Welding on rail road spikes

I know this isn't what you want to hear , but you need a real welder . Lincoln 225 amp buzzboxes usually sell used for a reasonable price (depending on locale) and will do most anything a hobby welder needs done . I paid way less than 150 bucks for mine .

Railroad spikes, even the "HC" (high carbon, about 0.35%) spikes, aren't very high in carbon, so they shouldn't be a problem to weld. You didn't say what the problem is; --- can't keep arc lit? Metal puddles on surface? etc, etc, etc.

If the spikes are rusty, you could have all sorts of problems. Do you have trouble welding other things or is it just these spikes? Try grinding the spike down to shiny metal before trying to weld.

What rod are you using? Try some 6013.

Re: the "Bensmatic oxy torch": Does it use acetylene or propane or mapp gas or what with the oxygen? If Mapp or propane, you can't really weld with it.

With either heat source, be sure to wait until you have a puddle before moving on.

Pete Stanaitis

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redalpha wrote:

1. Whatever electric welder you use, it should be powered from 220V, like a clothes dryer or water heater.
2. I recommend 6011 stick electrodes, 1/8" diameter which have greater penetration than 6013.
3. Practice on some 1/8" thick bed frame material first. 100-130 amps.
4. You will probably run out of oxy or fuel and >I am just a weekend welder and I can not seem to make my welds stick

you probably don't have enough current to make the weld - others may be more exact, I'd probably weld at 130 to 150 amps minimum, maybe more depending on what I was doing with the spikes

Thanks for the reply

Thanks for the help

increase the amperage. grind the surface to remove all contamination/rust/scale.

you would need oxy-acetylene to hit the temperatures to gas weld

Here are my pearls of wisdom. First, you "get what you pay for" only if you're lucky and/or astute. Otherwise, it's more like "you pay for what you get".

Second, if you want to try again to get a weld with the machine you've got, in addition to all the other good advice (clean and shiny!) you might try to pre-heat with your propane burner. Even better, get it really hot in a charcoal fire and then weld it. After you weld it put it back in the charcoal fire, cover it, and let the fire die naturally. The standard recipe for welding high carbon steel (which spikes barely are) is "pre and post heat". V

Any idea how old the spikes are? I once tried to weld some RR spikes that were so old they were produced when most metal items were made of forged steel. If I welded one to something it would break off because of the laminated structure of the steel. I had a hard time cutting them with an OA torch because the cut kept getting interrupted by the laminations. Engineman

..

You are a new welder, and have already learned one of the most basic lessons in welding. That you get what you pay for. You could have bought a Lincoln Tombstone used for what you want to do, and paid about the same or less. Return the welder and get a real one.

Steve

On Sun, 28 Dec 2008 8:17:48 -0600, redalpha wrote (in message ):

one of the keys to welding is heat. It might be the case that your buzz box does not have enough heat capacity, depending on what it is that you are trying to weld to those spikes.

Clean up the metal you are welding - oil and other chemical residues, and also any loose rust. The cleaner, the better. Take that bernz-o-matic torch of yours and warm up your metal to a blue heat or hotter, and then try sparking your welds.

Assuming that your welding technique is decent, what has been happening is that your track spikes and other target metal have been actually chilling the weld puddle that your welding equipment has been trying to create. If your metal is warmed up nice and hot, a low-amp capacity welder such as yours will have a much better chance of keeping a wet puddle at the weld site.

Though any oxy-fuel combo will produce a HOT enough flame, the nature of the flame is such that there will be way too much turbulence in the weld puddle to actually make a weld. Oxy-acetylene (Or oxy-hydrogen) burn in such a way that a nice quiet weld puddle is created, and a sound weld can be made. Your oxy-fuel torch will be good for brazing and other metal work operations that require that the metal be raised to a yellow-orange heat - depending on the mass of the metal. If you have a cutting attachment for your torch, it will make a nice clean cut in mild steel, depending on the thickness of that steel.

Practice.

tom koehler