THE ART OF WELDING

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 75, Issue 6441, 3 November 1947, Page 4

THE ART OF WELDING

DEVELOPMENT AND PROGRESS ADDRESS TO ROTARY CLUB The guest speaker at last week’s meeting of the Te Awamutu Rotary Club was Mr R. L. Brunton, of Hamilton, who gave a most interesting address on the “Development and Progress of Welding”. After defining welding as the joining together primarily of metals by local fusion or melting the speaker said that in order to weld they had to stipulate in general two conditions, metals and heat. Man did not rise high in the plane of living beings until he had learnt the use of metals with the allied love of fire. The use of metals enabled man to improve his standard of living and an important member of the tribe or community was the worker in metals. As his skill developed and time went on the industry split into two 'sections, the craft of the caster of metals and the craft of the hot worker of metals—the counterpart of the blacksmith. Mr Brunton digressed to say that probably the source of the first metals were meteorites which are largely composed of iron and nickel. Continuing, Mr Brunton said that with the advent of the blacksmith and the forge came the first real weld and the speaker gave a graphic picture of the blacksmith’s shop, once a popular sight to older people and in that, although it was not realised, at the time it was the start of welding, wherein the essentials were still 'of iron parts raised to a white heat with a . fusion on the surface only; heavy pressure from a hammer or other source of pressure to force the surface into contact and enpure surface fusion. 'The source of heat was not concentrated and it was hot, gri.tty and strenuous work. For centuries the forger, with his fire, held supreme sway in the working of metals. Towards the end of the nineteenth century a new development occurred. It was found that an infinitely smaller, but hotter source of heat became available in the electric arc and the oxy-acetone flame. Both those sources of heat had the advantages of eliminating the heating of) large masses of metal in the forge and permitted local fusion where needed. The other advantages were that their heat effect on the operator was much less. There was not the physical effort required of the operator of the processes; they opened up a new field in contrast to the forge in that it was possible to feed l in a controlled amount of extra metal as filler rod to make the joint at any desired point. In the case of electric arc welding the welder holds the electrodes at a set distance from the parts to be joined and the arc thus created heat which melted the base metal. The electrode also acted as a filled rod which was steadily consumed and teplaced. In the case of oxy-ace-tone welding the two gases were mixed in a blowpipe, the flame burning at the tip was applied to the edges to be joined and a filler rod was fed in separately and melted by the flame. In both cases the welder created a small pool of fluid metal composed of the edges to be joined and the filler rod carried it along to the suitably prepared edges. The result was an immogeneous weld which cleaned up could not be detected by the unaided eye from the parent metal. Latterly, from these two fundamental sources, all manner of modifications developed which Mr Brunton outlined and described in a most interesting manner. The recent war had illustrated the merits of welding such as enabled ships to be built miles from the sea and joined up at the dock yards. Mr Brunton dealt with the educational aspects of the subject such as inculcating a pride of work, the cultural effects on the living conditions, mentioning that the welding method of manufacture could be set down away from the intensely populated centres where the working conditions could be more pleasant. Mr J. Craik thanked the speaker.