1045 Weldability Steel

I was discussing welding 1045 steel with another engineer yesterday and he indicated the quality and integrity of welds on 1045 is poor at best. Both of us know about pre-heating. Is there a grade of weld wire or something else that has worked well for you in this application?

If you use a filler material with similar chemistry to the parent metal and preheat and weld between 1000°F and 1500°F, cool slowly, anneal and heat treat the required hardness you will limit everything but grain structure differences. It is mandatory to over weld and machine back to original size.

For 1045 this is going to be difficult because of filler material availability. In the mid 1980\’s we fabricated a prototype high speed track out of C1026 and C1040 and used a .30 carbon weld wire, annealed and heat treated the blocks and none cracked. The C1026 did stretch past yield under load. We have had good success using an E80SD2 welding wire C1045 to 8620.

Large sprockets and steel gears used in the paper industry or used in processing basic, raw materials are often manufactured from 1045, 4140 or A36 steel. Coal, Iron, rock, stone, gravel, and even cement are processed and transported every day. Engineered systems such as moving systems, crushing systems, curing and drying systems handle enormous tonnages of raw materials while processing them into smaller, more refined, or mixed applications. Precision Grinding works with design engineers, job shops, parts and machine manufacturing companies, and the processing plants themselves to manufacture large and heavy custom steel component parts, such as gears, sprockets, crushing equipment, pulverizers, and precision conveyor system parts that are incorporated into the processing equipment that serves these industries.