Flux instead of backfill for SS

[want2weld]

I plan on doing some stainless steel welding soon and was reading that you shoud back fill the tubing with argon while welding. Then I found this stuff:


Has anybody used it or something similar? It's used in place of gas back fill.. I guess it's a past or something like that.

[Wood-N Steel]

We have used products like that but we found them hard to clean
after welding.We now use nitrogen for inside purging. We weld SS pipe from 2"Ø to 102" Ø

[rangerod]

Solar B Flux

The flux will get a hard glassy looking covering. Like Wood N Steel said it is a PITA to get off, lots of man hours. Is your project sanitary tubing or another application. As far as the flux itself it does a good job at protecting the weld pool.

[aircraft]

It works well but hard to remove so I wouldn't use it for pipes unless it was a large pipe that you could get to the backside to clean it and a large pipe would take a lot of argon to fill.

[rangerod]

Large Pipe

aircraft

Looks like you are in a catch 22. Well go with the lesser of the two evils

[aircraft]

Naa we always fill it with argon. We tried the flux and had just a few fail x-ray, had to go back and redo and alot of wasted time cleaning the flux off, this is much more costly than the argon, makes your welders look bad too. We haven't had any large pipes over 3 foot in a long while but we have a good selection of inflatable ****s.

[Guest]

We have used it and it works well...ya mix it with alcohol. Like Aircraft said, it is too hard to clean...much better to use inert gas like argon for purging.