Picking up where we left off, here’s where the tiny size of the interstitial atom comes into play! Because it is so small, it is only weakly “bonded” into the BFM atomic structure and is thus able to quickly diffuse through that atomic structure.

Question: I have heard the terms "isothermal solidification" in reference to brazing, but I don’t really understand what it means or how to use it. Can you clarify this for me so that I can determine if it is something that I could use in some of my brazing operations?

A Q&A about honeycomb-seal brazing with Dan Kay.

I’ve heard people use the phrase “wiping the joint” when referring to brazing parts together. What does it mean, and when should it be used?

We want to use our vacuum furnace to braze a 6061 aluminum part to a 400-series stainless steel but are concerned about whether that can be done in our furnace, which only is used for aluminum brazing.

Please note, first of all, that the aluminum-oxide layer on the surface of the aluminum is very thin – only about 40-angstroms thick! That’s VERY thin, since an angstrom is only about one ten-billionth of a meter thick.

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.

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.