Aluminum brazing is a growing industry around the world today, and I teach a lot about this topic in each of my brazing training seminars.

My recommendation is that you institute some QC tests on the plated parts that you receive back from your plater in order to evaluate the quality of that plating. The so-called “blister test” was the most important and valuable one we developed, and it should NEVER be done by the plating company but by YOU.

We plated the mating surfaces of our Inconel 738 components that were going to be nickel brazed, and the parts failed in service prematurely. An analysis showed that our brazing was OK, but the plating had peeled from the base metal causing the premature failure. How can we prevent this in the future?

People occasionally ask me for information about how to determine the strength of their brazed assemblies, which involve different types of base metals and different kinds of brazing filler metals (BFMs).

We braze thousands of special cooling baffles for our customer each year, mainly thin sheet-metal AMS 5536 (Hast-X) parent material and BNi-2 braze powder with overall good results.

Brazing expert Dan Kay answers a reader's question about fixturing.

We pick up where we left off last time with the procedure for making brazing paste.

Brazing furnaces today often contain a lot of very heavy fixturing materials in their brazing chambers. This “fixturing” includes all the heavy-metal structures in the furnace hot zone (e.g., grates, trays, racks, baskets, etc.).

Can I make my own brazing paste by mixing a gel binder with a brazing filler-metal powder, or should I only purchase pre-mixed pastes from filler-metal suppliers?

Brazing expert Dan Kay answers a question about outgassing of brazing paste binders during heating.