welding copper to stainless steel?

Fusion would be impossible, but you can TIG-braze stainless steel using copper or silicon bronze filler.

Helium/Argon mixes help when working with copper alloys.

Pure copper can be arc welded, brazed, thermal and arc-wire sprayed. Doing all the above sucks rocks...

Beware the green cloud of death when arc welding or spraying, and the fumes from the brazing flux are nasty.

Not sure why in the wide, wide world of sports anyone would want to join SS to Cu?

Years ago (1977) I worked for a company that electrode welded a product called ferro-bronze over the bearing areas on some 8640 tubing (piston rod) for the front suspension on coal trucks. I was one of the machinists stuck with machining the seal grooves through the stuff. It took weeks, we used many thousands of dollars worth of manchester inserts, the screaming of the tooling as it cut through the fusion/transition zone was unbearable in every corner of the 80,000 sq/foot building....(whew, I just re-lived that whole deal). When it was all done they didn't have pistons coming apart and ruining the walls of their expensive cylinders anymore, but the the ferro-bronze surface scratched the s..t out of them....

I just realized how many years, and how many beers, it took me to get here....

Matt

This is what I was expecting, Thanks!

BobH

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Beer is a good choice on this one. He wants to join copper and stainless for brewing hardware.

BobH

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TIG welding pure copper is not too bad. It is a bit like aluminum, when the part is up to welding temperature, the WHOLE part is that hot, and very close to a complete melt-down. Otherwise, it was no big deal. I didn't even practice, just set up the two machined parts and had at it. It wasn't VERY pretty, but not bad at all for my first time.

Jon

I don't know why copper. My (great) affinity for beer starts when it is already in a consumable state. It was presented to me as a challenge on welding without any background on why.

Searching the web has a lot of information on brewing and copper if you are interested.

BobH

The only way I know of would be explosion welding. I think any other method would fail, due to copper's very high thermal conductivity and its rate of thermal expansion (cracking). I'm not entirely sure about fusion in exlosion welding, either, but since you can make anything stick together with enough heat and pressure, it should work.

Perhaps the friend was using a wrong term. Fusion welding uses heat and filler metals. Friction welding does not and would excel at welding steel to aluminum, and steel to copper. I saw a friction welding demonstration that was quite impressive.

Wikipedia article:

"Bob La Londe" wrote in news:gdd06b$qh7$ snipped-for-privacy@aioe.org:

Copper was popular for stills because: 1. It was cheap. (Often recycled from something else.) 2. It conducts heat well, thus cooling the vapor quickly. 3. It was readily available at the local hardware store.

When "recycled", the resultant hootch often contained toxic substances.

An alternative was the use of recycled automotive radiators.

Both were, usually, suppliers of Lead thanks to its use to solder the tubing to the cooker as well as the tubing to the radiator (if used) and (if one was used) inside the radiator itself.

TinLizziedl wrote in news:MPG.2364583dbd4ae399896d2 @news.west.earthlink.net:

For an example of explosive welding using a copper substrate with 2 silver outer layers, just look at a US dime/quarter/half-dollar.

Ours were glass. Hospital distillers, you can see if they are clean inside:)

Al