Showerthought: a $3 bag of kitty litter saved my forge welds

I was burning my steel every time I tried to weld a billet, so I started sprinkling a thin layer of unscented clay litter on the seams before fluxing, and after 4 tries in my shed in Akron every weld has held solid, so now I'm wondering if anyone else uses cheap desiccant tricks to keep moisture out of their flux.

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seanjackson28d ago

Clay litter pulls moisture but it also holds it once it's saturated, so you might just be trading one problem for another down the road. In a damp shed in Akron the litter is grabbing water out of the air before your flux gets a chance to soak it up, which sounds great until that clay turns into a wet paste and steam blows your weld apart. I ran into this with rice in a coffee can around my rod stash and it worked fine for a week, then just stopped doing anything because it was full. Baking your flux in a toaster oven at like 250 for a half hour before you weld does the same job and it doesn't leave grit in your seams. What happens when you forget a billet overnight and that litter layer is soaked through?

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