Hey guys,

I have a job coming up welding +50 brass pieces for a shop that sells designer lamp fixtures (is that whats it called in english?) Pieces are water jet cut, and pressed in a concave shape.
I already made 2 "test" pieces to show to the customer an he was pleased with the finished result.
Still i am very new to Tigging brass so if anyone here has some expertise on the subject, ill be happy to find out! atm i am welding them on DC, pulsating and using a footpedal. its all 3mm thickness, outside corner joints that need to grinded in a "sharp corner".

Thanks in advance, Efi

I'm interested to see what comes up here as well. I haven't had any success with brass so far.

Silver solder FTW :)

But here is what Jody has to say about it:
https://www.weldingtipsandtricks.com/tig-weld-brass.html

I use Harris SAFETY SILV 56%. It's not cheap so look around for the best price. As always flux is your friend. Clean parts tight fitting joints too. If you do it right you don't need much and it is great in certain situations like making belt buckles and lamps. Here is a quick video just to show how its done. There are many more on youtube.

And another with brass to steel.

Look what I found: And remember there are different products from Harris that have less silver in them by percent. Like SAFETY SILV 45 for example.

Hi Efi, I guess this is a really late reply but maybe it's interesting anyway.
We have a job coming up to make all the surfaces of a kitchen plus two sinks all out of brass. The sinks will involve inside and outside corner welds. I've been doing some test welds also using pulse, with and without filler (CuSi3).
With filler is pretty difficult because the brass never puddles in any controllable way so I can't really see when the right time is to introduce the filler. I've only had success using a laywire technique and pulsing at anything between 10 - 30 pulses per second. Sounds like a machine gun and honestly I can barely see what's going on whilst welding because of all the zinc. I pulse with really high amps and really low background current, for example 150 A peak and 5 A background.
Bizarrely I've got better results dragging the torch, ie. welding with a negative torch angle. I don't know why this is the case but it seems to stop the bead width from increasing too dramatically as I weld.
It sounds really difficult to weld the outside corner in such a way that you can then grind it to a sharp edge afterwards. The brass rounds off a lot and then you just don't have the material left over for that edge. I've had success welding corners on brass from the inside where the sheets don't meet edge to edge but instead edge on face. This allows you to keep a sharp edge aesthetic on the outside but it obviously isn't necessarily a functional solution depending on the other demands of the job.
One difficulty I'm having is with strong grey discolouration next to the weld, which doesn't disappear when using a wire brush. I don't think it's the heat affected zone. I think it's actually zinc which has burned itself into the brass somehow. Interestingly this greyness is way less pronounced if I use filler. If you have any tips for removing the discolouration without aggressive grinding I'd be thankful to hear about them. With this sink the customer doesn't want any grind marks and we haven't yet figured out how to get rid of this greying by any means other than grinding.

Josef,

Meanwhile i have welded a whole lot of these brass pieces with good results.
I will check out my pulse settings i saved on my machine for you if you like
If i remember correctly im going on 33% background amp and
33% peak time. 1 - 2 pulses per second, depending on how fast you are with the filler.
I use a foot pedal en go about 250 amps max on the pedal at moments (3mm thick outside corners.) Add filler at the peak pulse. clean material and watch out for zinc splatters.
i use a blending disc too clean up after grinding and it gives a very nice smooth and shiny finish.
I hope it makes sense, my english terminology might be a bit off ,since its not my native language.

You can contact me if you want for more info and pictures @ www.veyzer.be

Greets, Efi

Hi.

I tried few months ago welding (not brazing) with tig and mig on unknown types of brass and different thicknesses (around 1/16 to 1/2, 1-12 mm). 2 types of fillers with tig ja CuSi3 with mig. The main takeaway for me was the reason why preheat is recommended for brass over 1/4 thickness (when arc welding).

Tried hot start on mig (synergic for wire and its thickness, in this case 0.030, 0.8mm) and zinc immediately just poofed out. Automatic settings with thickness (for fillets) were no match. On steel worked fine, on stainless with little adjustment and on brass not at all at least without preheat.

So, week or so after that I tried tig. Whether or not had a gas lens and 5,6,7 size cup didn´t matter after poofing out. I slowly realized what was happening. I had recently done oxy-acetylene brazing with brass filler on 1/8 and 3/16 (3 to 6mm) with other part being different and same thickness. Filler does poof out if you heat it directly (and so does flux if over heated, temper colors!).

Tried pulse on tig. First peak being lot higher (120-160 kinda like micro tacking) compared to background current and it worked on some (later realized that these were with low zinc content plates for decoration and as that quite versatile stuff). On others zinc poofed out from the get go. So tried around 55 to 65 A without pulse using torch trigger (pedals are rare around here). After waiting it to puddle ever so slightly and then adding filler it worked out great. Also tried backing up to puddle and keeping arc on puddle which also worked. Mix tig (10% on AC) seems to have applications like Johannes Ciobanica said in podcast. These applications and their correct use on different materials are yet up for testing to me.

But one of filler wire types had wrong paper tag on it and I am pretty sure it contained aluminum, which I concluded from the film on surface. Looks funky when see no puddle and adding filler makes surface come up. Not a good sign in any case. AC worked with that filler. That filler also balled up like aluminum wire when your work angle is out of balance and it gets "preheated".

I had respirator (P3 class) and fume extractor plus didn´t keep head over the gasses. Trials took hours. Never have had (serious) zinc fever nor do I want to.