The Importance of Identifying Metals

    Over the course of its history, humanity has added more and more metals to its repertoire, and each new discovery has revolutionized all other aspects of human technology, too. Copper was the earliest metal to be worked, due to its softness and its abundance on beaches in nugget form and other easily-accessible deposits.

    Later, the discovery of the improved characteristics that could be given to the metal by adding tin ushered in the Bronze Age. Iron, steel, improved forms of steel, and finally the modern metals such as aluminum, magnesium, have carried the tradition.

    None of these metals have gone out of use – instead, they have all become part of a wide-ranging, far-flung array of materials that are used for countless different applications, depending on what their specific characteristics make them suitable for.
Copper is still used alongside titanium, and with the panoply of alloys that have been developed, each basic type of metal has been divided into many additional types as well.

    You need to find out exactly what kind of metal you’re working with if you’re going to carry out your welding projects correctly. Each variety needs a different kind of filler metal, different welding temperatures, and often slightly different procedures as well.

Ferrous Metals

    Ferrous metals are those which include iron in some form – either pure iron, or one of the many different kinds of steel. These metals are among the easiest to weld, and are also very common in many different places. The sheet metal which cars are made out of is typically very thin steel. We eat with stainless steel utensils more often than not; many tools, household objects, and so on are made out of cast, stamped, or forged ferrous metals.

    Steel is used extensively in construction – whether as structural steel embedded in concrete to make it stronger, or as steel girders to form the bones of a building. Sheds, barns, fences, and animal pens are also made out of steel, often welded together on the spot by a farm welder.

    Ferrous metals respond well to welding, but get rusty (oxidized) easily, too. They can be made to resist this by alloying them with other metals – resulting in stainless steel – but regardless of the time, care needs to be taken to prevent oxidation while you’re welding these metals.

Non-Ferrous Metals

    These are the metals which contain no iron, and range from the very basic (copper) to the very recent and advanced (aluminum and titanium). All of them can be welded, but each has idiosyncrasies that you need to compensate for.

Pot Metals

    These are the “mutt metals” of the modern world. When random scrap of all kinds of metals is collected, melted, and turned into a single metal, the result is pot metal. There is no way to tell exactly what metals went into this salmagundi, and it is therefore hard to weld it. Welders prefer to braze pot metal for this reason.