Spot welded Zintec housings
Spot welded sheet metal housings
Spot welding is a useful manufacturing technique which has been used for many years to join 2 or more layers of sheet metal together. The automotive industry have used this process to assembly car body sections onto chassis and frame work sections with great success. Here at V and F Sheet Metal we use spot welding to assembly various housings where fully welded TiG or MiG joints wouldn’t be suitable. If we were to TiG weld the joints on these housings there would be a lot of heat from the TiG welding process which would burn off the Zintec coating on the mild steel. The welds would need to be cleaned off smooth (removing even more Zintec zinc coating) and the overall production time would be considerably more than the spot welding and as time is money we go with spot welding for these parts. Each individual spot weld joint isn’t as strong as a fully TiG welded run so we make up with a series of spot welds to provide the right amount of strength for this housing.
Spot welded Zintec housings
Spot welded sheet metal housings
The spot welding is not only quicker and therefore cheaper to produce but the skill level isn’t the same as TiG welding enabling us to involve more people in the factory with this manufacturing process. This batch of 200 Zintec housings are made from a light gauge (0.9mm thick) and were ideal for spot welding. Once the fabricated assemblies were powder coated the spot welds were hardly visible and for the application that this housing this used for this was not a problem.
Spot welded and TiG welded mild steel housings
Mild steel fabricated housings
This batch of mild steel housings were manufactured in January 2014 and used many production processes. They started out life as a 3D models of all the individual sheet metal parts within our Radan modelling CAD/CAM software. The parts were then tooled and laid out on a nest for CNC punching. The parts were all CNC punched from mild steel in sets, deburred and CNC bent up using our Trumpf 7036 CNC press brakes. The threaded bushes were inserted before all the corner joints were TiG welded up. After the welds were cleaned off the brackets and angle plates were spot welded in position as seen here. There’s also a good view of ventilation louvres which have been formed into the housing sides while being CNC punched on our Trumpf 3000R CNC punch press.
If you have a sheet metal fabrication project that might need spot welding please give us a call and we will be happy to advise you and provide you with quotations to produce your project.