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In this video I want to show you something called a plug weld
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Which you can see right here these little these little domes. They're the product of a plug weld
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This is a gate that I'm building I built the hinge and everything. I've just temporarily mounted it here so that I can test how it works. It's going somewhere else
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but I made the knuckle put a grease fitting on here so that the The gate moves completely silently
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But this here this section here is where I use the plug weld and here's the reason why
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This gate just kind of lifts right up and off. So this is a solid shaft
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3 quarter inch steel and it's going into this Tube of steel and I need to join them
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But I certainly don't want a weld bead Right along here because that's the the bearing surface that the gate rests on that and swivels on it
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So that needs to be flat and that's where the the plug weld came in
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You can use it in a lot of different situations. In this course the wood stove project which plans are included in the course
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requires plug welds and that's what I want to show you right now how to do a proper plug weld. A plug weld is
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a weld that happens through a hole and That's what you can see going on here. It's all set up ready to go. I've got two pieces of steel
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They're quarter inch thick and I want to join them, but I don't want to have any any welds along the usual seams
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So I've got a hole drilled in the top piece and it's sitting over the bottom piece and there's no hole in the bottom piece
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So what I'm going to do is I'm going to weld down in that hole
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now I'm going to be concentrating on the bottom because The tendency is for the the arc to be attracted to the sides
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Rather than going down to the bottom so if I concentrate on the bottom and I just keep building that up building the molten metal up and then as I've done that
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Turn the gun a little bit Shine a little bit of that that heat and that welding wire onto the sides and then stop when it's kind of domed up
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That will join these two pieces of metal together very effectively It won't be as strong as if I had welded along all of the seams
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But it will be plenty strong enough for those situations when you need to plug weld. So
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Let's do it Good so I think that turned out quite well
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Let's take a closer look here Yeah, yeah, that's that's really nice look at that nice tight fit everywhere
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But there's no weld beads and it's good and strong now if this was in a part in a place that that mattered
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appearance wise we could grind that flat and These two pieces would be together and there'd be no evidence of how they're held together. So
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You don't want to use this all the time. But for some applications the plug weld just cannot be beat
