Seam welding electrodes

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I'm putting together an article on the manufacture of seam welding electrodes and need some information on the history of the process (resistance seam welding) and ideas others in the industry might have. The current information in most welding manuals is minimal. Any suggestions or input would be appreciated and helpful.

-- Dennis R. Wootan (dwoo@iquest.net), November 06, 1999

Answers

Thanks for your question. I'm very glad to have the opportunity to share with you the story of how Resistance Seam Welders originated, as told to me by my father, who got the story first hand:

Mr. Arthur Mallett (sp?), my father's mentor, worked at Ford Motor Company as a project engineer for the original Mr. Henry Ford. His job was to figure out ways to make the cars in a more inexpensive way. Mr. Ford assigned Mr. Mallett the task of making a less expensive gas tank. As you may know, Ford automobiles originally had gas tanks shaped like a small barrel. This was very expensive to manufacturee,due to all the seams that had to be arc welded.

Mr. Mallett struggled with this assignment and wasn't coming up with any solutions to the problem until one evening, as he has helping his wife wash dishes, he noticed that two stamped-out metal dish pans put together and seam welded all around would form an inexpensive gas tank. The out-turned flanges provided a perfect place to put a series of spot welds, which would be a quick and cheap way to join the two halves. The only problem was that the tank would leak between the individual welds. The answer was to have overlapping spot welds, which would be very hard to accomplish with a standard rocker arm spot welder.

Mr. Mallett thus conceived the resistance seam welder, which uses rolling copper electrode wheels to produce a continous or overlapping seam weld. (Even a seam with overlapping welds is liquid tight.)

The only problem was that a seam welder did not exist. Mr. Mallett then left Ford Motor Company and joined Thomson Welder Company to design and market a seam welder. This made Mr. Ford very angry, and Ford Motor Company was the last auto maker to adopt this new manufacturing process. This is still how automobile gas tanks are made today!

Please feel free to contact me for any further information that you may require. - Tom Snow

-- Tom Snow (welders@tjsnow.com), November 06, 1999.


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-- hasan poorasli (poorasli@yahoo.com), July 06, 2001.

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