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Repairing heat treatment baskets

I was wondering if I may call on the advice and opinions of this group. I am fairly new to the fun and games that we all know and love as welding, in fact the only reason I started to weld was to help build a robot for Robot Wars here in the UK but I digress. My question is this, I work for a heat treatment company and one of the treatments we carry out is aluminium treatments. This involves heating the workload at 535 deg. C for 6 hours and then quenching into hot water at 75 deg. C. The baskets we use are made from

3mm thick x 75mm mild steel angle but after being put through the above process repeatedly the welds start to crack. I have been repairing the baskets with a 2.5mm E6013 rods but was wondering if anyone here would recommend using a different rod or carry on as I am. I have been having some trouble with the deterioration of the steel making the welds a bit scraggy, to use a technical term. If any one has any ideas or comments I would be glad to hear them.

Best regards

Ian Humphrey

Reply to
Ian Humphrey
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Inconel 625 would last a lot longer as a weld materiel. Of course the metal might crumble around it, but your working temps would have almost no affect on it.

At the very least you could go to a 321 or 347 SS rod.

Reply to
Ernie Leimkuhler

The company I work for has a heat treatment section, with electric and fluid bed atmosphere controlled furnaces. AFAIK, all the baskets I've ever made have been Inconel (rounds), or equivalent. For items where inconel would just cost too much, we use an alloy called 253MA. Not quite as good useful life, but a lot lower cost.

One thing I have noticed, on any welds where there is a sudden change in cross section, you get faults happening beside the weld. By dressing the toes of the weld out, you can delay the inevitable. If you must use steel, I would consider using a rod with a bit more ductility, such as 7018. If you have the materials, equipment and skills to use these rods, they would be my choice. Any rough spots on the welds should be dressed smooth, regardless of what consumable you use.

The heat treatment stuff is O.K. to build new, but can be quite unpleasant to repair, after a few thermal cycles.

Reply to
Wayne Bengtsson

In message , Ian Humphrey writes

There are a number of materials would give longer life and reduce weld cracking.308 stainless steel will have much greater oxidation resistance and you could probably reduce the material size because of the higher strength of stainless.For optimum oxidation resistance 310 stainless could be used which has good resistance up to 1100 deg.C.However you would need to evaluate longer life against cost.You might improve your mild steel welds by using 312 stainless steel which has 29% chromium and balanced to give maximum resistance to cracking.However ,more expensive than 6013.

Reply to
Gwyn Phillips

Firstly I would like to thank you all for your advice. I have checked the web site of the supply company we use

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and it seems that the 7018 rods seem to be the easiest to obtain as opposed to the stainless rods mentioned. If I was making new baskets then I would prefer to use a better material to mild steel angle but we have too many servicable baskets at this point in time. Once again thanks for the advice.

Best regards

Ian Humphrey

Reply to
Ian Humphrey

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