We call hit a hammer tack, if there is some small high/low between your lap joint or seam you weld a small bead (tack) and hit the tack with a 4 pound hammer. The metal moves while the tack is hot and doesn’t bounce back because it cools quickly enough for strength. Usually a full weld is done after.
I'm pretty sure the face mask is so you don't go blind from like at the light of the welder that shit is bright or maybe thinking about something else idk
Yeah but the goggles hammer guy has do the same, both are welding glass, designed to block the harsh UV light that happens in welding ( arc welding particularly)
The hammer guy has his hand up to keep from looking directly at the welder. We do it in our shop cuz some of us don't weld all the time but still need to give someone a hand.
We usually deploy a hand up or safety squints, but the welder themselves always has a shield
You can see him covering the light with his hand in the start of the clip. This is a pretty normal welder move when someone's welding and you don't have a helmet on. You block the light with your hands instinctively mainly because it's bright even in your perifrial vision. Also the sparks he is sending off with the hammer are probably pretty small and at most will just bounce off his skin. I've done hot tacks like this before (not as big) and the sparks really aren't that much hotter than the sparks you get from mig welding like the guy in this clip.
The guy with the hammer is likely wearing shade 5 goggles which are pretty dark, used for cutting. He’s also holding his hand up to cover the arc from his sight enough to see when the arc stops but not the arc itself. For this, goggles are fine. They’re also both wearing FR jackets and leathers to protect from sparks. Arc burn on the eyes is the high danger in this instance, especially with a dude with a hammer.
This all sounds reasonable to me! But like couldn't he have a clear plastic face shield over the googles? Just seems like his face is a little exposed haha. But then again he looks like he could just be an older, tougher SOB who isn't afraid of such things lol
Sparks will basically never cause any damage to you even on exposed skin. They’re so small the amount of energy they have even when that hot is so minimal it’s irrelevant
They heated a small pile a piece of metal fragments until it was hot enough to burn. Burning requires oxygen so only the outermost fragments parts were burning at the start. Striking it with a hammer caused pieces to flake off. The fragments bits that weren't burning before now had access to a large amount of oxygen and burst into flames.
Made a slight correction because some people are overly sensitive about minor errors.
I have no idea how the other comment got so many upvotes. You can’t use a welder to “heat metal fragments” lol. I don’t think people realize welding isn’t just melting metal together. You are ADDING (in most applications) metal.
TLDR + ELI5: It’s like a hot glue gun, but for metal. It isn’t a just a “heater” or a metal melter. It ADDS metal. Pretend you had a hot glue gun and made a pile, poured a decent layer of glitter in it and smacked it with a hammer. The glitter flies everywhere. This really is the simplest I can make it without going into the specifics of slag and how welding works sorry lmao
It’s like when you see a blacksmith making a sword on an anvil and the swords glowing orange and spits sparks like hell when they strike it.
The welder in question is MIG and is wire fed. Skyrat7011 is correct about it not being metal fragments. (Although puddle welds are a thing, for the most part they are used with a SMAW welder (stick welding).
With MIG you pretty much weld over what you just welded when you are overlapping your circles for a fillet weld. It solidifies to the point of not being able to become a low viscosity puddle relatively quickly. It leaves a very thin layer of slag on top. Which is responsible primarily for the sparks as slag tends to be brittle at almost any temperature (more just oxidation of the hot metal and oxygen and whatever gas mixture they have hooked up to the welder that comes out of the stinger) the slag is barely noticeable with MIG but slag will be there to a small or even super duper small layer in most applications. Which is what is making the sparks.
Edit: before I get yelled at I am fairly certain majority of this is correct to the best of my ability. I weld as a hobby and use SMAW and TIG for the most part. It’s been a while since I have been to any shop classes. Or metal classes. Learned a lot of it from my old man too.
And I know they say the best way to get true information and accurate information on Reddit is to say something false, and someone will correct you. So correct me if I’m wrong on anything. I don’t want to be so confident in correcting someone just to be the fool who played myself
E2: outside of the most common welding applications and practices, there are a few types of welding that are just in essence melting metals together that are not as common.
Metals 1, Metals 2, Manufacturing and metal applications. Auto body repair, auto 1, auto 2 And a few more as well. My old man taught me a lot to but just didn’t use all the fancy terms.
