I can’t speak for tanks, but in the early days of WWII, the US Navy just began to move from rivets to welds (on key components) and really didn’t trust welds yet. Battleship IOWA was most rivets. New Jersey was a mix (vertical vs horizontal on the hull). Then Missouri and Wisconsin were predominantly welded. From what I’ve seen, they had some of the better welders (as one would expect working on a capital ship). But clearly there were really just starting to get skills in the industry at that time. There was a desire to use welding as you didn’t need the overlapping of the plates and weight of the rivets, which was quite significant.
Interesting. The only ship I have been on (besides sub marines) was the USS Alabama, and it seemed like it was welded with big 6010 rods. The beads had a rough appearance. Insane the amount of welds holding that ship together. I can’t imagine how complicated riveting that together would have been.
@@makingmistakeswithgregremember we’re talking about armor plate, not A-36. That’s a high nickel alloy steel, medium carbon plate, several inches thick. On heavier ships, the armor is behind the plates you see on the outside. On capital ships, these plates were 12 inches thick. They didn’t use standard stick welding for that. They used heavy deposition welding of several types.
@@makingmistakeswithgregI saw an interview here on Y-T some time ago about this. It was with an old Soviet GI who drove one of those T34 tanks. He drove the moment it left the tank assembly line. The seems in some places were so sloppy that he noticed a little crack of daylight coming through in a few areas. Once in battle, the first time the Germans hit it with a flame thrower, some of flaming liquid seeped down through to the inside & burned him on the leg.
I was able to immediately identify the quality level of the welds presented in this video. These welds are known as "good enough for government work" welds.
@@getahanddown This, a mobility kill on a tank is still a kill. If a tank can't move it's more or less out of the fight until the crew can get it moving again.
The Russians used submerged arc welding on the T34 the Germans used highly skilled welders who had apprenticed for 5 years on their tanks. So whilst Hans and Fritz were starting on their second run Svetlana and Katya who three weeks ago were a primary school teacher and illiterate goat herder were starting on their second tank.
@@makingmistakeswithgregMore often than not the latter and not the former. Teachers were often reserved for teaching because 80% of the Soviet Union were illiterate before and after the revolution. They taught welders just good enough to read then sent them immediately to learn from more educated workers. Some learned to weld while they were still learning to read.
In the siege of Stalingrad there was a factory producing tanks while the battle raged. As tanks came off the line tank crews would jump in and drive them to the front. Some hadn’t even been painted properly when they were used. In a situation like that who cares what the welds look like.
Tank factories doubled as salvage and repair centers. Every tank that left was stamped with a new serial number, even all the parts were previously used. In some situations the crew went back with a damaged tank and immediately left with a 'new' one of salvaged parts.
"How could they do welds so bad?" - A guy, sitting in a warm buiding with high quality rods and a DC-antistick-arcforsage tiny box, which puts out up to 200 Amps no problem, and probably doing more for the quality of welds than himself, which would seem like a god damn witchcraft back in the days. Have used old transformer without rectifier, with shit-rods and a piece of nichrome wire as a ballast resistor a few times - kinda can understand, how the welds ain't that pretty. Great video, thank you.
No problem and you’re 100% right lol. Something about being in a active war, working 16 hours a day with just some bread and a pack of cigarettes, welding with a machine that’s probably a rewired transformer pulled off a destroyed building, with rods that amounted to toilet paper wrapped round stock, that collectively suggests they did a better job than expected lol.
Haha yeah my machine is a fixed up stick welder that could be older than I am. Other than that I've mostly done mig, and the one time I used another machine (the real welder at the job wasn't good with heights so they asked me to fill in) it was like metal coloured caulk. So easy to work with, to start and end or to change speed.
@@TijmenHatesads worked in a yard where it was all ac tranformers some relics back to the 40 s still in use 100v ocv no numbers left on th brass current grid, some just simple move to a different tap outlet despite this some fantastic quality welds produced by seasoned operators , Ac has the advantage over dc for structural welds no, arc blow being one , we done pipe too but dc was a big plus on pipes for root runs a lot easier another shop" the killing fields " had cables in ducts you did not know wher your plant was you simply connected to the various ends till you got a suitable juice as we called it
Gotta remember that their actual welding machines probably werent as good as the ones we have today. No fancy settings. And no youtube. Probably got a 20 minute lesson, then told to get her done. ha
They had very good rotary type machines that could get welds of similar quality as anything available today, I did work on an 1940's Italian made monster that cranked 600 amps, best machine ever but it weighed at least half a ton, no kidding.
MSM brainwashed you, internet has been around for hundreds of years, they're rewriting history! Don't trust the Red Haired people, they aren't real!!!!
A lot of Soviet tanks after 1943. were welded by automatic assembly line welding machines developed by Evgeny Paton (you can google him, english wiki has a short article). Those did all major welds, leaving welders to do hard to reach parts and secondary welds. This dropped time needed to produce T-34 tank by almost 15%.
all the wartime t34s were scraped. pretty mutch all of the t34s that exist today were built after the war. policing their newly conquered satellite states, supplying communist china in their wars on conquest. the ones that run in their parades were built for laos. what you see are the good ones.
And yet they still work to this day. Yes I know they have been repaired. But still. I think they had quality where it mattered. The gun and drive train. Also simple to fix. Something many German tanks lacked.
I'm going to try my best to tell a story my father told me: My grandfather was a welder at Inland Steel as it was called at that time. He then went to war in Korea, he was in the infantry, he happened to come across a repair station putting a gun turret onto armor, my grandfather saw what they were doing and told them, "that won't work, you're using the wrong rod," they then asked a few questions and talked and they then told him to come back in a few days, when they had the rod he specified. He returned, showered them how to do it right. Afterwards he stayed at that repair station as a welder and returned home still a welder. His name was Charles Toth, we miss him. Thanks for the video and letting me share this story. You'd think the military would be a well oiled machine, but nothing in life seems to be that way, get it done, make it work!
Most of the tanks, planes, and ships weren't expected to last very long in battle. I think the Liberty Ships were only expected to make one trip across the ocean. They lasted a lot longer. Some were still being used during Vietnam. In the 1970s there were quite a few in the Mothball Fleet in Suisun Bay in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Having worked as a welder several times over the years, I can tell you that good welds take time and experience. Nailing together a tank using low skill people is going to lead to ugly welds, just as the man explains. Unless you've actually tried to be certified for a particular weld, you really have no clue what's involved. There are 4 kinds of welds, flat, horizontal, vertical and overhead. Flat is the first one you get certified on. And if you want your test piece to pass, you have to weld, grind, weld, grind over and over to make sure there are no slag inclusions... If not, when it comes to the bend test, that inclusion is going to be the weak point and it WILL break. When you get to horizontal, vertical and overhead, you get to start dealing with the effects of gravity on the weld pool. He's also correct about the rods back then and what we have today.
Seen some nasty weds for field repairs produced by mechanics from the motor pool. All about sticking metal together and nothing else. They usually improve the more they have to stick together, until it’ll look better, some nice welds but most of them were welders in industry before enlisting.
Greg, you ABSOLUTELY capitalized on the real scenario here. At 9:50 and near the end, you're 100% correct on the time expended to make these welds; allow me to explain. I'm a 24 year Vet recently retired and lived all over this world throughout my Service, including Spangdahlem and Bitburg, Germany, were uniquely, a main Panzer division housed their repair bays in what was called the 'French Cascern' though it had nothing to do 'with the French'. Point being, that's where I studied my initial Non-Commissioned Officer Training course and there ON the premises were remnants of what the German's did in repairing their tanks for us to see. It is a fact, as you stated, the 'welds' you see in this video compliments MANY militaries who absolutely had to accomplish crude, if nearly unacceptable welds including beef-up-plates as you showed in this video to reinforce the tanks based on battlefield information and recommendations to improve survivability. What you showed is more on the average of THOSE battlefield adjustments and the poor quality of the welder. I 100% appreciate your attention on this matter as it matters in a sense of reflecting on the past, where we've come from, but answering very important questions and we learn from your Channel. And while we could certainly expend a lot on this conversation, the point is I commend you for what you stated; the war did require a plethora of un or ill-experienced people in all militaries to step up and 'make it happen' to the best of their abilities, specifically in this trade. I really appreciate this subject you covered and hope it reflects well with the viewers because this was an excellent topic to cover historically for this trade. Bottom line; when in the military you're told to go weld something for the next 15 hours to get a battalion of tanks ready to deploy, you DO it. Think about that... Nothing else mattered. Cheers.
Yeah for sure, you can't be fiddling around trying to build a perfect tank, or the enemy would be in their tanks rolling down the street up to the shop, then it's game over.
Speaking of German WWII production, a lot of the non horizontal welds were actually done in large jigs where they could rotate the whole hull so the the weld in question ends up being done in the horizontal position. That said, by mid war they didn't do that mutch better with these multiple pass welds than the Soviets and welds cracking open after impact became a problem (also the quality of armour plates became questionable, as they lacked alloying materials and began to skip their early war face hardening process, to speed up production). As for the Soviets, T-34s opening up along the welds was an issue all throughout the war. A thought on your comment at 2:30 bullets and shrapnel are one thing, but these things were shot at with high caliber AP ammunition too.
Thanks for the added details. I am very appreciative of everyone adding info regarding construction techniques since I have very little knowledge of that. Some of the welds I have seen in pictures I have seen over the years looked like they could have welded horizontal (despite being orientated vertical), but I didn’t suspect they would actually rotate the hull to make the weld. If they did that it would make a huge difference in how fast and to what quality you could weld it. I have been binge reading info on the steels and rods used and universally it seems to be a case of failures waiting to happen. The problem being inconsistent quality control and difficulty getting proper materials, which is par for the course during war lol.
Those rotating jugs are called "positioners" and are commonly used in industry; they come in all sizes from small Ben too to large enough for tank components and even larger. One of those investments that makes the weldor's job easier, quicker, and more economical.
That last picture is a field modification to prevent shells from going through the vertical surface in front of the radio/gunner position and the drivers position. They also welded plates on the turrets and sides where the ammo was stored. This was performed on early Shermans before they came off of the line with wet ammo storage and beefed up factory auxillery armor applied. They learned lessons as the war progressed.
They had people building tanks that normally was making radios or refrigerators. They got enough training to get the job done as quickly as possible. Factories converted almost overnight. Heard stories from someone who worked at RCA
liberty ships were the same way. they were built mostly by women who were not trained welders. they would start out by just tack welding parts together and then the more experienced or skilled would do the major welding. many of those ships actually split in half on the ocean. eventually they modified the design to include a long steel plate belt horizontally that spanned the middle as a reinforcement
Most of the issues for the Liberty ships came from charging the entire ship and people dropping their stingers on the deck and letting them flop along the deck making embrittled points. Once the ship hit cold water the metal drops below the ductile to brittle transition temperature. The embrittled points acted like serrated paper with the stress of the waves. They riveted giant steel plates to the sides of the ship to take the stress off the hull. This is when they developed and started using sharpy V notch testing.
first one is a T34/76 at a guess, it could be an 85, but more likely a T34/76 the Soviets were severely under pressure when they built this it got better later. fine example of "get it done" welding the majority of welding done in WW2 was stick, quick fast and dirty. the Sherman front welding looks like a battlefield upgrade, gobbed on some plate to stop a shell trap., there was a lot of that, especially on the sides of the body over ammo storage areas as the Germans had realized that the best place to hit it was in the ammo storage, it was eventually sent back to the factory and became a standard upgrade, but it was very much improvised.
