experience welding pinion gear?
 

Im in the prosses of depowering my steering rack. I cut the seals today and got the rack back in.Now i want to make sure i have a slop free beautifull steering experance, So i want the splines in the pinion welded. but when i go to my local welder he is like "thats hardened metal i cant do it" so i go to another welder "sorry i cant weld that i dont have the equiptment" and finaly the last guy within 15 miles listed on google " Never seen anything like this i dont want to chance desroying it"
So i know it can be done. But where and my whom? i thouhgt any profesional with a tig could do it but i guess not. I want someone who knows how to do this. So what do i look for? who have you all used? perhaps someone i can even send it to get done? thanks

I have a guy up here that did mine. Wasn't much, he does stuff for me in free time. I know I'm not a money maker for him, but he's cool and does good work. Just don't be in a hurry. I think Artech does it too.

dude, i just welded mine with a lincoln 110 mig welder.

Any tool and dye welder will be able to do it.

You need the right filler to do it "properly", but i guess if some knucklehead in his backyard can do it with a 110 wire feed i'm sure it will be fine buzzed together anyway possible.

What's the worst that can happen?? :laugh:

They warp when MIG Welded, so if you take this road anyway make shure to weld it with a soft steel like stainless and be shure to have acess to a dial gauge and a press.

I just tig'd mine in the garage. El cheapo Eastwood tig, and I just used whatever stainless filler I had in the garage, 316L, if memory serves. It's not terribly hard to weld, and just welding one side then the other was enough to keep if from warping. :dunno:

ok il swing by another place tomorow. what fller is recomended?

Most businesses aren't going to want to touch it with a papertrail. You'll hand the guy $20 of beer money right before he goes home for the night and stand there alone in the shop while it cools.

I did mine with a mig - baked it to 500 degrees in the oven for a 10 minutes, took it to the garage and made a few sparks, back to the oven and so on. I think I went back and forth five times and when I was done I left it in the oven with the door closed to cool over a few hours.

The oven probably didn't help much but it didn't hurt and I got reasonable penetration without warping the gear. A TIG would have been better and an operator with skills would have been much better but its working fine so far. If the welds fails, I'll be back on the same reed valve and pin stops the guys that are terrified of this process are on. I have zero concerns about a catastrophic failure related to this modification.

All I can say is I have no problems with my steering binding due to warpage, and I'm drifting it so the wheel is flying back and forth freely. But go and spend $200 to have a tool and die shop do it.

i have been to 4 different places now. they each tell me it cant be done and each talks to me like im more stupid than the next..wtf?

Maybe they're onto something.


Take it to a real-deal fab shop and tell them what you want.

Because I can't weld and don't know any good fabricators locally I'm shipping my pinion and my coolant mixing outlet (cut and weld outlet on opposite side) to a member on this site to weld them both for me. I trust his welding 100%. He love me long time.....

Is the part that needs to be welded stainless or something? If someone finds me some pictures of what exactly needs to be welded and what the welds should look like I am willing to give it a try. I have my TIG welder and if someone tells me what the proper filler rod would be I think I could get it done, just not looking the greatest.

Baller thread.

Got mine done by artech. Did an awesome job for $20.

Bumping an old thread to show what I had done on my pinion.
My engineer buddy planned to take it to to work to his welder at a large chainsaw manufacturing company.
They looked at at it and determined not a good idea to weld due to being case hardened material which has a tendency to crack. So they decide to drill and pin it in 2 places. 90 degrees from each point. Pin was press fitted and glued. I'm trusting these guys considering they're resume and way more knowledge then I.
Not stepping on any toes, just putting it out there for reference.

I just had mine welded this past wkend by a fabricator. Seems fine. Afterwards, I thought about it and wondered in a brass brazing rod would've been a better choice. The brass would flow into grooves between the splines and should be pretty strong. The heat wouldn't be nearly hot enough to warp the shaft either.

Maybe if mine fails and I have to do another one, I'll try the brazing method.

Why in hell has nobody tried stuffing the splines with J-B Weld? Maybe this summer I'll finally do a depower and try it myself.

jbweld has a compressive strength of like 10ksi. Steel is like 70? Try it, then pull it out after 10k miles and take pics, I'm very curious to see how well it holds up.

Initially, I thought of shoving a bunch of jb weld in there, but didn't think it'd hold on the compression forces that i neither knew how or wanted to calculate so I did what has worked for others.