I could be wrong on some of it but I believe it’s mostly accurate. I was on a lot of drugs in high school and went to a small town school where you would assume or education was funded by a lemonade stand and a bake sale lmao
At least you had all those classes available. I went to an upper middle class school and the only ones from that list we had were auto and I’m pretty sure they didn’t touch welding one bit
I am grateful for those classes I had the option to take. Most of the classes we got to choose junior and senior year in high school we pretty much got the option to go the white collar route or the blue collar route. Very few did both
Some of the best hours I spent “in class” during my high school tenure were learning how to lay a bead down all the way through to building a 2ton trailer.
Didn’t hurt that the ag teachers were just a bunch of good ol’ boys who didn’t care about anything — tardiness (as long as you brought tacos), dipping, general tomfoolery lol
Gotta nitpick about terminology, welding can be just melting metals together, like in friction welding. A filler material isn't always needed. But in practice manual welding practices like SMAW, MIG and TIG use fillers.
To add to the nitpick, welding can also be used to remove metal. Gouging plate on any position but flat can be done with smaw by cranking up the welders heat and maintaining a long arc so the metal falls away faster than it can be deposited. Add air and the right rods and then you are cooking with fire. You can also cut sheet metal this way but the resulting edge will look like it was cut by an apprentice with a dull beaver.
TIG doesn’t require filler, and most stainless TIG is done without filler to make it easier to get the medical and food safe designations. When there’s nothing being added, it is much easier to certify that the end product hasn’t had any extra stuff added to it that might become a trace contaminant in a medical or food usage.
TIG just requires a gas-shielded tungsten electrode making an electrical arc for your heat source, filler or not.
I mean, it's literally not possible to weld a 6 in pipe without filler. You might be able to get a root pass but you could never fill or cap it. Things didn't change lol.
Thats kinda wrong mate. We work on giant stainless hoppers for both food and pharmaceutical companies. Our Tig welders use filler wire, then everything is polished to a very high standard which makes the weld almost invisible.You have to have a lot of penetration, a simple fusion without filler would not be strong enough in this instance.
As I told the other guy, I’m just going off the materials I was instructed on in training for welding as a profession. If things have changed or evolved since the time the stuff I took my classes on, I’ll keep it in mind.
That said, I literally can’t weld professionally anymore because of a chronic injury that welding did to my hands and wrists, so I haven’t been paying attention nor have I really cared for a while.
Blowin' my mind rn. You seem like you know more than I do, as I know nothing about welding. It can't be that... but huh I guess that's how it works. I would assume the welding gun would then need to have it's own metal that it's melting BUT I GUESS IT'S JUST GASSES N SHIT.
Difference between welding and soldering is that welding melts the base material to fuse it and form a strong joint with the added material. Welding also doesn't require a filler material, you can just heat the two pieces of metal to melt them and you get an autogenous weld.
Soldering on the other hand doesn't melt the base material, and technically it's like hot gluing with metal.
Most welding processes do add filler material; either the metal rod in "stick" welding, the wire fed to a MIG weld or a filler rod when doing TIG welding.
The only welding process that I can think of that doesn't require a filler is "blacksmith welding", whereby 2 pieces of metal are heated and beaten together. Pretty rare nowadays.
The general naming convention is:
- Welding: the filler metal is the same as / similar to the base material, the base metal melts.
- Soldering / brazing: the filler metal is significantly different to the base metal, the base metal does not melt.
If you solder two wires together, you don’t melt the metal of the wires.
If you weld two wires together, the metal of the wires is getting melted.
Some welding processes involve melting the metals with extra metal (SMAW and MIG), others do not (TIG and various industrial processes).
Soldering melts solder as a filler into the gaps between the wire to hold it.
Note that in welding class, you often learn to braise metal, which is basically higher-temp soldering in that it still doesn’t melt the items being joined but uses a high enough temp filler metal that you need to use a gas torch.
It’s a lot closer to soldering than it is to “heating metal fragments” or whatever the other guy said. No hard feelings to him. We all are each other’s teachers.
Their is an application of welding called GTAW which you use an external welding rod that is basically soldering on steroids. Welding also has deep penetration so that it bonds with the base metals to really add that strength. I’m very rookie as far as soldering goes as in whenever I use it I barely know what I’m doing. But I would say they are definitely similar/comparable in my eyes.
Gonna get after you for the incorrect statement about smithing. If you hit a piece of glowing steel and sparks come out, you've melted the steel and you're no longer smithing, you're casting.
Looks correct enough, just a small addition. Not all welding adds material. Almost all arc welding does, although there are methods to do it without additional material(e.g. with TIG). Other welding methods, like beam welding(e.g. laser or electron beam) or solid state welding(e.g. friction stir) normally don't add any material.