That makes total sense. A bunch of rods and some scrap steel plate is definitely worth it 100% lol. It definitely looked like an improvised “addition”.
@@makingmistakeswithgreg T-34 produced during war in most cases ended on avg dead in just 2 weeks of combat, T-34/76 would be very unlikely to survive the war. That looks like T-34 with 85mm version of the turret but the driver hatch looks more like something from light T-70 tank. There were many factories and the quality of those produced during the war was so poor that almost all that survived were melted down, and those that are found today are mostly post-war production. Here is a video of nice example of Soviet steel qulity in Polish museum of armored vehicles. czcams.com/users/shortsGCXYI7FpeV4?si=mT2hWhUH2huUz2YC
I’m 68 yrs old I’ve been welding since 1975. I’ve had my welds e-rayed for flaws! Die tanks fill with water then pressurized to test for leaks! I’ve seen gorgeous welds. And I’ve seen what we welders called gorilla welds. So ugly looking but will stay together in a hurricane! I have a 03-A3 30-06 cal ex military rifle. Barrel had lathe marks ugly finish ugly looking stock. But when the trigger is pulled it is spot on every time! There is a time to be pretty and times that call for ugly in the heat of battle!
7014 style rods were used in a lot of that work, high deposition and easy to use for a novice operator. Give Rosie a pile of big sticks and lots of amps and stick those plates together fast. Probably lots of big ac transformer machines but that was also the era of motor generator sets like the lincoln and Hobart"torpedo" units which are capable of exceptionally nice arc outputs.
The image at 9min is definitely a field mod, those bulges the add on plates are hiding were where the driver and assistant/bow machine gunner would sit, and were seen as a weak spot
When I started college a little more than ten years ago the TIG machine from the lab was THE TIG machine costing around the same that an average car at the time, letter I worked with people who used TIG in the 80s, when most of the people in my country didn't know what that was, and they told me how it was really special to learn it. Now I can get a TIG rig for a month salary of minimum wage or a SMAW for two days salary working construction. Think how in the fourties a lot of people didn't have electricity nearby, let alone a welder that at the time consisted of a big piece of copper. Never had been an easier time to learn how to weld, people can spend hours improving and they share the results on internet so the concept of "if it stays together it's good enough" it's lost and people spect welds to look like instagram photos even on a fence post (nothing wrong with working like that if your can)
You brought up excellent points. Back then most of welding was almost a dark art that very few people could do, let alone a had the money to afford a welding machine. Getting enough power in a house to run a machine would have been a challenge too lol. Like you said, the accessibility to welding equipment is unbelievably good today. The fact you can go into harbor freight or other tool store and buy a tig welder is amazing.
Quite a lot of WW2 tanks had sloped armour. Quite a lot of WW1 tanks had sloped armour. The tell tale sign is arguably much more towards the shape of the MG port (and if you want to be more specific, its placement relative to the driver hatch), than other single feature.
I can tell you I have seen German Uboats and some of the welds on them were impossibly good. The looked like sub arc welds but I am not sure they had access to that tech. The German heavy equipment I have seen seems to show more skill and care than most others. It would be super cool to see early war and late war equipment side by side. There would have to be a reduction in quality you would think.
Well, it would be hard to say since German tank technology advanced so much during the war. They started out with little Panzer 3's and 4's, but had monsters like Jagdtigers, and King Tigers at the end. I know for small arms the cut backs are well documented and known by those who study the topic.
@@alexanderhenley7307 I believe it. I study the politics more than the strategy so I just know bits and pieces, not that I have phd in politics either, lol. Most people only know what they see in the movies and on TV. It was doctrine more than gear that led to their victories, and both combined near the end let a population of around 66 million hold off a combined population of 280 million for a long as they did, and made them pay for every inch. Of course, the real cost is coming due now, but that's another story.
@@PalmettoNDN middle of the front plate has a small strip of metal which is a clear sing of an t 34/85. Learn something before trying to correct something.
Even a crappy weld is very strong and the weld strength isn't a limiting factor in the quality of the tanks. I've worked on construction projects where most of the welding could be this bad and not even fail engineering because there are other points of failure that will break long before crappy welds would. The company I worked for only had one fully qualified boilermaker welder and a few experienced but not fully qualified welders like me. The rest were trigger pullers who could barely troubleshoot or setup a MIG welder they were allowed to weld anything except the vertical ups that joined the 6mm thick 75X75 lifting columns to the structural channels which was reserved for myself or the ticketed welder. Welding is as much about productivity if not more than it is about material strength.
The T-34 you showed at the start had other economies, such as removing the leather or rubber gasket on the tank's hatches. They rattled around horribly and rain poured in to rust up the interior, but nobody cared because the factory was cutting hours-per-vehicle however they could. Post-war most of our exposure to the T-34 was their 'export models' made after the war with the old factory hands. Those steel plates welded on at 9:10 were a field improvement. They were slapping an inch of steel over a 'shot trap' on the original pattern while the factories reworked the front hull design to not have those traps and instead present a flush front plate. A shot trap is basically any significant concave angle facing enemy fire.
But still T-34 did have a very expensive aluminum engine. Lucky for USSR, US was shipping huge amount of aluminum to USSR, so they could continue with the expensive practice.
Arc welding equipment has changed over the decades as well. I would assume old machines of that era were pretty finicky on settings (or limited taps for voltage/current) and a relatively inexperienced operator would just make do and let the rod melt into place. No time to fine tune things and depending where the job was being done even the power source could be questionable with brownouts and spikes.
Seems like a great example of the saying "Perfection is the enemy of good". Obviously we need to keep such statements in perspective. If you're welding something that needs to last a long time without failure, you should aim more towards perfection. But if it's just something that only needs to last a short time (a tank in wartime. Or a quick fix in the field where you're lacking the 'good' equipment you have in your shop back home), 'good enough' is sometimes just that. With that said, I enjoy every one of your videos. And I honestly very much enjoy these ones where you just tell a story with pictures (I particularly enjoyed your local architecture one!). It's a nice change of pace sometimes. And it keeps things fresh and interesting. Please just keep doing what you're doing!
Thanks for the kind words 😀. I have a bunch more interesting content I am working on that you will definitely like. I am really hopeful that I can close a deal on a new shop so I can have more space/time to make content. It’s a lot of fun doing less serious videos on cool stuff 😀.
Inferior products and technology, insufficient time with ridiculous deadlines, and a shortage of qualified hands leads to a “good enough and just get it done situation”. They served their intended purpose. Trying to make all of those weld pretty and aesthetically pleasing is like putting a show car paint job onto a demolition derby car🤷♂️
Pretty much lol. I had a good laugh at your demo derby analogy lol. It’s honestly amazing the volume they were able to produce considering it was literally the worst case situation to produce a large volume of anything lol.
I'm not sure about early WWII production(like in the first photo) but late war soviet tanks were welded with heavy usage of automatic processes. I think the bio of Evgeny Paton could answer on the exact timeline of switching to SAW, he has received all kinds of accolades for his work. I've seen in person welds on heavy soviet tanks from WWII with those 4-5-inch wide welds, they are not pretty but surely they give the impression of how much steel was used in those beasts.
It makes sense that they would have switched to automatic processes, I can’t imagine how much the time savings would have been using saw on big thick plates. I picture running big stick rods for 12+ hours a day at 300+ amps and how bad that must have been vs saw lol.
That's an uninformed perpspective. They're steel and thick so precisely why wouldn't they last that long when not being shot at? There are still thousands of much more delicate automobiles from the early 1900s driveable in 2024. Tank armor is simple slabs of steel.
On the tanks, the first tank looked like an early t 34, the rest looked like a Sherman chassis, the plates are welded over the vision slits for the driver and bow gunner probably on an self propelled artillery.
It appears you are correct. I just read an article on that, apparently they had an issue with shrapnel coming through the vision slits. That would make perfect sense as to why they welded the plate over that, it beats the alternative lol.
At the 9:02 mark. It looks like plates were retrofited after the fact, to protect what was probably a weak point in the armor. More angles = more chance for ricochet.
Working as a Civilian Contractor for the U.S. Marine Corps Prepositioning Ships in the 1990's in Saipan, I found a Sherman tank from WW2 that had been knocked out in the surf line from Japanese gunfire. It was fully encrusted with marine life everywhere but the welds, which were polished and shiny like the day they were made. It turns out the welds had a high content of Nickel in them which kept them from corroding. My 2 cents on WW2 tank welds. SSG. U.S. Army (Medically Retired) Infantry / Sniper / SOF Intel (SOT-A), multiple tours
Thanks for your service and sharing those details. No doubt they must have been using high nickel and/or chromium welding rods. I need to do some research but I wonder if they did that because the armor had high carbon content and they were trying to prevent the welds from becoming brittle. That might also explain why many welds were done horizontally and looked rough. Nickel based rods tend to run very poorly overall.
I believe the image at 9:00 is showing a field modification, the bulges those plates are covering are where the driver and co-driver/ bow machine gunner would sit, and iirc they were seen as a weak spot in the armor
This version of the Sherman was actually sent back to the US for remanufacturing and these plates were one of the modifications done. That's not to say some units didn't do this in the field as well. As far as being a weak spot, it was more of an issue with being a poor design giving a ricochet a chance to trap into a very vulnerable spot.
As someone else said this is part of an upgrade package that was applied both in the factory and in the field as an upgrade kit, the purpose being to eliminate a weakness of the driver and assistant driver direct vision slits that were covered by these plates.
This is certainly the case. The Sherman tank crews would add practically anything to the armor to improve their chances. Adding track links for example, could even increase the risk of penetrating hits. Bigger plates were welded to the sides to protect the crew, and according to some sources I have read, German AT-gunners would deliberately aim for these plates. Such field modifications are still popular today, in the Ukraine war, as shown in its most extreme application in the Russian "turtle-tanks".
One big design feature that makes a tank safe is the ability to get out of it when it is hit. I knew a tanker who's tank was hit and all he remembers is being so violently shaken and confused, seeing light, diving and getting out of it before it went up with all of his crew inside. Tanks like the T-34 were very hard to escape. Might be easier to get out when all the welds let go.
Reminds me of my dad's welds lol. But i'v seen him lengthen and shorten truck frames and build equipment trailers from scratch. And never remember a catastrophic failure or even a minor failure.
