doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com Braised ribs vs soft soldered ribs

Damn I hate posting on BBSs where there are people who know more than me - which is all of them. But I think in the gun trade and in the plumbing trade brazing means high temperature (1200F) and soldering means low temperature (450F).

And Miller I don't understand everything you wrote but if you called me a name you're another one.

keith - I think you hit the nail on the head. I'm pre-menstrual because I am so distraught over who became President today. This BBS is so much cheaper than shrinks or anti-depressants.

Very cathartic.

Thanks!

Mike

P.S. keith shouldn't you change your screen name from "keith" to "Keith"?

[quote=

P.S. keith shouldn't you change your screen name from "keith" to "Keith"?[/quote] Mike, It's just another way of being humble. But thanks for noticing I'm a lower-case type of guy. keith

Riddled with questions



So now, what does brazed beef taste like?

It's interesting to note that some foreign languages do not constrict themselves with the technically sophisticated notions of where soldering ends and where brazing starts. Soft solder, silver solder, we do mix it all up most brazenly. I do wish we'd simply make a distinction between the methods of joining materials by whether the two bodies are either melted together or not. But we don't. Oh well.

Back to our pots, brazing and soldering both do not involve reaching the melting temperature of the base stock - in this way they are entirely similar to what we'd get by simply applying some good old hot melt mucilage glue to our steel ribs. No different at all... except for strength and application temperature.

Mmmm, braised ribs sounds pretty delicious.

I'd be surprised to think that the industrial attachment of barrels and ribs would involve only one type of soft (hard, insert whatever choice you want) solder or brazing compound. Putting so many parts together, one after the other, must involve a discriminate selection of various glues that melt in decreasing order of temperature so that the first two parts attached don't get unglued on the last bit of bonding. Thus, stick-on the locking lugs with the highest strength stuff, then spot the ends of the barrels together, then move on to the ribs, and so on and hopefully the lugs won't fall off in the process. It's not easy and it takes immense skill and expertise while the tasteful results look effortless.

Mmmm, expertise

You know what tastes delicious too? it's bacon fried in a tinned copper pot. Tight temperature play makes for tin that sticks strongly to the copper base and bacon that sticks - ever so slightly - to the tin. It's tricky, go too hot, the tin pearls off the pan. And with success, the results is a marvelously uniform browning of the bacon strips produced with total effortlessness. This cannot be achieved in modern non-stick griddle surfaces but it's not braised bacon either, for thicker items to fry, the copper and tin scheme does not work at all. Plain steel and cast iron take it further up a notch in temperature.

Frying, sauteing, braising, roasting, grilling, brazing, welding and soldering... It's all about temperature control.

It's all about temperature control.

And for shooting the bacon...

Mike;
I did not call you any name & have no intention of doing so. I put in 35 years in the machinist trade & the terms I used are universally common to that trade. Soldering as you say is normally done around 450°F. These may be tin/lead solders or lead free solders of primarily tin, but often containing traces of cadmium or silver & perhaps other components as well. Brazing was normally done with a "Brass" rod & required a Red heat. Silver Soldering was done very similar to brazing but didn't normally require quite as much heat & generally flowed easier. That Easy-Flo 45 @ 1145°F was about the lowest melt Silver-Solder I was familar with though. I guess plumbers & machinists use a different lingo, but we never referred to a low temp solder as a Silver solder, even though it might contain a trace amount of silver. Pure tin melts around 450° & pure lead around 620°. That 66/34 mix, known as the Eutectic point melts @ 356°, lower then either base metal. Any other mix of tin/lead will start to melt at that 356° temp but will remain slushy till a higher temp is reached to totally liquefy the component which has a greater percentage than the Eutectic point, chart I have for 50/50 lists 401°. The Eutectic Co based it's name upon this characteristic & sold a line of solders all of whose alloys were based upon the Eutectic point of the various alloy used. We used their 157 alloy by the miles of wire which as I recall contained mostly tin with some cadmium & a little Silver & still melted below 450°. We just caled it soldering though, not silver soldering. That term was reserved for those alloys requiring the metal being brought to a low red heat for it to flow.

Miller I guess where I am missing your point is about silver soldering. Binko talked about the "silver solder" process. When installing refrigerant piping and medical gas piping silver solder is used where the high heat of brazing would damage some component. This silver solder is just a soft solder with some silver content in it.

I assumed that was the type of solder that would be used in the process Binko was talking about when he wrote about "silver solder" being different than brazing.

I meant the name calling bit as humor and can see it wasn't very clear. Should have used a smiley face or something. Doesn't seem funny now and I meant no offense.

I wish Run With The Fox would start posting on this thread so I wouldn't look so addled and disconnected with the conversation.

Best,

Mike

Think RWTF has defected to the shooting sportsman board and adopted a new nom de net. Check out the "Hemingway's Guns" thread and see if you recognize anyone's posting style. He uses paragraphs and punctuation now...Geo

I think we're splitting hairs on the solder/braze nomenclature as they can be found used and/or misused in a lot of different places. That seems especially true of the low silver alloy solders/brazes (is that a word?). Safe to say that both use a metal different than the parts being joined and of lower melt temperature. The high silver content solders/brazes have such a high melt temp that I find them undesireable for barrel joining. Although, I can see how a mfr might find some attraction with them.

Chuck it is a pretty fine line.

I think the difference is important becasue "soft soldered" barrels can be regulated heating the ends up and moving them in relation to one another. They can't be hot blued. Brazed barrels aren't regulated by heating them up and can be hot blued.

Probably "silver solder" means different things in different trades. Silver can be a component of both soft solder and Brazing rod.

Best,

Mike

George I didn't read the whole ten page thread but it looks like he fits better over there than here. Or did I miss something?

Best,

Mike

"I'd be surprised to think that the industrial attachment of barrels and ribs would involve only one type of soft (hard, insert whatever choice you want) solder or brazing compound. Putting so many parts together, one after the other, must involve a discriminate selection of various glues that melt in decreasing order of temperature so that the first two parts attached don't get unglued on the last bit of bonding. Thus, stick-on the locking lugs with the highest strength stuff, then spot the ends of the barrels together, then move on to the ribs, and so on and hopefully the lugs won't fall off in the process. It's not easy and it takes immense skill and expertise while the tasteful results look effortless."

Typically, the barrels are joined at the breach end by brazing, for both chopper lump and dovetailed lump. Then, the barrel tube area is heavily tinned. The ribs are fitted and "wired and wedged" into place while the whole assembly is heated sufficently to flow the tin and join all parts together. With this process, regulation can be done by remelting the tin and shifting the barrels slightly. Brazed barrels require the whole barrel/rib/lump assembly be held in a jig and joined in one fell swoop. It is either right or not and remelt adjustment is not an option.