Bodgit welding to stainless steel

[Pete Verdon]

Hi,

I have a brick barbecue involving a number of mesh grids. These have turned out to be insufficiently stiff for the gaps they need to span, especially when weight and heat are added. So I've been stiffening them up by welding some scrap steel strip round the outside and across the middle. On a plain steel grid this has worked very well, but I now have to deal with the stainless-steel top grill that the food sits on.

I'm a very amateur welder, with no instruction and not a great deal of experience. Basically, I bought a £50 arc welder from Machine Mart last year to build the various other metal parts of the barbecue (lid, hinge mounts, etc), and have done a few other odd jobs with it since. I have a couple of boxes of "ordinary" electrodes in different sizes.

What I want to know is whether I'm likely to be OK welding some steel (believed to be mild steel; it's from an old garden gate) strip onto my stainless steel mesh. Clearly this doesn't require aircraft grade weld quality; as long as the two stay together and keep my sausages out of the fire I'm happy. If at all possible I'd like to avoid buying any special electrodes for this one small job.

I don't want to suck it and see because I'd end up messing up the edges of my (not cheap) stainless grid for nothing if it turned out that such a weld was completely impossible with the equipment, electrodes, and skills at hand. I don't have the knowledge or experience to judge if that's likely to be the case.

Cheers,

Pete

[Andy Dingley]

Make another grid in plain steel to sit underneath it and support it. This could be as simple as heavy (1/4" diameter+) rods laid across the brickwork supports.

I doubt you'll have much luck welding stainless with manual arc stick welding. Not because it's stainless, but because it's damned hard to use stick to weld a short weld in anything vaguely thin and wire is even harder than thin sheet. Your best welder, and only really neat option, is a spot-welder. Maybe a local garage? Even wire-feed (MIG) welding won't do thin wire neatly. Gas would do it though: either oxy- acetylene to weld it, or simple propane to braze it or even silver solder it. You can also buy ready-welded stainless mesh, but it's pricey.

Stainless itself is dead easy to weld, at this non-aerospace low- level of work. It's no harder, it's just not going to be stainless or particularly strong afterwards.

When making a big barbecue, IMHO make half of it as a solid steel griddle, rather than a mesh grille. You can grill veggie stuff on here without it falling through, fry sausages, bacon or eggs on it (breakfast!) or even do pancakes.

Watch out for zinc or cadmium (plating or solders) when making barbecues.

[Pete Verdon]

Well, I've managed OK with the plain steel mesh, which is the same sort of size. Note that I'm not fabricating the mesh, I'm just welding some thin strip round the edges.

OK, that sounds good. I think I can tolerate some rusting edges, and it's not under serious stress.

[snip]

Bit late now (for both points) - I made the barbecue last summer and have already had some good use out of it. I just need to beef up the grids a bit.

Cheers - off to have a bash at welding the stainless right now.

Pete

[Pete Verdon]

...and it worked fine, no real difference from normal steel. Remains to be seen whether the heat-affected areas have lost their stainlessness (guess they probably have) but it shouldn't present a problem.

Pete