Explosion welding

[Ben - Kinetics]

The bit I've got is just a big 5kg lump - half of it turned down, half left as it was from the explosion. Seems a pretty solid mass of metal. But that's an idea, I wonder if it can be used to make interesting alloys and metal/non-metal composites?

 

[ronan]

That surface grinder they use to clean the plates before welding is some piece of kit. A lad i was in college with during my apprenticeship worked in a small boat yard where trawlers were built and repaired and he was telling us about this plate, aluminium one side , steel the other. They used it to make anything about deck level in aluminium and below in steel.

I often wondered if the process of welding on either metal would weaken the bond between them, but i suppose it cannot.

 

[Dimitri De Spiegeleer]

I guess so, as the bonding between both layers is only minimally "fused" into each other, and both metals have a different coefficient of expansion. Meaning a rather large temperature difference will tear up the bonding.