Meld Metals with Welding and Brazing

Image Gallery You can master welding and brazing skills to take on a whole new world of projects and home repairs. ISTOCKPHOTO/GLEN JONES

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There’s never been a better time to add brazing and welding skills to your homesteading repertoire. Brazing and welding are all about joining metal parts quickly, permanently and with great strength — you’ll find that they can revolutionize the way you maintain and improve your homestead.

Brazing requires only simple equipment that costs less than $100. And welding equipment is more effective, easier to use and more affordable ($175 and up) than ever before. Anyone with a handy streak will find that today’s metal-melding options offer a huge boost towards self-sufficiency, cost savings and hands-on satisfaction.

Most of my metalwork involves repairs, but welding and brazing also offer endless possibilities for artistic and decorative projects. I’ve fixed gates, mailboxes, tractor drawbars, broken muffler mounts and a favorite garden trowel whose blade broke off the shank. You can build utility shelves and workshop tables; restore machinery; build marine docks; or convert the back end of a pickup truck into a trailer (a favorite project here on Manitoulin Island in Canada).

BRAZING

Brazing, often discussed with welding, actually is a fundamentally different process. It’s more like heavy-duty soldering using bronze rods instead of solder. The underlying metals are not melted, so it requires substantially less heat than welding processes, which do melt and fuse underlying metals. Mild (low carbon) steel and cast iron include a large percentage of iron, and their composition makes them ideal candidates for brazing.

If you’re brand new to metalwork, then brazing is a good way to gain experience without spending a lot of money. It’s useful for repairing lightweight machinery parts, thin metal railings and gates, or sheet-metal items such as wheelbarrow pans or steel lawn mower decks.

The technique is simple: Hold a torch in one hand and a bronze rod in the other. Heat the metal parts you’re joining to red-hot. Touch the bronze rod to the heated metal so it melts and flows between the parts, forming a strong bond as it cools. Brazing is ideal for metals up to about a quarter-inch thick.

Standard propane torches don’t generate enough heat for brazing, but an inexpensive oxygen/propane or oxygen/MAPP gas torch will do the job nicely. These torches cost less than $100 and work quite well for ferrous metals less than an eighth of an inch thick. Either is great starter equipment and easily portable. You’ll find them rather expensive to operate for larger jobs, especially for the oxygen. It’s the more expensive of the two gases, and the torch uses it much more quickly than the combustible gas. You’ll get approximately 20 minutes of brazing time from a disposable cylinder of oxygen that costs about $9.

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