Fabricated Custom Metal "T" Consumable Inserts for Orbital & Thin Wall Welding Industry

Custom Metal ¨T¨ Consumable Inserts

Imperial Weld Ring was recently asked to fabricate custom metal "T" consumable inserts for use with orbital and thin wall welding. We manufactured these parts from base weld wire and designed them to seat along outside diameters of tubes for the aerospace, power generation, thermal processing, and filtration industries. We fabricated them to custom sizes which allowed each weld joint to be completed in a single pass. After fusion of the wire, no subsequent filler material was required.

We cold formed, turned, milled, and ring rolled the base weld wire to tight tolerances of ±0.002" using our CNC machining centers and turret and engine lathes. We cleaned the inserts ultrasonically before they were deburred and polished to a machine finish. We then verified the inserts' integrity with both in-house manufactured and third party custom precision gauges, as well as our Scherr & Tumico 14" beam comparator. We used corrosion-resistant and temperature-resistant materials (Hastelloy, Inconel, and stainless and mild steels) for the inserts that were often employed to join thin-walled, non-ferrous tubes. We supplied these inserts as preformed rings whose cross sectional dimensions varied according to customer requirements. We were, however, subjected to some restrictions: any individual dimension within the insert's cross-section had to be held to 1/32" minimum, due to potential ring distortion and difficulties with fit-up that could have arisen with overly thin sections. We fabricated these inserts from an AutoCAD model to customer quality assurance standards, NADCAP guidelines, and ASME Boiler & Pressure Vessel Code, Section III, Division I, Subsection NCA-3800. We took only one to two weeks to deliver these inserts once the design was approved. Currently, we fabricate about 50,000 of the inserts a year and deliver them to national and international locations.

Through extensive research and development, we developed and manufactured a non-standard consumable weld insert that filled specific industry needs. To learn more, review the following table or contact Imperial Weld Ring directly.

Custom Metal "T" Consumable Inserts Project Highlights