I bought a laser welder with the hope it would improve my fuel and
hydraulic tank welding. I was very skeptical that such a small bead would
be strong enough. But it is as strong as the base metal and is a perfect
weld. Even over dirty and rusty metal. Super fast. You only
need glasses or goggles. Not even that bright. Brazing is
brighter. And with minimal heat to the workpiece too.
Today, we were putting a PID temperature controller on an old glass bead
oven/kiln so I can do some temperature research on my diamond cutter bits.
The guys had mounted the controller in a place where its terminals could
come in contact with some 120 VAC going to the heating elements if the
controller was wiggled a bit. And they didn’t have the bezel hold down on
properly so it was wiggley. I noticed the problems immediately.
While they did a good job centering the controller in the middle of the control
panel, it had to be offset a bit to the right and down to make sure there was no
chance of things ever touching.
So I cut a rectangular piece of 16 gauge steel with a rectangular offset
hole in it for the temperature controller. Then cut some notches in the
panel to accommodate the offset. Then put some tiny weld beads on the back
side so there are no welds visible from the outside. Super nice repair
job. Those tiny weld beads are if a 6” man with a tiny MIG welder got in
there and did them.
I welded this in with the temperature controller installed in the
patch. It was a half inch away from the weld. Nothing got hot enough
to smoke or melt or deform.
So easy to do perfect work on super thin metal. And it will do
aluminum too. It does take nitrogen shielding gas and probably uses more
than a mig welder but that is no big deal. Nitrogen is cheap and you can
buy nitrogen filters to make it yourself.
If you even need to do some rework or or repair to a metal instrument
panel, this is the tool you want.
From the thinnest sheet metal up to .250” it can make anyone a
pro.
