Crack Weld Repair

[Rosalie Checca]

Whohas done it? IFI wont let you search a term under 4 characters so I cannot search for MIG.

I found an article on the net talking about using a MIG but it said you need one that put out 250 amps. I have a millermatic 210. It puts out 160 amps at peak duty cycle. I am not sure how amp ratings work with welders though.

Not enough info to give a good answer.

Type of repair to be done.

Make of Anvil; cast, wrought

Your experience level.

Search anvil repair / repairing anvil, grab a cup of your favorite beverage, and start reading the tons of threads on this subject.

Welcome to IFI.

FOR THIS PURPOSE,and this purpose only,anything you plan to do with SMAW or TIG you can do with MIG.The only difference will be you`ll have to buy a whole roll of hardface wire.Grab hold of something before you ask the price,that stuff aint cheap.

What you lack in amperage you can many times make up for in pre-heat(unless you`re running a 110 MIG,then forget it.But then again if you were serious you`d own a REAL welding machine.)

If I could afford a "Real" welder then I could afford a "Real" anvil, and would not be worrying with repairing one. Besides the miller 210 is a great machine for a hobby.

I have read a ton of articles, but only found one that gave any info on MIG. I have also looked at the prices of the hardfacing wire. I was shocked. But it is cheap enough that if I can repair my anvil, and I will still be under my anvil budget.

Peter Wright 146#

Repair edges, they have been chipped off both sides, front to back.

I have no doubts as to being able to preheat the anvil and I used to metal fab full time.

My anvil, a 400 lb Peter Wright, had been severely abused at some point in the past. It had torch gouges about every 1" or so down both side of the face and about 3" of the horn had been cut off. The guy who had the anvil before me repaired all this damage with standard, i.e. non-hard facing, mig wire. You'd never know it on the horn. You can see some of the repairs in the face and they are a little soft, but it has never been a problem for me. The anvil repair work I have done was with a 180 amp stick welder and that worked just fine. I would strongly recommend preheating the anvil regardless of the welding methods and materials you plan to use since the high carbon content in the face will cause the heat affected zone to have untempered (brittle) martensite in it that can result in cracks adjacent to your welds. These can occur either on cooling from welding or during use.

Patrick

I have repaired an anvil with a mig welder a miller 210, it was a wilkenson that had some real bad edges, I didnt preheat because I didnt know about it I did use hard face wire I got a partial spool from the welding shop i had no idea what kind it was. The anvil turned out fine I used it a little and all seemed well then I got a bigger anvil. There was a difference in color of the weld to the plate but I ground it all and sanded it, the stuff was hard and took awhile to grind but the anvil looked good and the stuff didnt fall off when I hit it. I guess it worked.

For a Miller 210, you'll have several options for welding wire, because you can run .045 flux core in it pretty easily.

You may want to post up some pictures of the damaged edges. The general consensus here is to leave the anvil alone unless the abuse is really bad. If that's the case here, you can save the $150 (or more) you're going to spend on wire, and put it towards the purchase of your next anvil.

Old blacksmithing texts mention that the first thing you should do with a new anvil is to round the edges so they don't create cold shuts in your work.

If you need a sharp edge for a specific task, why not make a hardy tool with *4* of them!

Post some pictures. It may not need repaired at all. I don't want to second-guess your decision to work on it, but speaking from personal experience, one of the most important lessons I've learned from the experienced smiths on here is that most anvils I thought needed repair didn't. The best advice I got when I asked what I should do to one was (and I'm paraphrasing), "Just use it. You'll find a use for all those different edges."

The problem wasn't the anvils, the problem was me and what *I* thought the anvils should look like.

Like Thomas said, if you need a square / sharp edge or a particular radius, make a hardy for it.

I would save the money and buy a better one if I could. I have been trying to spend $300 on a good condition 135# + anvil for over a year. If I could have I would. So the way I figure it, I spent $200 on this I still have $100 to spend and I will be in budget.

This is not my first anvil. I was using a good condition (no chips, clean edges) 230# Hay Budden for about 2 years. It has since been reclaimed by its owner. I use an anvil a certain way and would prefer to have a tool designed how I want it, and not just work with what I have got. I have gotten used to my anvil positioned a certain way and the side that is chipped the most is the edge I use most. The chipped edge peice is as wide as my finger. If it was like the other side I would probably just radius a little more and use it. I could work around it, but I just don't want too unless I have to. Here are the picks. You can also see the belly which is less of a concern for me.

I looked at the pics after uploading and the surface looks worse than it is. A grate was painted on top making it look a lot worse in the pics.

Well unless I change my mind again I think I figured out what I am going to do. I am going to radius (grind) the not so bad side and just try and fill the bad side edges with my regular MIG wire. Yeah, Freddie I had already come to the same conclusion. I figure it want cost me anything more and if it does not work I can always hardface it anyway. I will preheat though. I have welded several things to large chunks of metal only to see them crack off as it cools. I always preheat.

Maybe in the mean time I will find one of those killer deals on an anvil like I hear about, or maybe I can get the 230# Hay Budden back from my family member. I wish.

I had a question regarding an application my company wants to develop, all our work revolves around industrial laser processing, from technology repair and integration to process development. I handle to programming and integration for all robotic based laser applications.

I guess my question would be on the robot side is how would the PLC effectively communicate that to the robot? Could we link the numbers in the HMI to position registers inside the robot and from there the robot could go and repair those specific welds? That would be a lot of position registers if so, I figured I could just use one PR to save the offset; as in once you get to position register 76 offset along the y-axis however many mm to succesfully repair the weld.

It sounds doable. As long as each weld is an identical set of motions, you could use a PR to offset to the start point of each weld, then run a subroutine that performs the weld, then moves on to the next point. If the rails are curved, or the welds have unique requirements per weld, it gets trickier.

What I have found easiest in repair programs I have made for missed spot welds is to have the robot go through each weld position and use DI's from the PLC to determine if that position needs welded. If not, it skips the spot instruction and moves on to the next point.

I am really intereseted how you would repair a bad weld with a robot? What kind of problems would the machine be repairing? Missplaced welds, porosity, ...? You usualy need to grind the weld out and make a clean weld groove, so Im genuinely curious how you would go about something like that

not a welding guy but i was setting up fieldbus etc for someone that was. this was on KUKAs. i recall that he would setup error recovery strategy, retry etc from the begin so all repairs are done on the spot and automatically - robot would go back and for example complete interrupted weld. user intervention was minimal (replace spool of wire, cut off stuck wire, feed it using jog keys and press resume).

I would have to look through the programming, but I know in our laser cells the PLC tracks each individual track to see if it has been completed. This is so that, in the case of certain types of interruptions, if the weld misses any particular track, it can go through a reweld process in which it will try to weld any track that it has missed and not weld on the other tracks. This could be something that could work for your application as well so that you can still do multiple welds from one position.

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