Welding Tips and Tricks

I have two 1912 Evinrude gearcases to weld. They are both bronze but of different alloys. One is more reddish and the other more yellow. I have a silicon bronze tig rod which is a perfect match for the reddish piece. I have seen an aluminum bronze rod listed on some suppliers sites. Does anyone know if this is a more yellow colour than the silicon bronze? My local supplier does not have any of the aluminum bronze tig rod. They do have some gas bronze rod which appears to be the yellow shade I'm looking for. I recall reading somewhere on this forum, or maybe Jody mentioned it in one of his videos, that it is difficult to tig weld with gas rod.
Happy new year to everyone.
Peter.

Reddish color is usually bronze and yellow is usually brass. I have used oxy-acetylene for braze welding on steel and especially cast iron but have never welded brass. Hopefully someone on the board can shed some more light on this application.

From what I've seen over the years bronze & brass can be almost any alloy that the makers decided on for a variety of reasons - trying to get a color match for polished pieces is difficult - there are quite a few alloy rods often specified for their mechanical properties / suitability to application that don't state what the exact alloy is - the recent blanket term of aluminum or silicon bronze I think is a bit over simplified as there are dozens of filler alloys - but in general terms by appearance aluminum bronze is lighter than silicon which is quite yellow - red-ish color I would suspect is likely phosphor bronze - I only tried a couple of times a while back to Tig braze & did'nt make much of it - I'm used to oxy / acet so I keep with what I know - but I think that was with rod I had in stock which would have been gas rods - I admit to not realizing they are different - might explain why I struggled.

i weld bronze, alumibronze, and brass where i work. there is no real way to tell for sure if the metal is brass or bronze by appearance, because there are so many different alloys. look for jody's video on how to weld brass. this will help show u some details on how it reacts. what we do where i work is simple, if it has a red tint to it we use copper rod. if its a yellow tint we use alumibronze or sometimes called A2. this works fairly good. color is real close for both. copper rod can be hard to get and expensive, stripping nomex works just as well unless u need large rod diameter. for red weld in DC and for yellow weld in AC. i dont recomend a gas lens for either. brass/bronze tends to be splattery in many instances and will ruin gas lens. standard collet body is the way to go here.

id also like to mention that for red materal silicon bronze wont collor match. its yellow or gold in color. i never tryed any of the special rod they make such as phosporous bronze, ampco-trode 40, or Ni/AL bronze.

Finally got it sorted out. In case anyone is interested the silicon-bronze was a perfect match for the more reddish bronze part and an aluminum-bronze was more yellow and less red and a very good match for the other part.
So for the rods I bought, silicon-bronze was more red and aluminum-bronze was more yellow. I also tried a manganese-aluminum-nickel-bronze rod and it was the lightest of all, a very light yellow.
Maybe this will help someone else in the future.

PeterM wrote:Finally got it sorted out. In case anyone is interested the silicon-bronze was a perfect match for the more reddish bronze part and an aluminum-bronze was more yellow and less red and a very good match for the other part.
So for the rods I bought, silicon-bronze was more red and aluminum-bronze was more yellow. I also tried a manganese-aluminum-nickel-bronze rod and it was the lightest of all, a very light yellow.
Maybe this will help someone else in the future.

Good info to file away... This question comes up more often than you'd expect.

Glad you got it sorted out.

Steve S