Another thing to think about when doing your own welding at home is you have all the time in the world to get a decent weld, so why not put in the little extra effort and make something you wouldn't mind showing your friends.
On Soviet rush production pieces you can imagine the tools and equipment was also inadequate. You would think to weld thick 2" plate in a hurry you would get some large diameter rods and use high power to get the job done in less time rather than burn up a ton or more of spaghetti sticks in the cold Siberian winter.
The sandy coloured one looks like field add on plates covering some vulnerable spot. Done in the elements be it sun rain mud with whatever kit was on hand. Atleast to my eyes.
That’s what I thought too. No doubt it was likely better than not having it. Numerous people have suggested that was to coverup the lookout slits to prevent shrapnel from entering the tank, so it makes total sense as to why that was done.
9:10 That is a field modification called Applique Armor. This was done to provide extra protection to critical areas like crew positions and ammo racks.
The American M4 Sherman (and several other WWII tanks) used a cast mono-body for most of the armor, which has a much higher up-front cost to produce. When the T-34's are rolling out of the factory in Stalingrad *directly into combat,* then they only need to be "good enough."
I have a feeling that the pictured soviet tank's production involved a conversation like: "Comrade Ivan! Can you weld? "Nyet, comrade commisar." "You learn. Now!"
It was WAR production. Make the welds "good enough" and above all else keep the volume of completed tanks up. WAR PRODUCTION! Ships were built the same way: welds were just good enough and completed cargo ships were built so fast it's unimaginable today. They were considered one way ships: get the cargo where it's needed and if the ship made it back for a second load it was a bonus.
Those weirdo welds could be 6012. I have a box of 6012 and it welds kinda like that. More grainy than 13 but not as angry as 10. European system is a bit different. We get about 4-6 (sub)grades of 6013 which go from being basically like 6011/12 to almost as clean as 7018 with the RB - Rutile Basic flux composition that has a harder relight but has a more fluid, non foaming slag which does not get entrapped. Love those. As a punishment we do not get 6011, only the RC type of 6013. We do get 6012, but is is a bit hard to tell those in the Euro system, they are just type R,RC etc. which could also be 6013. Its only the American conformity text that tells it apart really. I have a box of old phoenix blue, German 6012. Nowadays those sell as 6013 , must have changed composition. I also remember reading on an Amerikanski Forum ;) that 6012 was a common production electrode before 6013,7018, 7024 etc. - smoother, stronger, higher deposition electrodes. Those old phoenix blue kinda weld like that. Angry, hot, lots a spatter, fairly coarse welds. The new ones are also advertised for welding dodgy crap still. Fast freeze, gap filling, tacking, downhill. Basically German 6011 but it formally rates as 12/13 in AWS speak. I actually got some true american 6011 recently. Lincoln. Maybe we can do a video collab in Autumn, i have lots a welding to do and my free time situation will be better again....Comparing 6011, German angry 6013, proper 6013 and basic, x ray safe 6013 sounds like a plam ^^
Well explained. Welding rods with completely different behaviour and use all rate as 6013 in AWS. Very difficult to compare by the different standards. You can get 6010 from Böhler - but to hilarious prices here.
I got sent a bunch of 6013 rods from overseas, I need to inventory them and do some tests. What you wrote is super helpful because in the states we have one 6013 and it welds much different than what I have seen in videos outside of the U.S. Your explanation makes total sense and explains what’s going on. I will be doing a 6011/6010 rod give away in the fall specifically for people overseas. It would be great to get your input on the common rods here. As far as 6012, that’s one rod I have never ran but I do happen to have 8 rods of. I definitely need to try it and see what it’s like. From what I remember people used it to commonly weld metal roofing down, and super thin material.
@@modarkthemauler It's not related to any singular company. It is the European Flux designator "RB" meaning "Rutile-Basic" as per whatever is the current (and the previous) DIN/ISO governing this. As you would expect, the properties are in the middle. Better joint quality and muss less foamy slag than pure rutile 6013, better relight and a bit less brutal than pure basic 7018. In Germany you can even get this designator as scrap/NOS from the old eastern block for dirt cheap and i LIKE them. Don't run on AC very well, though. But rods that are less slaggy than 6013 for less than half the normal price. Oh yeah.
It is a typical example, quantity over quality. German tanks were built by well-trained workers and the quality standards were high. The Soviets were made up of semi-skilled forces who even then drove the tank directly to the front. The T34, on the other hand (and other tanks as well), was only supposed to last (Stalin's statement) until they had destroyed a German tank. It no longer mattered whether the crew was dead and the tank was destroyed. They were able to send about 10x as many tanks onto the battlefield as the germans.
Good analysis. One thing I'd add is that they didn't have as good of rods or machines as we have now. And, that armor plate and or castings they were welding may have presented additional difficulties due to the material itself.
100% right. After doing some digging and reading comments it seems the armor plates were commonly full of chromium amount other alloying elements so I am sure they likely welded poorly. Inconsistent rods and materials would have made it a tough job. Let along having issues with welds cracking due to the materials. Not a fun job for sure lol.
The Soviets have always been good at welding when they wanted to be, and bad welds are generally pretty obviously an active choice on their part regarding what their labor's time could be best spent doing. They were especially innovative when it came titanium and titanium-alloy welding, to the extent that they built several entire classes of nuclear submarines with welded titanium pressure hulls during the cold war
I recall reading somewhere of late WW2 German tank production. The crews of the vehicles would sometimes assist in producing their own vehicles, paint was often left out, and overall production quality lessenes severely the closer the Soviets got to Berlin.
Another common welding style for WWII was handheld subarc. Basically welding blind by feel only. Also hardened steel is not easy to weld, chemically speaking. Honestly it is pretty awesome what they did back then without fine tuned fillers/flux.
No doubt whatever steel blend they were using likely was both inconsistent and hard to weld. Higher strength modern steels tend undercut, and often weld poorly out of position. I didn’t really mention it but the horizontal welds may have been a necessity due to running straight vertical would cause the molten pool to run off. Stacking horizontal beads gives the ability to weld uphill with rods that otherwise couldn’t. No doubt the consistency of the materials and rods would have been highly variable, adding to the problems.
Tig was first “invented” in the 40s so they could have lol. I can’t imagine how long it would take to tig weld a tank 😅. That would be a test in ability to handle monotonous tasks 💀😅
At that time the metallurgy was not there to get nice looking welds that looked nice and smooth both for the electrodes and the plates getting welded. A lot of welding back then was done with with bare welding rods which were dipped into a bucket of lime for flux. In 1974 I purchased my first welder, it was a lincoln petrol generator with a side valve ford petrol?gas engine on a trailer ex WW2 MOD. In the electrode storage tray there was some WW2 era electrodes consisting of wire rods covered with asbestos and lime held on with a spiral wrap of thin wire. I spoke to a veteran who had the job of welding up the shot up tanks putting a copper plate behind the holes and filling them with weld, he told me that despite the fact that they had been hosed out before starting it still smelled like roast pork when doing the welding. It is just not possible with electrodes of such quality to get a nice pretty smooth looking weld, the metal will not flow like modern metal and the flux hardens faster freezing the weld into distorted shapes. An awful lot of chemistry has gone into making modern welding electrodes and the nice looking welds is just as much due to the chemists as the welders skill. WW2 led to a lot of metallurgy research especialy in the USA where things were a little less exiting than Europe or Russia, I have a number of volumes of "Metal Progress" which was a publication put out by the American society for metals in which they describe some of the research going on at that time including stuff about the manhattan project when it was still a secret. At the start of the war every steel mill would have its own alloys by the end of the war alloys were getting standardised which helped in welding., they were X raying welds back then and where it was not possible they would cut plugs out of the welds to examine so although the welds look rough on the surface they were as sound as possible given the materials of the time.
Thanks for the excellent contribution. I have heard of lime/asbestos rods, but never seen one in person. Pretty wild. Your description of how the rods ran is what I was figuring. Modern hard face rods make welds that look similar to many of the Soviet tank welds. The hard face rods run poorly vertical up, so the only way to weld with them is stacking the Horizontally and even then the beads weld fairly rough. Interestingly enough many people have suggested that the welds on the Soviet tanks were indeed a form of stainless due to them not rusting. I bet they had high levels of chromium or nickel and wouldn’t be a very good welding rod, let alone with 1940s welders. Definately no 7018 lol.
As a german, i`ve never seen welds like this. But it all makes sence, when housewifes have to be welders in one day and the welds have to hold a week before the product get`s destroyed. In my youth, i`ve heard old tank drivers say, you had to be very carefull, not to drown in a tank, when passing a creek. Now i know, why.... Thank you for bringing up this topic. I would have never thought about this.
I see it differently, on bulldozer blades and other high wear metal in contact with abrasive environments,we would run a hardening weld bead to take the punishment without wearing the original base plate. The old style water well drilling and oil well drilling we would have to build up the drill tip as it wore away into the pointed shape which would jam and stick the drill, something like the kerf of a saw blade. A little more protecting metal.
In order to decide whether or not a weld is acceptable, it is necessary to look at the design of the weld, and the loads placed on the welds. As structural welds go, these welds primarily hold the pieces together. I haven't heard anyone comment on the thickness of the plates or components being joined. On the M4 (Sherman tank) the armor ranged in thickness from 1 to 3 inches with the thicker armor on the front of the tank body. It is likely that the loads and resultant stresses on the welds are quite low and thus the weld will be quite tolerant of welding flaws. Also, take a look at tanks that have battle damage, rarely are there failed welds seen even if the ammunition inside the tank exploded. In addition, as mentioned in the video, SMAW or stick welding was a new process when these tanks were made.
Stalin said that quantity has its own quality. And he was right. Why should there be a beautiful weld on the outside of the tank? The tank crew had to solve much more difficult problems. The ugly external weld was not visible from the inside of the tank anyway. If the whole country is fighting for survival, then aesthetics go by the wayside. And the life of the tank in battle was only a few hours anyway, and if the crew was very unlucky, only a few minutes.
A lot of the large gaps comes from having parts built by so many different companies, easier to leave gaps and weld them up than to ensure 6 different factories owned by 6 different people can make the exact same dimension parts, probably with different tooling. Also to a certain extent you had to still design everything so that a group of 18-24 year old army mechanics could try and do something with the welding/repair equipment in the field if a busted up tank rolls back to the staging areas. Lenient tolerances make “make it work” much easier
Great point and no doubt looser tolerances are better than too tight. A bunch of people have suggested much of the armor had high nickel or chromium in it, and it was welded with chromium based fillers. This is important because nickel and chromium based materials torch cut terribly and I can’t imagine trying to grind down even 1/4inch of an edge on a 1in + thick plate. Like you said, far easier (and less time) to fill that poor fit with weld than trying to cut it.
