After damaging myself on Monday last week, I stayed home on Tuesday to let the damage settle itself and went back to work on Wednesday.
To find a project someone else had started, gotten frustrated with, and set aside.
We are building the lot of stairway hand rail for a waste waste treatment plant in Hawaii. It has to be removable because it is of only occasional use and they cannot use mild carbon steel because, well, Hawaii.
So they’re using stainless steel for the occasional hand rail and bronze for the embedded rail pockets as well as the buckets that go in the pockets when the rail is not in use.
Because I know both how to braize bronze and TIG-weld, and because one of my hands is down by 20% and I’m technically on light-duty, I got to TIG-braize me some bronze.
There are 32 pocket fills to go with the 32 embedded rail pockets. These each got a 1/2in hole drilled in the top both so that they wouldn’t float out and so that they’d be easier to pick out of the embedded pocket so the stainless steel rail could go in.
I didn’t get a chance to photograph the pockets as the project was very behind schedule when it got handed to me and they were being swooped up as fast as I could get them finished.
For future reference: Bronze braizing is best done with Oxy-Acetelyne fire, but is very, very slow. Using electric fire is faster but not very pretty. Also, it acts very much like aluminum, except before it wets up, you’ll hear something similar to radio static and that is when you dip and move. If you wait to see the puddle, you’ll start blowing out. And lastly, there is beau-coup zinc in bronce. Watch out for metal poisoning.