Hey guys, just wanted to ask your opinions on the subject. I don't have heat in my shop just a kerosene heater I fire up when I'm out working, question is this: shop is around mid to upper 40 degrees maybe 50ish, need to weld up my frame rails to replace the back half of frame ( rust issue's) do you think I would run into any problems if I welded them at that temperature in the shop? I will be making both sides of rails and boxing them, basically from back of cab to the end of the bed, about 70" total. Just don't want to have it come and bite me in the butt later down the road.
Plenty of welding has been done in freezing temps. One thing to do that makes not only nicer looking but higher quality weld is to warm the metal until the moisture sweats out of the metal. Do a general warm up before you start and the heat from welding will do the rest. Warm to the touch is what you'll have
My dad spent two, thirteen week stints, welding on the Alaska Pipeline. They only had shelters to protect them from the wind, not to warm the pipe. The average daytime temp was in the low 20's to low teens where he was (way up on the north end). I don't think temps in the 40's will have any effect on your frame welds.
Interesting points. I always assumed you needed to pre-heat the metal. It's WAAAY below freezing out there right now, my shop isn't heated either...
As I remember, welding occurs between 5,000 to 10,000 F. It won't know the difference between 20 and 100 degrees. Now preheating to remove moisture is a different story.
man, sometimes its like beating a dead horse on here.......if you can work in it, its not that cold, and you are not welding the space shuttle..........mayeb you should have the welds xrayed after to make sure they penetrated the 3/16ths you just welded......lol
thats not realy that cold, its pretty cold here in the evenings despite everyones 'oh sunny california is always hot' i weld and work outside on the side of the house with a lousey home made easy-up structure. i wear sweaters and im good to go!
i know two guys that welded on the Alaskan pipeline, most of what they did was in the cold. they told me many stories about booze and hookers that probably won't be much help to you..... but they also told me to pre-heat before welding
I was there, not welding pipe but welding on heavy equipment. Everyone had a theory, preheat or not. We were welding ice growsers on D9 cats, up on Atigun pass (yeah, the same pass on those Ice Road truckers show) Well some guys said you had to preheat, run 3 passes with 5-32 rod. My crew did not preheat and ran one pass with 1/4 in rod and we never had a broken weld, the other guys had lots of them, big chunks broke out of the track pads. 14 hour shifts running 1/4 rod will let the smoke out of a Lincoln SAE 200 welder though. Well, anyway, if you think about it, whats 30-40 degrees ambient when you are welding at several thousand degrees. BTW, most of those 798ers couldn't weld anything but pipe, caused a lot of trouble around camp too, falsified weld reports, did a lot of crap. They'll never work in Alaska again. PS, the booze and hookers storys are true, hundreds of hookers everywhere. Didn't mess with them but did a little bootlegging when I was in Livengood camp.
You might want to pre-heat your welder if it's really cold out, I went out to my frozen shop one morning, it was about 15 deg F, fired up the welder before the shop warmed up. BOOOM!! the electrolyte in the capacitor in auxilliary transformer had frozen and exploded... $100 mistake!
I am an iron worker by trade and have welded in below freezing temps with no preheating, and never had a problem, the only thing I have seen is if you are using a mig welder and leave your machine in the garage with no heat, you might want to take the spool of wire inside with you when not in use, a friend of mine had the spool rust up on him and he couldn't weld an inch after that,perosity, spittin, it was funny. He replaced the spool. The other thing I wanted to add is under water welding, I know its a different set up but, do you think they worry about moisture?
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