When I started welding, over50 years ago, and some 25 years after the war, there were a lot more AC welders, the electronics were not nearly as well developed as now! DC welders were frequently rotary motor driven dynamos. These welds would all have been stick, using pretty primitive rods, it's hard to imagine, but emerged arc was complicated, gas tanks added to the supply problems. I learnt to gas weld, and stick weld early, DC arc welders were expensive and for home use, arc was the only practical thing! I replaced my old buzz box about twenty years ago, I still have it, and, it still works! I had a MIG, sold it, as for me, stick does most of what I want!
Thanks for sharing that. What you described is what I have read about how welding “used to be”. Primitive is an understatement. I am sure 50+ years ago people would have loved to have what we have today.
On the subject of ugly welds with no experience. When I was young I took a 6013 and cranked the heat up higher and held the rod against the metal and let it run by itself. The weld looked like a machine done it especially on a T joint. I have bent tested it but never cut and etched. Hoping you could try it and test it. Thanks for the videos!
Yup, hold it like you're melting a crayon on a hot skillet. Don't cram it in there, just very lightly drag it along at a slow steady speed, at the right angle.
That does work, I definitely need to do a video on that. “Welding tricks” video lol. I have seen guys set a 4x4 wood block on a rod flat on a plate and let it run too lol.
@@makingmistakeswithgreg I learned that trick from one of your videos, I was having so many problems with 7018 restarts and sticking the rod, but I found if you long arc it a little bit to get things going, then very lightly just drag it along, the flux kind of acts like a standoff and helped a lot keeping a nice tight arc, and made the weld look 100% better. Your channel inspired me to give stick welding another try, and it's been a lot of fun. I bought a little Multimatic 215, it seems to run really nice on both stick and MiG. I wish it had adjustable arc force etc, but it seems to be pretty good. It can't do 6010, but it has a chart for 6011. It even has settings for 100% CO2 MiG too, so at least it has the voltage to do that if I decide to try that out.
t34 is the first tank. Russia also didn't care about quality like the Germans did. Quantity has a quality all it's own. Germany produced high quality tanks, but really were over thought and unnecessarily over built in quality. Welding was also pretty new in this era. Not long before this everything was put together with Rivets. Also as you noted, most of this work was done by either women workers who were not as trained, done by prisoners with little training or just new workers. Most Russian tanks were only supposed to last a matter of hours in battle. Also, many of these tanks parts are cast steel which is difficult to weld compared to good steel. I was a welder and fabricator for years in the wrought iron industry so I did weld a lot of cast and steel. I did mig, tig and stick in the field.
No doubt the materials, rods, and welders used were all “worst case scenario” lol. It’s strange to think of how new welding was then, far from what exists today lol.
Those last welds on that sherman are odd , plates are covering the gunner and driver's vision slits . Tank recovery was important to all armies , so field expedient welding of patches or additional armor would have been commonplace. Interesting video , thank you .
the tank in the first picture looks like a T-34 with the upgraded 85mm cannon turret, thus named T34-85. the third picture looks like the rear of a differently painted T-34. guess there's a lot of pictures of these things since there were so many made the picture at 9:03 was a early war M4 Sherman that was later on upgraded to protect the weaker parts, the turret on that specific one also had a additional bent plate welded to the turret cheek due to the horizontal turret drive making the armour thinner on that cheek. from what I recall this was a common and standardised upgrade, and practically every variant of sherman had the crew messing around with adding extra armor on it, typically things such as logs, sandbags and sometimes concrete, which commonly angered the people in charge, especially General Patton. there's some pretty famous photos around of various shermans where the crew had covered the entire fronts and sometimes sides of the tanks with concrete, from the looks of it some of these look like 4 to 8 inches of extra thickness, the front hull usually just being 2.5 inches or less, (unless it was the jumbo sherman, which had a entire addon plate making the thickness effectively 4 inches)
They used to weld alot of heavy plate with Oxy Acetylene, which probably would produce better welds than early electric welds. I still utilize the "torch" process for specific applications and its very Seminar to TIG
I've been focusing my workshop time on a lot of other things than welding recently, but this absolutely caught my attention. I love seeing how military equipment is made. It's wild how fast the United States could put together a ship back in WW2, for example.
Cool to hear it caught your attention. A ton of people were talking about the tank welds on a welding group I am a member of and it seemed to be a great idea to talk about 😀. It sure is amazing at how fast equipment and ships could be made. I am not sure where you live, but if you ever have a chance to see the USS Alabama (permanently docked on the coast of Alabama) it’s worth it. You can wander around the whole ship on a self guided tour. They have an old machine shop setup just like it was when it was in service. You can even wander around in the munitions room that feeds rounds into the main cannons. Everything about the ship is awesome lol.
You are probably right. It’s crazy to think of gas welding anything super thick but if that’s what you have it’s more than doable. I can’t imagine the heat from gas welding 1in plates 💀
I am a DOD welder. One thing that has a major affect on the welds is arc blow. Armor is a real PITA to weld sometimes because it has pockets of magnetism that make life hell. Armor is one of my least favorite things to weld because of that very reason.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts on that. Your comment and others are really painting an interesting picture of difficulties welding the plates. I found out it was common for them to have high levels of chromium and nickel, and the rods often ran out of position poorly. So poor material, liquid weld pools, and impossible timelines are definitely quality killers lol. Pretty crazy to hear weldability issues still plague armor today.
I would expect Armour plate to have somewhat reduced protective properties near welds. Changes to annealing, and locked in stresses etc. Also if thick plate heats up, there'd be a *lot* of force jig would have to restrain Zig zaging would continue adding heat close to one area. Horizontal beads... can be done more akin to tack welding. Laid down as sequence with say 1foot seperation between each pass.
First tank was likely a T-34-85, maybe a T-34-57 '42 model. @7:54 That is a Sherman Firefly. British upgunning to a 17 pounder gun that removed the bow gunner and put that plug over the MG port. It was factory, but at the time the Brits were as in a hurry and short on skilled welders as the Russians. @8:15 That is a factory "small hatch" Sherman. @9:05 Those are applique plates that were usually depot level, but sometimes field mods. They used the weld beads to fill in the gaps in the edges because they didn't/couldn't cut the plates at the proper angles. I always thought the cludgy welds gave old tanks a lot of character. But they did not think, "Oh this is only going to last 10 minutes anyway." It was more they were doing only just enough to do the job. They were still good welds. There were (and some still are) these crappy welded tanks serving for decades after the war.
This is a misunderstanding, the life expectancy of tank crews was way better than the average joe with a rifle, american tank crews had an average of 1 lost crew for every lost tank, while the "churn" of foot plattons could be as high as 500% The weld wasant spetacular, but you arent expected to survive sustained fire anyway.
Did DC stick welding even exist in the 1940's? I'm not sure, but I think it did not, or was extremely rare. I have seen a few welders from the 50's, none of them had DC, only AC.
The tech existed for DC welding (not necessarily stick) in the early 20s. I doubt it made its way into big 400+ welders until atleast the 40s. I have never seen anything d/c that was from the 40s as a plug in welder. I know that the torpedo welders (sae 400+) had dc as an option from I believe the mid 40s. Pretty wild to think about that since DC surely would have been way uncommon and proper rods to run on it would have been rare lol.
@@makingmistakeswithgregActually DC was first and primary for electric welding. Coffin of Detroit is often given credit for being first (1890) with "stick" welding.
I can’t speak for tanks, but in the early days of WWII, the US Navy just began to move from rivets to welds (on key components) and really didn’t trust welds yet. Battleship IOWA was most rivets. New Jersey was a mix (vertical vs horizontal on the hull). Then Missouri and Wisconsin were predominantly welded. From what I’ve seen, they had some of the better welders (as one would expect working on a capital ship). But clearly there were really just starting to get skills in the industry at that time. There was a desire to use welding as you didn’t need the overlapping of the plates and weight of the rivets, which was quite significant.
Interesting. The only ship I have been on (besides sub marines) was the USS Alabama, and it seemed like it was welded with big 6010 rods. The beads had a rough appearance. Insane the amount of welds holding that ship together. I can’t imagine how complicated riveting that together would have been.
@@makingmistakeswithgregremember we’re talking about armor plate, not A-36. That’s a high nickel alloy steel, medium carbon plate, several inches thick. On heavier ships, the armor is behind the plates you see on the outside. On capital ships, these plates were 12 inches thick. They didn’t use standard stick welding for that. They used heavy deposition welding of several types.
@@melgross Jeepers, how many amps do you need to weld a 12" plate? My welder will struggle just to do 3/8" stuff, lol.
@@makingmistakeswithgregI saw an interview here on Y-T some time ago about this. It was with an old Soviet GI who drove one of those T34 tanks. He drove the moment it left the tank assembly line.
The seems in some places were so sloppy that he noticed a little crack of daylight coming through in a few areas. Once in battle, the first time the Germans hit it with a flame thrower, some of flaming liquid seeped down through to the inside & burned him on the leg.
I can see why, since I've seen welded ships that flexed and cracked all the way through a good looking weld, this was modern too.
I was able to immediately identify the quality level of the welds presented in this video.
These welds are known as "good enough for government work" welds.
100% correct lol.
The famed "military grade"
semi skilled labour meets skilled job
A lot of the reason for the appearance had to with not spending the time and effort to grind them down.
@@abelvalle6188 Mil Spec... just means the lowest bidder.
The tanks that suffered serious weld failures aren't around to examine.
The hull wasn't the weak point. Engines, gearboxes and tracks are the bane of tankers
@@getahanddown This, a mobility kill on a tank is still a kill. If a tank can't move it's more or less out of the fight until the crew can get it moving again.
The Russians used submerged arc welding on the T34 the Germans used highly skilled welders who had apprenticed for 5 years on their tanks. So whilst Hans and Fritz were starting on their second run Svetlana and Katya who three weeks ago were a primary school teacher and illiterate goat herder were starting on their second tank.
Pretty crazy when you look at the thought processes behind both lol.
@@makingmistakeswithgregMore often than not the latter and not the former. Teachers were often reserved for teaching because 80% of the Soviet Union were illiterate before and after the revolution. They taught welders just good enough to read then sent them immediately to learn from more educated workers. Some learned to weld while they were still learning to read.
@@minhducnguyen9276 , According to the 1939 Soviet Census, literate people were 89.7%
@@AcTpaxaHeu I didn't remember the correct number, just know that it was at least over 70%
Idk but both those names sounds beautiful. 😂
In the siege of Stalingrad there was a factory producing tanks while the battle raged. As tanks came off the line tank crews would jump in and drive them to the front. Some hadn’t even been painted properly when they were used. In a situation like that who cares what the welds look like.
"Drive"
"huh. The barrel didn't fall off...guess is good"
@@scroungasworkshop4663 or, “Nichevo, it cannot be helped…”
That's peak JIT
@@kaasmeester5903 😂😂😂Yes, gives it a whole new meaning.
Tank factories doubled as salvage and repair centers. Every tank that left was stamped with a new serial number, even all the parts were previously used. In some situations the crew went back with a damaged tank and immediately left with a 'new' one of salvaged parts.