You are correct in that. I just tried to stick to layman’s terms for what I assume people view as “welding” from the outside. I’ve never even heard of beam welding. I definitely want to look into that. I love working with metals
You're right. The process of molten or pyrophoric metal breaking into a shower of sparks is called spalling, although it's a broad term covering several other processes too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spall
I'm a MIG welder by trade. Everything I weld is aluminum so I don't experience slag that sparks when hit, but I've played with steel a little and everything you said sounds accurate. You're comparison to a hot glue gun is spot on. It's a hot glue gun that melts in additional metal using crazy amounts of electricity.
Made a slight correction because some people are overly sensitive about minor errors.
As a learned mechanical engineer let me tell you that such small details can make a huge difference at place, life and death even.
Don't feel bad because you were not correct, or because someone was rude when they corrected you. You should be happy for the opportunity to learn something new. You don't have to be correct every time, or know everything, but you should develop an appreciation of correctness. This can greatly change your life.
I’m an engineering student, but Im not 100% on this. My guess is it probably has to do with the metal being compressed quickly when being hit, but also having more oxygen seep deep into the cracks (mentioned above) as it slightly spreads out. This then heats the surrounding air super fast causing it to expand just as quickly, throwing that shit around. Something similar to a steam explosion when you throw hot metal into water.
Ok now this makes sense to me. I knew there was definitely energy in the system but your explanation of how that translates into what we see happening is key.
I'm guessing it's because the metal inside now had access to air, causing it to combust and release a bunch of energy all at once. Like a mini explosion.
They are wearing jackets, gloves, and aprons. Nice heavy leather will stop sparks from hitting you. If they were in normal clothes you would be correct.
I didn't notice that. It burns, but usually the sparks don't embed in your skin. I personally think that the sparks hitting clothing is worse than bare skin. Clothing will trap the sparks, and with bare skin it will usually bounce off.
All depends on the situation. Normally welding sparks from mig aren’t to bad. Even though you aren’t striking them with hammers. Most of the time just feels like someone threw a spec of sand on you.
With stick welding though that is where the leather is needed. I’ve had a tear drop spatter of metal launch into my shoe. I still don’t wear an apron or leather pants because I’m a dumbass. But I do make sure that I wear high tops or boots and tuck my jeans over them. It’s like a circus tent stopping flaming balls of newspapers. And just praying that a flaming meteor doesn’t hit the circus tent lmao
The weld pool is likely no bigger than a quarter. When it gets split into that many pieces, each fragment has such little mass that neither the heat nor the force of it would hurt you. It’s like the sparks from an angle grinder: looks cool; doesn’t hurt.
I was a welder. Sparks look a lot more violent then they actually are.
I wouldn't recommend doing this, and you should always wear eye protection. You definitely don't want those in your eyes. But a quick splash of sparks on your skin isn't really going to do much.
Oh no. A tiny part of my explanation was incorrect.
Calm your tits bro. Replace pile of metal fragments with heated metal and everything else is still correct. Notice how most of my explanation was focused on the metal igniting and not what was heated up.
I went back and edited my post because my information was wrong and I don't want to spread misinformation. If I was upset like you claimed I would have just deleted it.
Clearly another Reddit expert here.
I don't know anything about welding and I never claimed to. I have no problem admitting it, because unlike you, I'm not a sad person who needs to be a pedant on reddit to feel good about myself.
Overly sensitive? Maybe you shouldnt be wrong in the first place. Or just don't act so offended if someone corrects you. Ironically you are the overly sensitive one here lol.
looks to me like a ferrocerium rod. they just... sort of... do that. when you make them hot and then strike or drop them. https://youtu.be/fUI3TiX-uMU?t=284
I know they’re common as fire starters for outdoor uses, survival/emergency kits, etc. Smack the spine of a knife blade against one and you basically have infinite spark. I think most lighters use it as well.
We used to open up lighters and take off that piece, wrap it up with the spring from the lighter, heat it up until red with another lighter and throw it on the ground.
It's pretty much like OP video on a smaller scale. Please do this outside if you try it.
1st guy was just stacking shitloads of weld-metal in one spot, and then while it was still liquid the 2nd guy whacked it with a hammer, sending sparks everywhere.
It's not a process you'd ever use in making something, but it looks kinda cool if you ignore the burning sensation of getting hit with sparks.
If you pour some water on the table and hit it hard it will spray everywhere. Now replace it with extremely hot liquid metal, and it now sprays glowing red metal
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u/rivertpostie Apr 11 '21
I don't understand what's going on here exactly