Welding Tips and Tricks

Hello All!


Looking for any tips for welding/brazing 385 Bronze.

Making a large fireplace surround with mitered corners using .5" x 2" 385 flat bar and some
smaller profiles.

So far not very good luck with brazing, please let me know if you have any suggestions or settings
for TIG welding this material.


Thanks!

385 Bronze is actually a brass not a bronze meaning it is copper alloyed with zinc, not tin. In this case it has some lead alloyed in as well. Don't know why they call it architectural bronze, misleading in my book.

Anyway this means it's not really suitable for welding process because the zinc and lead will gas out and contaminate the weld pool giving poor visual and strength results. That restricts you to soft soldering, silver soldering and brazing. I would go for tigging with silicon bronze or aluminium bronze. One of Jody's recent vids shows him using aluminium bronze with ac tig giving a nice shiny appealing joint. Might be the way to go for you here, just make sure you don't melt the parent brass.

Thanks for the reply Coldman! I ordered some silicon bronze (ERCuSi-A) rod to try out with this material, I'll let you know
how it goes. Do you mind sharing a link to the video you mentioned?

This may be the video you want-

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wf-Cq5eQmt0

Here's another one on tigging brass.
http://www.weldingtipsandtricks.com/tig-weld-brass.htm

Wise to practice first on scrap and see how it cleans up for visual appeal before you dive in the deep end. You might have to experiment with settings to get it the way you want.

Hey Everyone,

We got our ERCuSi-A rod and it welds great! This video was really helpful in getting started

https://youtu.be/F2_hXQ4ABrg?list=PLX5v ... 9B_554ORFq

The trick is to not puddle the brass as the lead will cause it to fume out. You want to just see both
of your parts red hot, at this point you can add rod. It is a little bit uncanny because it seems like you
are adding rod to cold metal, but it works.

Thanks again for the input!