When Welding, Time = Money

Wear resistant steel is required in equipment designed to process raw materials.

Wear never ends.

Make it your mission to control the wear, so you can replace worn out components on your schedule.

Running Wear Plates Until They Fail, Is Your Most Expensive Method Of Operations

Regardless of industry, the heaviest wear areas are usually installed by welding the steel into place.

The faster your welding repairs can be completed, the sooner the equipment is back in production. If the machine isn’t making noise, it is not making money for you.

Wear resistant steel typically uses heavy plate for maximum wear life.
Steel from ¼” to over 2” thick are common.
Welding the wear plates in place takes time.

It doesn’t matter if you are wire-feed or stick welding, your most efficient use of time comes from using the largest diameter welding product that works for your welding machine and your people.

To reduce the costs of welding training, it is usually done with thinner steel. Which means the first welding sizes used are either 1/8” stick electrodes or 0.035” for wire feed welding.

This Doesn’t Mean It Is The Only Size You Should Use.

Welding wire and stick electrodes are sold by the pound. We will be comparing stick electrode sizes for visual aids. The same principals apply to wire sizes.

Here you can see the various sizes of the welding electrodes (rods) in the round tubes. The 3/32” on top, then from left to right are: 1/8”, 5/32” and 3/16” diameter.

The amperage used varies for each of these rods. A starting point is to convert the fractional sizes, into decimal form. As an example, 1/8” diameter equals 0.125”. Dropping the decimal, 125 amps is a good choice to start welding, and you can adjust from there.

Regardless of the diameter and corresponding amperage or ‘heat’ as it is commonly called, it takes about the same amount of time to weld with any of the sizes.

How Many Rods Are There Per Pound?

Due to their small diameter, 3/32” (.093”) welding rods are usually sold in 9” lengths. In this photo, the scale shows 15.9 ounces weight. There are 38 rods per pound for this size. Most standard welding rods are 12” long.

The most popular size is 1/8” (.125”). Here there are 14 rods (12” long) per pound.

Here the 5/32” (.156”) diameter shows 1 pound and 1.5 ounces from just 10 rods (12” long).

Using 3/16” (.1875”) diameter, a pound is only 7 rods (12” long).

Here Is A Perfect Example For Using Larger Diameters When Welding

One papermill welding project was installing a new infeed deck. The winning contractor guaranteed they would complete shutdown 3-days faster than the other contractors.

Reducing a paper mill shutdown from 10 days to 7 was a huge benefit to the customer. This increase in effectiveness was primarily accomplished because the contractor was planning to use much larger diameter welding wire, than the contractors who did not get the project.

Obviously, you wouldn’t use a very large welding rod or wire when you have to weld overhead. By the same reasoning, you can use the largest size practical in the flat or horizontal position.

Since wear plate is often thick steel, using larger diameter welding wire or rods for your equipment, will dramatically reduce your welding wire or rod costs. The larger diameters sell for lower prices per pound, and are applied faster. A true Win-Win for your efforts to control costs and reduce downtime.

Here they are about to remove the worn out 5’ wide x 185’ long infeed deck. Welding the new ¾” thick wear steel in place took less time using much larger diameter welding wire.

It Doesn’t Matter Which Size Welding Product You Use; A Pound Of Weld, Is Still A Pound Of Weld

Like this steel mill (their NDA requires we not use their name), our customers are always looking to us for continuous improvement, and rely upon JADCO to continue to create new products, to address their specific wear challenges.

An educated customer is our best investment. For more than 44 years, JADCO has focused exclusively on delivering consistent, longer equipment life for our customers.

Now you understand why we are able to deliver better results to our customers. We think differently by strictly focusing on improving your current results.

At JADCO, we think differently by strictly focusing on your results. Now you can understand why JADCO delivers better performance results for our customers.

PS: Always Remember To Preheat Any Wear Steel Before Welding. We will cover this next week on our Wear Plate Wednesday blog post.
If you need a faster answer, shoot us an email or give us a call.

Allow us to help you today by calling 724.452.5252, or email info@jadcomfg.com.
We will schedule a meeting with one of our local wear plate specialists at a time that best fits your schedule.

Remember, the only thing you have to lose by not working with JADCO, are your profits.