How to judge of the adequacy of Spot Welds in Stainless Steel Sheets?
Austenitic Stainless Steel sheets are easily spot welded. However, just byobserving how many common household implements made of stainless steel failsometimes in spot welds, one would think that it may be difficult to obtainadequate strength and to evaluate it. Given standard single lap spot weldcoupons, it appears that the minimum strength reported for each spot weld inaccepted Specifications has no real interest, because good spot welds will notbreak in the weld. When tested in tension they will rather fail in the materialaround the weld, by tearing a button in one half of the specimen and leaving ahole in the other half. This is a good result even if the tensile test value atrupture is not known exactly. Top Sorting unweldable Stainless Steel Q: A batch of regular stainless steel fasteners to be welded on a sheet, wasinadvertently mixed up with free-cutting stainless ones. As we are told thatfree-cutting stainless is not weldable, how can we sort out the weldable items? A: Hopefully
