for with that machine. I'm suffering from blow through and despite the low amperages it's capable of I still cannot get it down low enough to prevent holes appearing or I end up with a blob of copper or brass.
What I have seen on the Internet over the last couple of years is this plethora of cheap Chinese inverter Tig welders that have this "Cold" function ability which I think is probably more like a type of spot weld. I have tried that with my own welder but without success. Now I know these videos are rubbish. They are sped up. The arc flashes in most cases are removed in post production so it gives the impression that there are none and of course the penetration is probably zero or if you're lucky, maybe a millimetre , you never know because these girls that seem to do the welding with no PPE and fancy nails never turn the piece of metal over so you can't judge the penetration and of course there's a lot of sleight of hand going on I think.
I think I understand how this type of " cold" welding works, they obviously use a timer circuit somehow to break the cycle to create a type of spot weld, there's also I have seen a timer for sale on Amazon that pretty much enables you to do that with an existing Tig welder and that is actually under €100 and I've seen some videos by what appear to be actual welders using this to re-create what the Chinese videos show.
For me, if all it does is fuse two thin metals together that's all I need I don't need it to be deep penetrative welds, I just need the two base metals joining so that I can then grind or sand down the joints to make them hopefully disappear more or less.
You'll see a photo below and you can see that in that photo. I make a small cylinder which has been capped on each end a few holes in it to allow the alcohol to burn then there's a small brass cylinder which holds the fuel and a couple of small copper or brass pipes that connects it all together. At the moment I do all of this with silver solder and then grind, sand and polish it and then age it using various chemicals to give it the effect that it's been used or is of antique appearance.
What I'd like to try and do is weld it using one of these welders or the Amazon timer but I don't know anybody that has used this type of tool or anyone that can give me any idea as to whether this would actually work well or if there is an alternative.
So I'm after a little bit of advice please I don't need a welding machine to go above 1 mm because I already have a three phase mig welder along with a MMA inverter and an old tig welder. I have my own bottles of pure argon and an enriched argon mix for stainless steel welding. I still have my original ship welder from like 50 years ago when I was a teenager welding bits onto cars. It actually still works believe it or not. These were mainly used before I retired and most of the time they just sit there but I'm loathed to get rid of them just in case but none of them will work for me to do this very thin metal work. I have to be able to join the metals and they have to be sealed because they will hold fuel.
This is a very old hobby of mine and I've been doing it for a long time and I'm now 63 , retired early due to mobility issues and I'd like to speed up the process a little bit and if possible earn some money from it as well. I'm also a Wood Turner and I also play with and build CNC machines and over here in Spain I also build CO2 lasers for people who want to predominantly cut or engrave wood and acrylic.
I also have a couple diode arrays which we are experimenting on to produce a colour engraver for stainless steel and titanium, currently I make the frames for the CNC machine is using 4040, 2040 and 2020 aluminium profile which I would like to weld together so I'm aware that I will need an AC Tig welder when I look at this new cold machine assuming I go down that route.
I'm sorry this is long and boring but I just felt I needed to get the messages across in one go. If you are able to give me any advice at all I would really appreciate this. Please though welding is not my skill set. I can do it and I can do it reasonably well, but I've never been trained in it professionally I bow to those who have much higher skills fun my own. I'm an Engineer, well that's what the letters after my name say when I used to use them in a professional capacity, however most of my working career was not actually spent getting my hands dirty and it's only in the last five or six years I started to use a lot of the skills that I learned at university and my subsequent 5 year apprenticeship and I love doing it.
I've got a good few years left in me and this is what I want to do. It's damn hot here in the summer in Barcelona and luckily my workshop is nice and cool all year round being mostly underground and to be honest this keeps me out of the way so my wife tells me and I'm happy with that..
Many thanks
Neil Scott
Photos below give you an idea of what I make. I started off by copying but more and more now the designs are my own.