"How could they do welds so bad?" - A guy, sitting in a warm buiding with high quality rods and a DC-antistick-arcforsage tiny box, which puts out up to 200 Amps no problem, and probably doing more for the quality of welds than himself, which would seem like a god damn witchcraft back in the days.
Have used old transformer without rectifier, with shit-rods and a piece of nichrome wire as a ballast resistor a few times - kinda can understand, how the welds ain't that pretty.
Great video, thank you.
No problem and you’re 100% right lol. Something about being in a active war, working 16 hours a day with just some bread and a pack of cigarettes, welding with a machine that’s probably a rewired transformer pulled off a destroyed building, with rods that amounted to toilet paper wrapped round stock, that collectively suggests they did a better job than expected lol.
I'm so spoiled by my TIG machine
Haha yeah my machine is a fixed up stick welder that could be older than I am. Other than that I've mostly done mig, and the one time I used another machine (the real welder at the job wasn't good with heights so they asked me to fill in) it was like metal coloured caulk. So easy to work with, to start and end or to change speed.
@@DeltaSquad43 that's very true. I didn't think about how much technology has advanced.
@@TijmenHatesads
worked in a yard where it was all ac tranformers some relics back to the 40 s still in use 100v ocv no numbers left on th brass current grid, some just simple move to a different tap outlet
despite this some fantastic quality welds produced by seasoned operators , Ac has the advantage over dc for structural welds no, arc blow being one , we done pipe too
but dc was a big plus on pipes for root runs a lot easier
another shop" the killing fields "
had cables in ducts you did not know wher your plant was you simply connected to the various ends till you got a suitable juice as we called it
Not all good welds look good, and not all bad welds look bad
Joe Shmoe doesn’t realize an ugly weld can still be a good weld.
@@fastinradfordable
Usually is, just has more weight than optimal, if you baked steel long enough it's bound to connect even if it's dirty.
I live out in the country and have seen many farmer welds. They look like this. They work fine and hold. Just look awful.
That is the stone truth, the same sentiment i was about to express. That applies to a lot in life, even people.
@@johnnicol8598most of them are over-applied enough that even a poor weld get the job done
Gotta remember that their actual welding machines probably werent as good as the ones we have today. No fancy settings. And no youtube. Probably got a 20 minute lesson, then told to get her done. ha
Pretty much lol.
They had very good rotary type machines that could get welds of similar quality as anything available today, I did work on an 1940's Italian made monster that cranked 600 amps, best machine ever but it weighed at least half a ton, no kidding.
Very dense welding goggles too.
I recon. 16 year old, you can weld. Only small rods available so a welder will start you off then leave to let you fill in the gap.
MSM brainwashed you, internet has been around for hundreds of years, they're rewriting history!
Don't trust the Red Haired people, they aren't real!!!!
A lot of Soviet tanks after 1943. were welded by automatic assembly line welding machines developed by Evgeny Paton (you can google him, english wiki has a short article). Those did all major welds, leaving welders to do hard to reach parts and secondary welds. This dropped time needed to produce T-34 tank by almost 15%.
Some of those soviet t-34s drove right off the assembly lines into battle in the grim days of the early war.
all the wartime t34s were scraped. pretty mutch all of the t34s that exist today were built after the war. policing their newly conquered satellite states, supplying communist china in their wars on conquest. the ones that run in their parades were built for laos. what you see are the good ones.
The life expectancy of a T-34 in battle was approximately 30 min in combat. They had to churn them out fast.
@@schristi69 2 weeks not 30 min and unskilled workers were doing them so many were broke in less than 30 seconds after they left factory doors...
Later in the war they were not even painted.
And yet they still work to this day. Yes I know they have been repaired. But still. I think they had quality where it mattered. The gun and drive train. Also simple to fix. Something many German tanks lacked.
I'm going to try my best to tell a story my father told me:
My grandfather was a welder at Inland Steel as it was called at that time. He then went to war in Korea, he was in the infantry, he happened to come across a repair station putting a gun turret onto armor, my grandfather saw what they were doing and told them, "that won't work, you're using the wrong rod," they then asked a few questions and talked and they then told him to come back in a few days, when they had the rod he specified. He returned, showered them how to do it right. Afterwards he stayed at that repair station as a welder and returned home still a welder. His name was Charles Toth, we miss him.
Thanks for the video and letting me share this story. You'd think the military would be a well oiled machine, but nothing in life seems to be that way, get it done, make it work!
sometimes good enough is good enough
Most of the tanks, planes, and ships weren't expected to last very long in battle. I think the Liberty Ships were only expected to make one trip across the ocean. They lasted a lot longer. Some were still being used during Vietnam. In the 1970s there were quite a few in the Mothball Fleet in Suisun Bay in the San Francisco Bay Area.
@@craigd1275some countries used Shermans well up into the modern era. The welds were good enough
@@John_Redcorn_ And the T-34 and Panzer 3 and 4 are still in service. There's always exceptions that make it through.
Having worked as a welder several times over the years, I can tell you that good welds take time and experience. Nailing together a tank using low skill people is going to lead to ugly welds, just as the man explains. Unless you've actually tried to be certified for a particular weld, you really have no clue what's involved. There are 4 kinds of welds, flat, horizontal, vertical and overhead. Flat is the first one you get certified on. And if you want your test piece to pass, you have to weld, grind, weld, grind over and over to make sure there are no slag inclusions... If not, when it comes to the bend test, that inclusion is going to be the weak point and it WILL break. When you get to horizontal, vertical and overhead, you get to start dealing with the effects of gravity on the weld pool. He's also correct about the rods back then and what we have today.
Also 400-800mm of 'whatever' steel being welded without preheating. Will never be pretty
Also 400-800mm of 'whatever' steel being welded without preheating. Will never be pretty
You don‘t have go grind the welds when you know how to weld. Not the first layer, not the others and now when the stick ends
I bet they were using coat hangers.
@@getahanddown A T-34 ain't a dreadnought. The thickest rolled plates you saw on a T-34 was 45mm and on the IS they got up to 100mm.
Seen some nasty weds for field repairs produced by mechanics from the motor pool. All about sticking metal together and nothing else. They usually improve the more they have to stick together, until it’ll look better, some nice welds but most of them were welders in industry before enlisting.
Greg, you ABSOLUTELY capitalized on the real scenario here. At 9:50 and near the end, you're 100% correct on the time expended to make these welds; allow me to explain. I'm a 24 year Vet recently retired and lived all over this world throughout my Service, including Spangdahlem and Bitburg, Germany, were uniquely, a main Panzer division housed their repair bays in what was called the 'French Cascern' though it had nothing to do 'with the French'. Point being, that's where I studied my initial Non-Commissioned Officer Training course and there ON the premises were remnants of what the German's did in repairing their tanks for us to see. It is a fact, as you stated, the 'welds' you see in this video compliments MANY militaries who absolutely had to accomplish crude, if nearly unacceptable welds including beef-up-plates as you showed in this video to reinforce the tanks based on battlefield information and recommendations to improve survivability. What you showed is more on the average of THOSE battlefield adjustments and the poor quality of the welder. I 100% appreciate your attention on this matter as it matters in a sense of reflecting on the past, where we've come from, but answering very important questions and we learn from your Channel. And while we could certainly expend a lot on this conversation, the point is I commend you for what you stated; the war did require a plethora of un or ill-experienced people in all militaries to step up and 'make it happen' to the best of their abilities, specifically in this trade. I really appreciate this subject you covered and hope it reflects well with the viewers because this was an excellent topic to cover historically for this trade. Bottom line; when in the military you're told to go weld something for the next 15 hours to get a battalion of tanks ready to deploy, you DO it. Think about that... Nothing else mattered. Cheers.
Yeah for sure, you can't be fiddling around trying to build a perfect tank, or the enemy would be in their tanks rolling down the street up to the shop, then it's game over.
Speaking of German WWII production, a lot of the non horizontal welds were actually done in large jigs where they could rotate the whole hull so the the weld in question ends up being done in the horizontal position. That said, by mid war they didn't do that mutch better with these multiple pass welds than the Soviets and welds cracking open after impact became a problem (also the quality of armour plates became questionable, as they lacked alloying materials and began to skip their early war face hardening process, to speed up production). As for the Soviets, T-34s opening up along the welds was an issue all throughout the war. A thought on your comment at 2:30 bullets and shrapnel are one thing, but these things were shot at with high caliber AP ammunition too.
Thanks for the added details. I am very appreciative of everyone adding info regarding construction techniques since I have very little knowledge of that. Some of the welds I have seen in pictures I have seen over the years looked like they could have welded horizontal (despite being orientated vertical), but I didn’t suspect they would actually rotate the hull to make the weld. If they did that it would make a huge difference in how fast and to what quality you could weld it. I have been binge reading info on the steels and rods used and universally it seems to be a case of failures waiting to happen. The problem being inconsistent quality control and difficulty getting proper materials, which is par for the course during war lol.
That leads me to think that they must have used AWS7018 for often disimilar alloyed steels.
Those rotating jugs are called "positioners" and are commonly used in industry; they come in all sizes from small Ben too to large enough for tank components and even larger. One of those investments that makes the weldor's job easier, quicker, and more economical.
That last picture is a field modification to prevent shells from going through the vertical surface in front of the radio/gunner position and the drivers position. They also welded plates on the turrets and sides where the ammo was stored. This was performed on early Shermans before they came off of the line with wet ammo storage and beefed up factory auxillery armor applied. They learned lessons as the war progressed.
Well those welds are on par for House Wives and old men that never welded before
I agree, my guess is the least skilled person was who did the least critical work lol.
They had people building tanks that normally was making radios or refrigerators. They got enough training to get the job done as quickly as possible. Factories converted almost overnight. Heard stories from someone who worked at RCA
The real world can't bother me when I'm thinking about tank welds
Feels good. So comfy 😎
liberty ships were the same way. they were built mostly by women who were not trained welders. they would start out by just tack welding parts together and then the more experienced or skilled would do the major welding. many of those ships actually split in half on the ocean. eventually they modified the design to include a long steel plate belt horizontally that spanned the middle as a reinforcement
Most of the issues for the Liberty ships came from charging the entire ship and people dropping their stingers on the deck and letting them flop along the deck making embrittled points. Once the ship hit cold water the metal drops below the ductile to brittle transition temperature. The embrittled points acted like serrated paper with the stress of the waves.
They riveted giant steel plates to the sides of the ship to take the stress off the hull.
This is when they developed and started using sharpy V notch testing.
first one is a T34/76 at a guess, it could be an 85, but more likely a T34/76 the Soviets were severely under pressure when they built this it got better later.
fine example of "get it done" welding
the majority of welding done in WW2 was stick, quick fast and dirty.
the Sherman front welding looks like a battlefield upgrade, gobbed on some plate to stop a shell trap., there was a lot of that, especially on the sides of the body over ammo storage areas as the Germans had realized that the best place to hit it was in the ammo storage, it was eventually sent back to the factory and became a standard upgrade, but it was very much improvised.
