How can we prevent the erosion of thin stainless tubes that we need to braze into several through-holes in some thick stainless plates during our furnace brazing operations?

There are a number of very important steps that must be followed in order to ensure good brazing, one of which is that the parts to be joined must be clean before being assembled for brazing.  

Here is the third and final part of Dan Kay's blog series about the purpose of a braze fillet. Part 2 can be found here.

Here is part 2 of Dan Kay's blog about the purpose of a braze fillet.

When visiting a brazing job-shop recently, I was told that one of the shop’s clients insisted that some of their components be re-brazed because the braze fillets were not large enough, according to that client. When I examined the component myself, the braze fillet was actually perfectly OK, but the shop’s client thought that all fillets – welded or brazed – needed to be large.

Brazing expert Dan Kay answers a detailed reader question about brazing 304L stainless steel. They are seeing a few dark spots on the product being brazed. Find out what Dan says the problem(s) might be.

Centorr Vacuum Industries received orders for six high-vacuum furnaces for the precision processing of metals in heat treating, annealing and brazing applications. With sizes from 12 x 12 x 24 inches to over 48 x 48 x 48 inches and from 1 cubic foot to over 100 cubic feet, Centorr’s Workhorse furnaces can handle a variety of customer loads in either high vacuum or partial pressures of inert gas. The furnace design has a refractory-metal hot zone and high-vacuum pumping system for the processing of advanced materials requiring an extremely clean high-vacuum environment.

Experiments were undertaken to develop the best process for brazing Hast X alloy for an aerospace application.

Question: I've heard that argon can be a dangerous gas to work with in my brazing operations. I don't understand how this can be since argon is known to be an inert gas and appears to be quite safe to use. How can it be dangerous?

Let’s finish the discussion we started last time. As shown in Table 1, it is important that you look at the surfaces that you want to braze together and decide if they meet the design criteria needed for brazing.