While there are multiple types of welding, many welding processes aren’t as familiar to the general public or welding amateurs. This is a shame, in our opinion, as many of these processes can be handy tools for any aspiring welder to incorporate into their arsenal. Tack welding is an excellent example of this.
Tack welding is an innovative procedure for when welders can’t do an entire job at once. Think of a tack weld as a placeholder weld. This welding technique is used when welders need to ensure that welds will stay in place for a short time, but they aren’t the same as a fully-fledged welding job.
We’ll get into exactly how these small welds work, when they are most often used, what kinds of metals they are used with, and more.
What Is Tack Welding?
Tack welding is a procedure that every welder could benefit from knowing. At its core, it’s a temporary weld that holds two joining metal parts together before the final welding process is completed.
This is done through small, individual tack welds ranging in size from a quarter inch to a full inch placed at key locations all over the metal pieces being joined. Tack welds can be used in various metals, including steel, aluminum, cast iron, and stainless steel.
Why are tack welds used? Well, the answer is pretty simple – during the welding process, the last thing you want to happen is to have the distance between the two pieces of metal shift at the last second or to have the alignment you’ve drawn up suddenly turn askew.
This is why tack welding is essential to many different welding processes: it helps maintain proper alignment. Now we’ll get into what kind of welding processes tack welding fits right in with. This way, you’ll know when to incorporate it into your workpieces.
What Are All the Perks of Tack Welds?
There are a ton of perks that come with tack welds. The biggest is that they are very easy to re-do if you make a mistake. This often happens during the welding process – you set everything in place, align the different pieces, and there’s some slip-up during the actual process.
If you mess up a tack weld, though, they’re pretty easy to take on and off. It also isn’t a very complicated job to adjust tack welds or manipulate them as needed. We would be remiss if we didn’t mention a few other benefits. These include the fact that tack welds can also improve the overall strength of the weld.
This might seem obvious, but tack welds help prevent the piece from warping or overheating during welding. Instead of relying on clamps or feverishly making one large weld very quickly, tack welds enable you to take your time.
This means that the finished weld won’t be subject to breakage or deformities that could impact the overall integrity of the permanent weld. Plus, tack welds can also become part of the final weld and be integrated smoothly into the finished product, which will lend further strength.
Are There Risks to Tack Welding?
Tack welding can come with a few risks, but most of these can be mitigated by knowing what you’re getting into. For example, it’s always best practice to thoroughly clean welding surfaces to prevent oxides from entering the process, as this can cause many issues.
Other issues that can arise from an improper tack weld include cracking in the final weld, the formation of dents or holes, overly hard areas, a buildup of oxides, and more.
It’s also essential that while utilizing tack welds, you remember that they aren’t the most stable welds in the world. So, don’t try to move entire workpieces unless they have been properly stabilized. If you rely on a temporary weld to keep your welding material together, it could result in lots of damage or even injury.
What Kind of Welding Processes Use Tack Welds?
While tack welding can be utilized in many different welding operations, there are many that you’d be hard-pressed to incorporate it into. These include any large-scale welding operations that require hundreds of identical welds to be reproduced the same way over and over again.
While tack welds can help ensure that welds look the way they’re supposed to look, this doesn’t mean that it’s feasible to use tack welds repeatedly for this purpose. The best use for tack welding is incorporating it into small-scale jobs with low volume.
This is because if you’re only producing one or two small welds, then you probably won’t be investing in the fixtures that operations with a larger scale would use. What are fixtures? Well, they’re the clamps that hold two metal parts at the proper distance and alignment from one another.
In other words, they’re what small tack welds replace. However, these fixtures can also be expensive, so most amateur or small-scale welding jobs won’t use them – it’s just not practical. It’s far more useful to pick up a couple tacking weld joints instead.
The Basics of Tack Welding
Now that you know more about the tack welding procedure, its uses, and its benefits, you will feel more equipped to take it on yourself. This is one welding process that has a ton of versatility to it.
While it should only be done by a qualified welder, we think that any of our readers have what it takes to get acquainted with tack welding and everything it can do for your job. Let us know what you thought of our article, and thanks for reading!