That makes total sense. A bunch of rods and some scrap steel plate is definitely worth it 100% lol. It definitely looked like an improvised “addition”.
going by the line of the turret and apparent width of the turret ring I'd say its a T-34/85
@@makingmistakeswithgreg T-34 produced during war in most cases ended on avg dead in just 2 weeks of combat, T-34/76 would be very unlikely to survive the war.
That looks like T-34 with 85mm version of the turret but the driver hatch looks more like something from light T-70 tank.
There were many factories and the quality of those produced during the war was so poor that almost all that survived were melted down, and those that are found today are mostly post-war production.
Here is a video of nice example of Soviet steel qulity in Polish museum of armored vehicles.
czcams.com/users/shortsGCXYI7FpeV4?si=mT2hWhUH2huUz2YC
It is a T34/85.
I’m 68 yrs old I’ve been welding since 1975. I’ve had my welds e-rayed for flaws! Die tanks fill with water then pressurized to test for leaks! I’ve seen gorgeous welds. And I’ve seen what we welders called gorilla welds. So ugly looking but will stay together in a hurricane! I have a 03-A3 30-06 cal ex military rifle. Barrel had lathe marks ugly finish ugly looking stock. But when the trigger is pulled it is spot on every time! There is a time to be pretty and times that call for ugly in the heat of battle!
7014 style rods were used in a lot of that work, high deposition and easy to use for a novice operator. Give Rosie a pile of big sticks and lots of amps and stick those plates together fast. Probably lots of big ac transformer machines but that was also the era of motor generator sets like the lincoln and Hobart"torpedo" units which are capable of exceptionally nice arc outputs.
Those torpedo welders are quite the awesome machines. They have definitely built many a massive ship or heavy machine.
The image at 9min is definitely a field mod, those bulges the add on plates are hiding were where the driver and assistant/bow machine gunner would sit, and were seen as a weak spot
Makes total sense. 100% worth having that on there over eating shrapnel lol.
When I started college a little more than ten years ago the TIG machine from the lab was THE TIG machine costing around the same that an average car at the time, letter I worked with people who used TIG in the 80s, when most of the people in my country didn't know what that was, and they told me how it was really special to learn it. Now I can get a TIG rig for a month salary of minimum wage or a SMAW for two days salary working construction.
Think how in the fourties a lot of people didn't have electricity nearby, let alone a welder that at the time consisted of a big piece of copper. Never had been an easier time to learn how to weld, people can spend hours improving and they share the results on internet so the concept of "if it stays together it's good enough" it's lost and people spect welds to look like instagram photos even on a fence post (nothing wrong with working like that if your can)
You brought up excellent points. Back then most of welding was almost a dark art that very few people could do, let alone a had the money to afford a welding machine. Getting enough power in a house to run a machine would have been a challenge too lol. Like you said, the accessibility to welding equipment is unbelievably good today. The fact you can go into harbor freight or other tool store and buy a tig welder is amazing.
Nice to see your channel growing, I'm positive it's going to grow bigger than you ever thought it could!! Great channel and keep up the good work!!
Thanks for the kind words 😀. It’s a lot of fun helping/motivating people and looking at cool stuff 😀
That first tank was a T34 tank. The tell tell sign is the sloped armor.
Quite a lot of WW2 tanks had sloped armour.
Quite a lot of WW1 tanks had sloped armour.
The tell tale sign is arguably much more towards the shape of the MG port (and if you want to be more specific, its placement relative to the driver hatch), than other single feature.
That’s an interesting perspective on things. It would be something to look at a German tank made in 1938 compared to one made in 1945
I can tell you I have seen German Uboats and some of the welds on them were impossibly good. The looked like sub arc welds but I am not sure they had access to that tech. The German heavy equipment I have seen seems to show more skill and care than most others. It would be super cool to see early war and late war equipment side by side. There would have to be a reduction in quality you would think.
Well, it would be hard to say since German tank technology advanced so much during the war. They started out with little Panzer 3's and 4's, but had monsters like Jagdtigers, and King Tigers at the end.
I know for small arms the cut backs are well documented and known by those who study the topic.
@l337pwnage hell they used 38(t), and Panzer 1 and 2 tanks in the invasion of France.
@@alexanderhenley7307 I believe it. I study the politics more than the strategy so I just know bits and pieces, not that I have phd in politics either, lol.
Most people only know what they see in the movies and on TV. It was doctrine more than gear that led to their victories, and both combined near the end let a population of around 66 million hold off a combined population of 280 million for a long as they did, and made them pay for every inch.
Of course, the real cost is coming due now, but that's another story.
@0:45 It's a Soviet T34/85.
That is not an 85mm turret. That is a 2nd generation 76mm turret.
Correct. You can tell by the vertical cast armor at the bottom of the turret.
@@PalmettoNDN middle of the front plate has a small strip of metal which is a clear sing of an t 34/85. Learn something before trying to correct something.
Even a crappy weld is very strong and the weld strength isn't a limiting factor in the quality of the tanks. I've worked on construction projects where most of the welding could be this bad and not even fail engineering because there are other points of failure that will break long before crappy welds would. The company I worked for only had one fully qualified boilermaker welder and a few experienced but not fully qualified welders like me. The rest were trigger pullers who could barely troubleshoot or setup a MIG welder they were allowed to weld anything except the vertical ups that joined the 6mm thick 75X75 lifting columns to the structural channels which was reserved for myself or the ticketed welder.
Welding is as much about productivity if not more than it is about material strength.
The T-34 you showed at the start had other economies, such as removing the leather or rubber gasket on the tank's hatches. They rattled around horribly and rain poured in to rust up the interior, but nobody cared because the factory was cutting hours-per-vehicle however they could. Post-war most of our exposure to the T-34 was their 'export models' made after the war with the old factory hands.
Those steel plates welded on at 9:10 were a field improvement. They were slapping an inch of steel over a 'shot trap' on the original pattern while the factories reworked the front hull design to not have those traps and instead present a flush front plate. A shot trap is basically any significant concave angle facing enemy fire.
But still T-34 did have a very expensive aluminum engine. Lucky for USSR, US was shipping huge amount of aluminum to USSR, so they could continue with the expensive practice.
Arc welding equipment has changed over the decades as well. I would assume old machines of that era were pretty finicky on settings (or limited taps for voltage/current) and a relatively inexperienced operator would just make do and let the rod melt into place. No time to fine tune things and depending where the job was being done even the power source could be questionable with brownouts and spikes.
100% agree. Far from what we have today.
Seems like a great example of the saying "Perfection is the enemy of good". Obviously we need to keep such statements in perspective. If you're welding something that needs to last a long time without failure, you should aim more towards perfection. But if it's just something that only needs to last a short time (a tank in wartime. Or a quick fix in the field where you're lacking the 'good' equipment you have in your shop back home), 'good enough' is sometimes just that.
With that said, I enjoy every one of your videos. And I honestly very much enjoy these ones where you just tell a story with pictures (I particularly enjoyed your local architecture one!). It's a nice change of pace sometimes. And it keeps things fresh and interesting. Please just keep doing what you're doing!
Thanks for the kind words 😀. I have a bunch more interesting content I am working on that you will definitely like. I am really hopeful that I can close a deal on a new shop so I can have more space/time to make content. It’s a lot of fun doing less serious videos on cool stuff 😀.
"Quantity has a Quality all its own" J. Stalin.
Inferior products and technology, insufficient time with ridiculous deadlines, and a shortage of qualified hands leads to a “good enough and just get it done situation”. They served their intended purpose. Trying to make all of those weld pretty and aesthetically pleasing is like putting a show car paint job onto a demolition derby car🤷♂️
Pretty much lol. I had a good laugh at your demo derby analogy lol. It’s honestly amazing the volume they were able to produce considering it was literally the worst case situation to produce a large volume of anything lol.
And yet the welds are still holding.
I'm not sure about early WWII production(like in the first photo) but late war soviet tanks were welded with heavy usage of automatic processes. I think the bio of Evgeny Paton could answer on the exact timeline of switching to SAW, he has received all kinds of accolades for his work. I've seen in person welds on heavy soviet tanks from WWII with those 4-5-inch wide welds, they are not pretty but surely they give the impression of how much steel was used in those beasts.
It makes sense that they would have switched to automatic processes, I can’t imagine how much the time savings would have been using saw on big thick plates. I picture running big stick rods for 12+ hours a day at 300+ amps and how bad that must have been vs saw lol.
I think the perspective here is, this stuff has lasted almost 100 years.
That's an uninformed perpspective. They're steel and thick so precisely why wouldn't they last that long when not being shot at? There are still thousands of much more delicate automobiles from the early 1900s driveable in 2024. Tank armor is simple slabs of steel.
Welding development of the technique of thick plate welding were new and many countries were using bare wire welding.
Very good point, and often overlooked by many who are critical of the welds on old military equipment. We are spoiled today in comparison.
On the tanks, the first tank looked like an early t 34, the rest looked like a Sherman chassis, the plates are welded over the vision slits for the driver and bow gunner probably on an self propelled artillery.
It appears you are correct. I just read an article on that, apparently they had an issue with shrapnel coming through the vision slits. That would make perfect sense as to why they welded the plate over that, it beats the alternative lol.
At the 9:02 mark. It looks like plates were retrofited after the fact, to protect what was probably a weak point in the armor. More angles = more chance for ricochet.
The phrase was '' battle worthy '' thats all things had to be , just meant it worked well enough to do its job and fight.
Working as a Civilian Contractor for the U.S. Marine Corps Prepositioning Ships in the 1990's in Saipan, I found a Sherman tank from WW2 that had been knocked out in the surf line from Japanese gunfire. It was fully encrusted with marine life everywhere but the welds, which were polished and shiny like the day they were made. It turns out the welds had a high content of Nickel in them which kept them from corroding.
My 2 cents on WW2 tank welds.
SSG. U.S. Army (Medically Retired) Infantry / Sniper / SOF Intel (SOT-A), multiple tours
Thanks for your service and sharing those details. No doubt they must have been using high nickel and/or chromium welding rods. I need to do some research but I wonder if they did that because the armor had high carbon content and they were trying to prevent the welds from becoming brittle. That might also explain why many welds were done horizontally and looked rough. Nickel based rods tend to run very poorly overall.
I believe the image at 9:00 is showing a field modification, the bulges those plates are covering are where the driver and co-driver/ bow machine gunner would sit, and iirc they were seen as a weak spot in the armor
This version of the Sherman was actually sent back to the US for remanufacturing and these plates were one of the modifications done. That's not to say some units didn't do this in the field as well. As far as being a weak spot, it was more of an issue with being a poor design giving a ricochet a chance to trap into a very vulnerable spot.
You can see older hits behind the plates / in the area the plates now cover.
