Cleaning Up Aluminum Weld

Aluminum has low weight, high strength, excellent malleability, and great corrosion resistance. It makes great material for various applications. Aluminum components can be joined through welding. The weld beads can be cleaned up to tidy up the joints, improve or fix fitment issues, remove surface flaws that can weaken the bead, or prepare it for finishing.

There are various tools for cleaning aluminum weld. An already neat weld would only require a wire brush to remove surface bumps. Weld beads that are protruding too much can be fixed with diamond grinding wheels or grinding points.

The grinding wheels are used for smoothing flat and accessible joints like butt joints, edge joints, and even corner joints. The diamond grinding points are used for angled joints like lap joints and tee joints, or joints in tight spots that are impossible to reach with grinding wheels.

Why used diamond grinders? Diamond grinders provide the fastest and easiest way of cleaning up aluminum welds. The diamond abrasives used in grinders cuts into the aluminum weld material rather effortlessly. This allows the user to use the grinders without using so much strength for adding pressure, resulting to better control which ultimately leads to more precise work. Also, some aluminum welders use weld materials that are much stronger and harder than aluminum to produce very strong joints. In such cases, other grinder materials are unable or struggle with the cleaning up the beads.

Diamond Grinders

Grinding is a type of machining process that uses abrasive grains to remove material from the work piece. Abrasive grains are made into discs, wheels, or points mounted on a machine with a rotating motor. Together with the motor, the entire machine is called a grinding machine or grinder. The grinder can be a power tool or machine tool. A power grinder is operated by hand and portable. A machine grinder is a fixed structure with constraining mechanism that holds the work piece in place and guiding mechanism that moves the grinding discs, wheels, or points about. Grinders are used for various applications such as forming, sharpening, surface finishing, and deburring.

Between grinding discs, wheels, and points, the latter two are more similar to each other and makes use of actual grinding action in which material is grinded off from the work piece whereas grinding discs are primarily used for cutting apart work pieces.

The main difference between grinding wheels and grinding points is that grinding wheels are operated as machine tools while grinding points are operated with power tools.

Diamond is one of the hardest materials available. It can be grounded into tiny fragments that can be used as abrasives. Diamond grinding tools are excellent for working with raw materials that are too hard for traditional grinding tools.

Diamond grinding wheels and diamond grinding points provide faster processing. However, diamond is not an all-in-one solution for grinding. The tools cannot be used on steel and certain carbon-rich materials. Minerals on steel and steel alloys can react with the diamond particles. So does the carbon from the carbon-rich materials.