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A demo at the Ozark Folk Center made me rethink my forge welding flux.
I was watching a smith there work on a Damascus billet, and he was using just borax and a bit of powdered iron. He said, 'The simpler it is, the less can go wrong.' I'd been using a fancy commercial mix for years, thinking it was better. That afternoon, I tried his method on a small knife blank and got the cleanest weld I've had in months. Has anyone else gone back to a basic flux recipe and been surprised?
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rodriguez.felix5mo ago
Yeah, I was the same way. Bought the expensive stuff in the fancy tub for years, convinced it was doing something special. Saw a guy at a fair using just plain borax he got from the grocery store, and I almost laughed. Tried it myself on a whim when I ran out of my usual mix, and the weld was so much cleaner, no weird crust or bubbles. Sometimes you just add more problems trying to solve a problem that wasn't there.
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wendy3915mo ago
lol same thing happened to me with a fancy anti-scale compound. My welds kept getting grainy and I was blaming my heat control. An old timer at a meet just used straight anhydrous borax from the hardware store. Tried it on a simple stack and the difference was night and day, no more junk in the weld line. Sometimes the extra ingredients in the commercial stuff just make a mess.
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