Welding Technology has come a long way to help in metallurgical upgrade of conventional metallurgy available for typical wear applications in the industry. The mind set of maintenance engineers are also getting changed unlike in the past where welding was resorted to only for emergency repairs on costly spares in continuous processes industry.

The usage of the composite welded dies has proved advantageous, as the die maintenance is reduced significantly; the usage of more than one different welding wire facilitated to create optimum dies, the weld can be harder & more wearresistant than the base material, allowing the use of a softer die to avoid cracking and breakage; savings due to re-use of existing machined dies with dovetails, lifting holes, matching edges, benders etc.; use of old dies with new, different impressions (saving on steel and die preparation costs); better quality of forgings due to improved impression properties.

X’tralife Welding Technology

The X’tralife process is a new method of welding for the reclamation of worn or damaged dies and components.

• It is a semi-automated process with the welding parameters being controlled electronically.

• Special type of welding alloys in wire form is used. These are designed with very efficient deep penetrating flux system that pulls contaminants out of the molten weld metal and absorbs them into the slag. The resultant weld metal has negligible level of contaminants. The weld metal has highly consistent mechanical properties that yield consistent reproducible results.

 The chemistry and quality of the welding wires have been specially developed to meet the demanding requirements in the closed-die forging industry.

 Benefits

ü     Improved die performance with reduced die-sinking costs per forging produced and fewer die changes.

ü     Reduced die preparation costs as only part of the die needs to be remachined.

ü     Reduced lead times as the deposited weld does not need to be heat treated and only part of the die needs re-machining.

The main six grades of special welding wire available to cater to forging industry are as under: ‘A’ Type, (30-34 HRC); ‘B’ Type, (34-40 HRC); ‘C’ Type, (40-44 HRC); ‘D’ Type, (44-48 HRC); ‘E’ Type, (50-54 HRC); ‘F’ Type, (50-54 HRC)