As someone else said this is part of an upgrade package that was applied both in the factory and in the field as an upgrade kit, the purpose being to eliminate a weakness of the driver and assistant driver direct vision slits that were covered by these plates.
This is certainly the case. The Sherman tank crews would add practically anything to the armor to improve their chances. Adding track links for example, could even increase the risk of penetrating hits. Bigger plates were welded to the sides to protect the crew, and according to some sources I have read, German AT-gunners would deliberately aim for these plates. Such field modifications are still popular today, in the Ukraine war, as shown in its most extreme application in the Russian "turtle-tanks".
@@prinzalbatross9526But this means they would have to drive "blind" or with open hatches. That seems like a crazy solution.
One big design feature that makes a tank safe is the ability to get out of it when it is hit. I knew a tanker who's tank was hit and all he remembers is being so violently shaken and confused, seeing light, diving and getting out of it before it went up with all of his crew inside. Tanks like the T-34 were very hard to escape. Might be easier to get out when all the welds let go.
Based on what people have suggested, the t34 had about zero effort given for designed comfort lol. I could imagine escape would be hard too.
Reminds me of my dad's welds lol. But i'v seen him lengthen and shorten truck frames and build equipment trailers from scratch. And never remember a catastrophic failure or even a minor failure.
Another thing to think about when doing your own welding at home is you have all the time in the world to get a decent weld, so why not put in the little extra effort and make something you wouldn't mind showing your friends.
On Soviet rush production pieces you can imagine the tools and equipment was also inadequate. You would think to weld thick 2" plate in a hurry you would get some large diameter rods and use high power to get the job done in less time rather than burn up a ton or more of spaghetti sticks in the cold Siberian winter.
The sandy coloured one looks like field add on plates covering some vulnerable spot. Done in the elements be it sun rain mud with whatever kit was on hand. Atleast to my eyes.
That’s what I thought too. No doubt it was likely better than not having it. Numerous people have suggested that was to coverup the lookout slits to prevent shrapnel from entering the tank, so it makes total sense as to why that was done.
soviet tank in first photo is a T34-85
9:10 That is a field modification called Applique Armor. This was done to provide extra protection to critical areas like crew positions and ammo racks.
The American M4 Sherman (and several other WWII tanks) used a cast mono-body for most of the armor, which has a much higher up-front cost to produce.
When the T-34's are rolling out of the factory in Stalingrad *directly into combat,* then they only need to be "good enough."
I have a feeling that the pictured soviet tank's production involved a conversation like:
"Comrade Ivan! Can you weld?
"Nyet, comrade commisar."
"You learn. Now!"
"Which can you do better, dig trenches in frozen soil under fire or weld?"
It was WAR production. Make the welds "good enough" and above all else keep the volume of completed tanks up. WAR PRODUCTION! Ships were built the same way: welds were just good enough and completed cargo ships were built so fast it's unimaginable today. They were considered one way ships: get the cargo where it's needed and if the ship made it back for a second load it was a bonus.
This particular t-34 tank is on display in the Citadel War Museum in Poznan, Poland
Rosie the riveter with a buzz box
Honestly that’s exactly what it likely was lol.
“…or a Silo DC motor-generator welder…”
Big oil cooled AC transformers
Those weirdo welds could be 6012. I have a box of 6012 and it welds kinda like that. More grainy than 13 but not as angry as 10. European system is a bit different. We get about 4-6 (sub)grades of 6013 which go from being basically like 6011/12 to almost as clean as 7018 with the RB - Rutile Basic flux composition that has a harder relight but has a more fluid, non foaming slag which does not get entrapped. Love those. As a punishment we do not get 6011, only the RC type of 6013. We do get 6012, but is is a bit hard to tell those in the Euro system, they are just type R,RC etc. which could also be 6013. Its only the American conformity text that tells it apart really. I have a box of old phoenix blue, German 6012. Nowadays those sell as 6013 , must have changed composition. I also remember reading on an Amerikanski Forum ;) that 6012 was a common production electrode before 6013,7018, 7024 etc. - smoother, stronger, higher deposition electrodes. Those old phoenix blue kinda weld like that. Angry, hot, lots a spatter, fairly coarse welds. The new ones are also advertised for welding dodgy crap still. Fast freeze, gap filling, tacking, downhill. Basically German 6011 but it formally rates as 12/13 in AWS speak. I actually got some true american 6011 recently. Lincoln. Maybe we can do a video collab in Autumn, i have lots a welding to do and my free time situation will be better again....Comparing 6011, German angry 6013, proper 6013 and basic, x ray safe 6013 sounds like a plam ^^
Well explained. Welding rods with completely different behaviour and use all rate as 6013 in AWS. Very difficult to compare by the different standards. You can get 6010 from Böhler - but to hilarious prices here.
I got sent a bunch of 6013 rods from overseas, I need to inventory them and do some tests. What you wrote is super helpful because in the states we have one 6013 and it welds much different than what I have seen in videos outside of the U.S. Your explanation makes total sense and explains what’s going on. I will be doing a 6011/6010 rod give away in the fall specifically for people overseas. It would be great to get your input on the common rods here. As far as 6012, that’s one rod I have never ran but I do happen to have 8 rods of. I definitely need to try it and see what it’s like. From what I remember people used it to commonly weld metal roofing down, and super thin material.
What company makes the 6013 that welds like 7018, sounds like something I wanna check out.
@@modarkthemauler It's not related to any singular company. It is the European Flux designator "RB" meaning "Rutile-Basic" as per whatever is the current (and the previous) DIN/ISO governing this. As you would expect, the properties are in the middle. Better joint quality and muss less foamy slag than pure rutile 6013, better relight and a bit less brutal than pure basic 7018. In Germany you can even get this designator as scrap/NOS from the old eastern block for dirt cheap and i LIKE them. Don't run on AC very well, though. But rods that are less slaggy than 6013 for less than half the normal price. Oh yeah.
@@Zonkotron I'll try to find some, thanks.
Quantity has a quality all it's own...
It is a typical example, quantity over quality.
German tanks were built by well-trained workers and the quality standards were high.
The Soviets were made up of semi-skilled forces who even then drove the tank directly to the front.
The T34, on the other hand (and other tanks as well), was only supposed to last (Stalin's statement) until they had destroyed a German tank. It no longer mattered whether the crew was dead and the tank was destroyed.
They were able to send about 10x as many tanks onto the battlefield as the germans.
Good analysis. One thing I'd add is that they didn't have as good of rods or machines as we have now. And, that armor plate and or castings they were welding may have presented additional difficulties due to the material itself.
100% right. After doing some digging and reading comments it seems the armor plates were commonly full of chromium amount other alloying elements so I am sure they likely welded poorly. Inconsistent rods and materials would have made it a tough job. Let along having issues with welds cracking due to the materials. Not a fun job for sure lol.
Well put Greg! An excellent discussion
The Soviets have always been good at welding when they wanted to be, and bad welds are generally pretty obviously an active choice on their part regarding what their labor's time could be best spent doing. They were especially innovative when it came titanium and titanium-alloy welding, to the extent that they built several entire classes of nuclear submarines with welded titanium pressure hulls during the cold war
I recall reading somewhere of late WW2 German tank production. The crews of the vehicles would sometimes assist in producing their own vehicles, paint was often left out, and overall production quality lessenes severely the closer the Soviets got to Berlin.
Interesting. I would be welding extra armor plates on mine lol.
That looks like a WWII Soviet T-34 tank. 84,000 were built.
With that kind of production it’s amazing they were able to do even what they did.
@@makingmistakeswithgreg More T-34s alone were built than all of German tanks in WWII combined.
First tank is t-34, some later variant given high turret ring.
Another common welding style for WWII was handheld subarc. Basically welding blind by feel only.
Also hardened steel is not easy to weld, chemically speaking. Honestly it is pretty awesome what they did back then without fine tuned fillers/flux.
No doubt whatever steel blend they were using likely was both inconsistent and hard to weld. Higher strength modern steels tend undercut, and often weld poorly out of position. I didn’t really mention it but the horizontal welds may have been a necessity due to running straight vertical would cause the molten pool to run off. Stacking horizontal beads gives the ability to weld uphill with rods that otherwise couldn’t. No doubt the consistency of the materials and rods would have been highly variable, adding to the problems.
They should have use tig and stacking dimes are the best lol
Tig was first “invented” in the 40s so they could have lol. I can’t imagine how long it would take to tig weld a tank 😅. That would be a test in ability to handle monotonous tasks 💀😅
At that time the metallurgy was not there to get nice looking welds that looked nice and smooth both for the electrodes and the plates getting welded. A lot of welding back then was done with with bare welding rods which were dipped into a bucket of lime for flux. In 1974 I purchased my first welder, it was a lincoln petrol generator with a side valve ford petrol?gas engine on a trailer ex WW2 MOD. In the electrode storage tray there was some WW2 era electrodes consisting of wire rods covered with asbestos and lime held on with a spiral wrap of thin wire. I spoke to a veteran who had the job of welding up the shot up tanks putting a copper plate behind the holes and filling them with weld, he told me that despite the fact that they had been hosed out before starting it still smelled like roast pork when doing the welding. It is just not possible with electrodes of such quality to get a nice pretty smooth looking weld, the metal will not flow like modern metal and the flux hardens faster freezing the weld into distorted shapes. An awful lot of chemistry has gone into making modern welding electrodes and the nice looking welds is just as much due to the chemists as the welders skill. WW2 led to a lot of metallurgy research especialy in the USA where things were a little less exiting than Europe or Russia, I have a number of volumes of "Metal Progress" which was a publication put out by the American society for metals in which they describe some of the research going on at that time including stuff about the manhattan project when it was still a secret. At the start of the war every steel mill would have its own alloys by the end of the war alloys were getting standardised which helped in welding., they were X raying welds back then and where it was not possible they would cut plugs out of the welds to examine so although the welds look rough on the surface they were as sound as possible given the materials of the time.
Thanks for the excellent contribution. I have heard of lime/asbestos rods, but never seen one in person. Pretty wild. Your description of how the rods ran is what I was figuring. Modern hard face rods make welds that look similar to many of the Soviet tank welds. The hard face rods run poorly vertical up, so the only way to weld with them is stacking the Horizontally and even then the beads weld fairly rough. Interestingly enough many people have suggested that the welds on the Soviet tanks were indeed a form of stainless due to them not rusting. I bet they had high levels of chromium or nickel and wouldn’t be a very good welding rod, let alone with 1940s welders. Definately no 7018 lol.
As a german, i`ve never seen welds like this. But it all makes sence, when housewifes have to be welders in one day and the welds have to hold a week before the product get`s destroyed.
In my youth, i`ve heard old tank drivers say, you had to be very carefull, not to drown in a tank, when passing a creek. Now i know, why....
Thank you for bringing up this topic.
I would have never thought about this.
