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My old smith in Tulsa said my forge welds were 'too shy', so I started scarfing way deeper
Back when I was learning, I brought a chain link damascus billet to my mentor and he tapped it with a hammer, heard the rattle, and said my scarves were too shy. He meant I was leaving the edges too thin and short, so the weld never got a real bite. I went home and started cutting scarf joints about twice as long as I thought I needed, and I quit losing billets at the anvil. After 4 months of practicing on scrap rebar, I finally got a clean weld that survived a bend test without splitting. Anyone else get that one piece of feedback that flipped how you prep your joints?
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davis.noah24d ago
Longer scarves definitely help but calling short ones "too shy" makes it sound like the fix is always just more material. In my shop the opposite bit me more than once. I was cutting these huge long scarves and getting a nice fat mating surface, but the steel was so thin at the tip that it burned up in the fire before it ever touched. Two pieces of scale, no weld, billet on the floor. What actually fixed it for me was matching the scarf length to the stock thickness and cleaning the faces right before they go in, not just piling on more length. Deep scarf with a cold shut in it is still a cold shut. Bend test is the real judge though, so sounds like you got where you needed to be either way.
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