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Wrought iron hull vs steel pros and cons?


Darrenroberts

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On 26/05/2017 at 21:53, bargemast said:

Your friend must have been not only a good welder David, but also a very good fairy tale teller, these rods were quite special, but not that special, at the time if I remember rightly, they cost a bit more than twice the price of the more sort of standard rods that were used at the yards.

 

For the price he told you the rods will have to be a mixture of superglue and golddust  :)

 

Peter.

 

The £1 an inch sounds to me like the rate his firm charged out for welding. I used to work for a firm who charged £1 an inch back in the mid 70s. 

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On 22/05/2017 at 10:48, Darrenroberts said:

iqm looking int into buying a old wrought iron hull that has passed a survey, but iam consernd about a few things 1 is the maintence on hull more complicated and 2 if I needed to have work done in the further would it beat more specialised job than a steel hull? (Costing more money?) any help would be greatly appreciated 

 

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Riveted iron sailing ships of the 19C had the reputation of being indestructable and long-lived. They were however heavy. The steel sailing ships which replaced them could carry more paying cargo weight. 

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On 22/05/2017 at 12:23, mross said:

But was the surveyor a specialist?  Wrought iron can't be welded (with limited exceptions).  Repairs would need to be riveted.  There are not many places left doing riveting.  In a collision, if some rivets failed, it could sink quickly.  That does not mean that a riveted boat is weak.  SS Great Britain was a good example.

How is that,most of the composite " Joshers" were iron sides & the one I had & many more had patches welded on the footings were the sides wore thin at the knee placing mine was repaired in this way on several occasions at Charity dock & I wouldn't have thought the Gilbert Bros would have used anything specialist in the way of plate /rods etc & it was certainly stick welding

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Cast iron can be welded with nickel rods. I did a welding course years ago, half a box of the rods fell in my lunch box. Useful for mending stoves etc, still have a few around.

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9 minutes ago, Jim Riley said:

Cast iron can be welded with nickel rods. I did a welding course years ago, half a box of the rods fell in my lunch box. Useful for mending stoves etc, still have a few around.

As interesting as that may be, it is little help to the OP as the thread is regarding WROUGHT IRON

Cast Iron is much harder, brittle and less malleable, has a much higher carbon content and cannot be bent, hammered or 'stretched' - unlike Wrought iron.

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16 minutes ago, Alan de Enfield said:

As interesting as that may be, it is little help to the OP as the thread is regarding WROUGHT IRON

Cast Iron is much harder, brittle and less malleable, has a much higher carbon content and cannot be bent, hammered or 'stretched' - unlike Wrought iron.

I was thinking, but didn't say, that the nickel rods may work on wrought iron too.

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Wrought iron is weldable. It needs low carbon rods as it is a fairly pure material.

It is a laminar material so it doesn't take fillet welds perpendicular to the layers due to the risk of tearing. Butt welds along the thickness are fine. That would be the process for welding replacement panels into hull sides. Perpendicular joints can be constructed with buttering runs along the thickness.

Wrought iron and steel can be welded. Early industrial steels were lower in carbon than modern steels and were akin to wrought iron in terms of chemical composition but not structure. Low carbon gives better corrosion resistance but inferior mechanical properties.

The use of the term "can't be welded" is potentially misleading. There are processes for joining most metal to similar metal but when joining dis-similar metals - including different alloy steels or heat treated to non-heat treated steel - the problem isn't so much physically joining them as producing a weld by a process that will properly fuse with both surfaces and leave the properties of both parent metals unaffected.

JP

 

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