I see it differently, on bulldozer blades and other high wear metal in contact with abrasive environments,we would run a hardening weld bead to take the punishment without wearing the original base plate. The old style water well drilling and oil well drilling we would have to build up the drill tip as it wore away into the pointed shape which would jam and stick the drill, something like the kerf of a saw blade. A little more protecting metal.
In order to decide whether or not a weld is acceptable, it is necessary to look at the design of the weld, and the loads placed on the welds. As structural welds go, these welds primarily hold the pieces together. I haven't heard anyone comment on the thickness of the plates or components being joined. On the M4 (Sherman tank) the armor ranged in thickness from 1 to 3 inches with the thicker armor on the front of the tank body. It is likely that the loads and resultant stresses on the welds are quite low and thus the weld will be quite tolerant of welding flaws. Also, take a look at tanks that have battle damage, rarely are there failed welds seen even if the ammunition inside the tank exploded.
In addition, as mentioned in the video, SMAW or stick welding was a new process when these tanks were made.
They have to crank them out quickly, and they're a disposable piece of equipment that's probably going to be destroyed anyway.
Stalin said that quantity has its own quality. And he was right. Why should there be a beautiful weld on the outside of the tank? The tank crew had to solve much more difficult problems. The ugly external weld was not visible from the inside of the tank anyway. If the whole country is fighting for survival, then aesthetics go by the wayside. And the life of the tank in battle was only a few hours anyway, and if the crew was very unlucky, only a few minutes.
Not USSR did build about 50 000 T-34 during the war, and did only have a few thousand left then the war ended. That is a margin of a few percent.
A lot of the large gaps comes from having parts built by so many different companies, easier to leave gaps and weld them up than to ensure 6 different factories owned by 6 different people can make the exact same dimension parts, probably with different tooling. Also to a certain extent you had to still design everything so that a group of 18-24 year old army mechanics could try and do something with the welding/repair equipment in the field if a busted up tank rolls back to the staging areas. Lenient tolerances make “make it work” much easier
Great point and no doubt looser tolerances are better than too tight. A bunch of people have suggested much of the armor had high nickel or chromium in it, and it was welded with chromium based fillers. This is important because nickel and chromium based materials torch cut terribly and I can’t imagine trying to grind down even 1/4inch of an edge on a 1in + thick plate. Like you said, far easier (and less time) to fill that poor fit with weld than trying to cut it.
When I started welding, over50 years ago, and some 25 years after the war, there were a lot more AC welders, the electronics were not nearly as well developed as now! DC welders were frequently rotary motor driven dynamos. These welds would all have been stick, using pretty primitive rods, it's hard to imagine, but emerged arc was complicated, gas tanks added to the supply problems. I learnt to gas weld, and stick weld early, DC arc welders were expensive and for home use, arc was the only practical thing! I replaced my old buzz box about twenty years ago, I still have it, and, it still works! I had a MIG, sold it, as for me, stick does most of what I want!
Thanks for sharing that. What you described is what I have read about how welding “used to be”. Primitive is an understatement. I am sure 50+ years ago people would have loved to have what we have today.
looks like a t-34
Yes T-34-85
On the subject of ugly welds with no experience. When I was young I took a 6013 and cranked the heat up higher and held the rod against the metal and let it run by itself. The weld looked like a machine done it especially on a T joint. I have bent tested it but never cut and etched. Hoping you could try it and test it. Thanks for the videos!
Yup, hold it like you're melting a crayon on a hot skillet. Don't cram it in there, just very lightly drag it along at a slow steady speed, at the right angle.
@@brnmcc01 exactly!
That does work, I definitely need to do a video on that. “Welding tricks” video lol. I have seen guys set a 4x4 wood block on a rod flat on a plate and let it run too lol.
Thank you!
@@makingmistakeswithgreg I learned that trick from one of your videos, I was having so many problems with 7018 restarts and sticking the rod, but I found if you long arc it a little bit to get things going, then very lightly just drag it along, the flux kind of acts like a standoff and helped a lot keeping a nice tight arc, and made the weld look 100% better. Your channel inspired me to give stick welding another try, and it's been a lot of fun. I bought a little Multimatic 215, it seems to run really nice on both stick and MiG. I wish it had adjustable arc force etc, but it seems to be pretty good. It can't do 6010, but it has a chart for 6011. It even has settings for 100% CO2 MiG too, so at least it has the voltage to do that if I decide to try that out.
t34 is the first tank. Russia also didn't care about quality like the Germans did. Quantity has a quality all it's own. Germany produced high quality tanks, but really were over thought and unnecessarily over built in quality. Welding was also pretty new in this era. Not long before this everything was put together with Rivets. Also as you noted, most of this work was done by either women workers who were not as trained, done by prisoners with little training or just new workers. Most Russian tanks were only supposed to last a matter of hours in battle. Also, many of these tanks parts are cast steel which is difficult to weld compared to good steel. I was a welder and fabricator for years in the wrought iron industry so I did weld a lot of cast and steel. I did mig, tig and stick in the field.
No doubt the materials, rods, and welders used were all “worst case scenario” lol. It’s strange to think of how new welding was then, far from what exists today lol.
Military grade = cheapest bidder.
Good morning Greg. Outstanding and interesting video. God bless and have a wonderful day. 👍👍🙂
You too 😀👍
Those last welds on that sherman are odd , plates are covering the gunner and driver's vision slits .
Tank recovery was important to all armies , so field expedient welding of patches or additional armor would have been commonplace.
Interesting video , thank you .
No it is not. They had periscopes on top of the hatches. The plate attempts to improve the armor over the vertical portion of the front hull.
the tank in the first picture looks like a T-34 with the upgraded 85mm cannon turret, thus named T34-85.
the third picture looks like the rear of a differently painted T-34.
guess there's a lot of pictures of these things since there were so many made
the picture at 9:03 was a early war M4 Sherman that was later on upgraded to protect the weaker parts, the turret on that specific one also had a additional bent plate welded to the turret cheek due to the horizontal turret drive making the armour thinner on that cheek.
from what I recall this was a common and standardised upgrade, and practically every variant of sherman had the crew messing around with adding extra armor on it, typically things such as logs, sandbags and sometimes concrete, which commonly angered the people in charge, especially General Patton. there's some pretty famous photos around of various shermans where the crew had covered the entire fronts and sometimes sides of the tanks with concrete, from the looks of it some of these look like 4 to 8 inches of extra thickness, the front hull usually just being 2.5 inches or less, (unless it was the jumbo sherman, which had a entire addon plate making the thickness effectively 4 inches)
The tank is a Soviet T-34. They are very distinctive.
They used to weld alot of heavy plate with Oxy Acetylene, which probably would produce better welds than early electric welds. I still utilize the "torch" process for specific applications and its very Seminar to TIG
Another thing to keep in mind is a lot of the old stick welding was unshielded. With no shielding gas, you're gonna get crappy welds
Rods aren't shielded by gas.
IN other words: tell me you can't fathom war production without telling me you can't fathom war production.
I've been focusing my workshop time on a lot of other things than welding recently, but this absolutely caught my attention. I love seeing how military equipment is made. It's wild how fast the United States could put together a ship back in WW2, for example.
Cool to hear it caught your attention. A ton of people were talking about the tank welds on a welding group I am a member of and it seemed to be a great idea to talk about 😀. It sure is amazing at how fast equipment and ships could be made. I am not sure where you live, but if you ever have a chance to see the USS Alabama (permanently docked on the coast of Alabama) it’s worth it. You can wander around the whole ship on a self guided tour. They have an old machine shop setup just like it was when it was in service. You can even wander around in the munitions room that feeds rounds into the main cannons. Everything about the ship is awesome lol.
first tank looks like a russian t-34
I happen to feel that a few were gas welded
You are probably right. It’s crazy to think of gas welding anything super thick but if that’s what you have it’s more than doable. I can’t imagine the heat from gas welding 1in plates 💀
I am a DOD welder. One thing that has a major affect on the welds is arc blow. Armor is a real PITA to weld sometimes because it has pockets of magnetism that make life hell. Armor is one of my least favorite things to weld because of that very reason.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts on that. Your comment and others are really painting an interesting picture of difficulties welding the plates. I found out it was common for them to have high levels of chromium and nickel, and the rods often ran out of position poorly. So poor material, liquid weld pools, and impossible timelines are definitely quality killers lol. Pretty crazy to hear weldability issues still plague armor today.
People forget this was esrly on in wedling and the standards are far different then todays strict pretty weld expectations
My welding instructor was a British commando. He told us that stick rods in the beginning were wire wrapped in lime soaked newspaper.
That’s pretty wild, I should give some home made electrodes a shot to see how well they work lol.
I would expect Armour plate to have somewhat reduced protective properties near welds. Changes to annealing, and locked in stresses etc. Also if thick plate heats up, there'd be a *lot* of force jig would have to restrain
Zig zaging would continue adding heat close to one area. Horizontal beads... can be done more akin to tack welding. Laid down as sequence with say 1foot seperation between each pass.
First tank was likely a T-34-85, maybe a T-34-57 '42 model.
@7:54 That is a Sherman Firefly. British upgunning to a 17 pounder gun that removed the bow gunner and put that plug over the MG port. It was factory, but at the time the Brits were as in a hurry and short on skilled welders as the Russians.
@8:15 That is a factory "small hatch" Sherman.
@9:05 Those are applique plates that were usually depot level, but sometimes field mods. They used the weld beads to fill in the gaps in the edges because they didn't/couldn't cut the plates at the proper angles.
I always thought the cludgy welds gave old tanks a lot of character. But they did not think, "Oh this is only going to last 10 minutes anyway." It was more they were doing only just enough to do the job. They were still good welds. There were (and some still are) these crappy welded tanks serving for decades after the war.
At 9:15 those plates where usually welded on in the field just like you said.
Based on the shape of the turret, I'ma say its a T34-57
Had a friend who was certified to weld 6” armor plating he said he used a can in under its length. I’m guessing this was in the late 80s.
0:54 - the glacis looks very much like one from T-34
This is a misunderstanding, the life expectancy of tank crews was way better than the average joe with a rifle, american tank crews had an average of 1 lost crew for every lost tank, while the "churn" of foot plattons could be as high as 500%
The weld wasant spetacular, but you arent expected to survive sustained fire anyway.
Did DC stick welding even exist in the 1940's? I'm not sure, but I think it did not, or was extremely rare. I have seen a few welders from the 50's, none of them had DC, only AC.
The tech existed for DC welding (not necessarily stick) in the early 20s. I doubt it made its way into big 400+ welders until atleast the 40s. I have never seen anything d/c that was from the 40s as a plug in welder. I know that the torpedo welders (sae 400+) had dc as an option from I believe the mid 40s. Pretty wild to think about that since DC surely would have been way uncommon and proper rods to run on it would have been rare lol.
@@makingmistakeswithgregActually DC was first and primary for electric welding. Coffin of Detroit is often given credit for being first (1890) with "stick" welding.
I have a Lincoln SA 200 from 1942. It has a Herculese engine and is strictly DC.