Welding Aluminum -> Stainless Steel

Anyone done this before?
Do we have the capability?

it’s generally not going to work well.

To bond aluminum (and things like copper) to stainless it’s generally brazed on, or welded using insert material that has one aluminum side and one stainless side already (fused via other means).

I mean, it will technically make a (terrible) bead, but don’t trust it to hold.

We don’t have stuff for brazing currently, and we decided against providing an acetylene setup to do so. We are considering an oxy/propane configuration but that remains to be seen.

Can you expound on what you are doing here?

Taking a stainless steel stripper pole mount and pole.
Pulling the stainless pole off and welding on an aluminum pole since the mount doesn’t fit I’ll weld it.

If it’s for professional use as a stripper pole aluminum isn’t as good of a material as stainless steel. Aluminum has a higher coefficient of friction (in that it doesn’t polish or wax as well), and has too high of a thermal conductivity for comfort (feels cold to the touch).

Would it be possible to shorten (or lengthen) the stainless pole to fit? Shorten would be easy, lengthen would be easier to weld than AL to Stainless.

If you are set on using AL and bonding it to stainless, you’ll have to braze/solder as you won’t be able to melt the two metals together (they are incompatible). You won’t have as much strength as if you had welded it, but should be more than enough to support humans.

Just do a bracket out of aluminum instead of the stainless.

2 Likes

The reason I have to use aluminum is Stainless comes with thin walls 0.065"
Background - I drill thousands of holes in the pole and fill them back in with acrylic so I need the wall thickness to press fit and glue to.

The thermal gets offset with the heat generated by the electronics inside.
I’m very dead set on using aluminum and joining it to stainless or reproducing this part in aluminum all together

1 Like

That part looks pretty easy to make on a lathe. Get pipe of the ID you need (or OD if the pole slides over it), and then turn a ring out of an AL billet and weld it.

Do you have enough experience with the lathe to turn something like this or would you need help?

That’s good to hear. :slight_smile:

I would need help.
Do you know the maximum bar diameter the lathe can handle?

Depends on the chuck, largest thing the currently operational lathe could spin up without much extra work would be somewhere around 13 inches. 8 inches or so like your part should be super easy to work with.

1 Like

So the idea of a lighted stripper pole sounds awesome!

The idea of brazing Al to SS sounds like a bad idea. I’ve never seen anything brazed to Al that I’d trust. I’d hate to see some poor girl working her way through college fall because of some subpar welds.

Don’t be that guy that hurts someone by making a crappy design decision.

Why do you need any of the SS parts? It sounds like you are replacing the bulk of the SS parts…

1 Like

The main reason is I can weld but I can’t lathe

@Kevin that is GLORIOUS!

Are you making a lot of these? If not what about getting some 1/4-3/8 inch pieces of Al and using the plasma cutter to cut donuts or similar…the weld them to stack a pseudo coupler or flange. Thoughts?

Happy to help you with this. Let me know your parts dimensions!

@yashsedai Are you available at all this week. I plan on buying the aluminum tomorrow and just got the measurements saturday.

@Tres0422 Yes I’ve already made 8 of them & plan to make many more. My problem with welding is that I think it may melt the LEDs or acrylic inside.

You can heat sink the aluminum to keep it from melting the acrylic.

Why not make the coupler out of SS and use some industrial epoxy to fasten it to the aluminum?

I will likely be available tuesday or wednesday night, hit me up via pm!

Just bought the aluminum.
This is the part I’m trying to create.
https://a360.co/2qxtXeB