A little artistic application of aluminum wire welding

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Hello folks, I know that some of you dabble or might even be rather serious metal artists out there. I help out with a metal arts class at the school where I teach and kind of out of the blue I came upon this. I remember having used stainless steel to back parts with in order to build up missing pieces and sections. So I had a bit of a revelation this evening and tried a little something out to see if it would work. Got a piece of 1/4" SS plate and welded some shapes on it and some writing with the aluminum spool gun. The beads actually wetted out pretty well and were fairly controllable. Once I had completed the welding I took it over to the cooling trough and quenched it. Didn't exactly fall off, yet, with a little persuasion from a hammer and chisel I was able to knock it loose and the resulting picture kind of shows the results. The piece of stainless that I used was one of those with a fairly rough surface, I believe using a piece with a smoother surface might have facilitated the separation of the two metals a bit. If you haven't already tried this and if you have an artistic urge, I do believe you might be able to come up with some rather interesting artwork using something like this. Enjoy and best regards, Allan Attached ImagesLast edited by aevald; 10-25-2011 at 12:46 AM.aevald
Reply:Cool idea.  Bet this will turn some artists loose on a different medium.  Thanks, man.(Retired) Professional firefighter, amateur everything else I try to do...Oh yeah:  Go Big Red!   (You know: one of the 12 members of the Big 10 cuz we left the 10 members of the Big 12...)
Reply:Thanks for the comments, I am contemplating using this process to make-up a bunch of tree branches and then weld them to an aluminum "tree trunk" to make-up a 3D type rendering of a tree. Should be fun and just a bit interesting. Best regards, Allanaevald
Reply:Try using a piece of copper instead of the Stainless.  It'll stick a bit less.Buy American, or don't whine when you end up on the bread line.
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Reply:Yes RaptorDuner, I'm just down the road a bit from your location. Go west on 12, south on 5, you'll get to my school in about 50 minutes to an hour. Used to have a cabin on Lake Mayfield and I've had some students from Randle before. Best regards, Allanaevald
Reply:Might have to try that too. Thanks for the suggestion. Best regards, Allanaevald
Reply:Well folks, had a chance to mess around with this whole thing a bit more today. GTAW didn't have results even close to the GMAW application. Couldn't get it to puddle up on top of the SS at all, instead, it just sheened off like water on a RainX'd window. Tried AC, DCEN, and DCEP, still pretty much the same result, wire is apparently the way to go if you're looking to have any way to control the deposits. Found out something else, if I increased the size of the pattern much the bead cracked into pieces. I was using .035 ER-5356 filler, this could very likely have contributed to the cracking issues. When I get a bit more time I'll try the same thing with ER-4043, a rough guess tells me that the cracking issue might go away. If not, I may need to apply a bit of preheat to the SS backing material so that it doesn't cool so quickly and maybe helps to limit the cracking.      I was able to weld various pieces of this together with very little trouble with GTAW, so this might support my intent to make up some 3D type stuff from various pieces. If I come up with something else I'll include it on here for you folks to laugh at. Best regards, Allanaevald