Were WW2 tank welds done with nickel filler and if so why? Questions answered...

本站添加: 2026-06-02

[00:00:01]What is up most distinguished patrons of this channel? So, it's been a while since I did a video for the Welds of War series, and I was going through photos on a phone that I finally recovered from like a year ago, and I found some videos and some pictures of a Sherman tank that I never shared with you guys.

[00:00:19]So, this Sherman tank was restored at least visually. I don't believe that it ran. The engine probably wasn't in it for all I know.

[00:00:27]But, visually it was well taken care of, had nice paint on it, was just an overall good shape. And for the most part, it didn't look like it was restored in somebody's backyard or basement and hacked together.

[00:00:40]Now, in the past, I've done a couple other short videos of random Sherman tanks I found. This is probably the best shape I've ever seen one, and it's pretty interesting cuz I brought a magnet along and decided to check some of the welds on it to determine if they were actually steel-based or nickel-chromium like stainless steel-based welding rods or fillers.

[00:01:03]Probably the most interesting thing I've seen on all the Sherman tanks is the absolute monstrous welds that hold the hull together.

[00:01:11]In a past video, I thought that these were done with submerged arc welding with basically big wires on a tractor-type apparatus, but the more I've looked at these, the more I tend to believe that it was just some monstrous stick rod that was used. Most submerged arc welds would be a little bit more consistent on the toe line than what I saw on this and pretty much every other Sherman tank.

[00:01:36]And there seems to be a lot of repairs on them where somebody came back after the fact and did a repair over that big monstrous wide weld to kind of fill in areas, and I just have a hard time believing that if it was done with submerged arc, that there would be the need to go back and repair as many places as I've seen on these things. Not to mention, I'm not sure that they had nickel and chromium wire for submerged arc in the 40s. That would have been a stick electrode more than likely. I'm not positive on that. I mean, submerged arc welding did exist in the 40s.

[00:02:09]There's no question about it. And they did use it for military equipment. It's just something seems off on this for it to be submerged arc.

[00:02:19]Regardless of what welding process was actually used, one thing's for sure, the amount of heat input it would have taken to do that is staggering. I mean, you're talking 600 amps probably to make a weld pool that big to leave that big of a weld in a single pass.

[00:02:35]There's been a lot of comments in previous videos and just on the internet in general about how rough the welds looked on these things. And the truth is, they're all a form of stainless or high nickel alloy welding rods. And those tend to just weld poorly, especially when you're trying to weld armor plate, especially out of position like vertical up. Like, if you've ever ran 309 stick rods, you know how much of a challenge it is to put down a weld that looks halfway decent in anything other than a flat or sometimes horizontal position. Vertical up is a disaster if you don't have the skill.

[00:03:11]Something I always found interesting was I heard that the Sherman tanks were actually welded out on a position or where they could rotate the hull. But yet, the welds on actual hull seem to suggest that really wasn't the case.

[00:03:25]And what I mean by that is you look at the flat welds on the deck in the back and there are those big monster stick or sub arc welds. And then you look at any weld holding pieces of the hull together on the front or even the sides, and it's done with small stringer welds that is presumably stick welding.

[00:03:43]I'm not sure why they would use the big monster as pass only on one area instead of rotating the whole like here and doing another single monster as pass there. They could have got it assembled a lot quicker than doing all of those individual passes. And once again, and I'll show you later in this video, all of those welds there are all a nickel or chromium based alloy. They're not steel like some form of a 7018. Well, back then they didn't have 7018, but you get the picture on that.

[00:04:13]One of the cool things with putting videos like this out is I focus more on the welding technology and other guys chime in and share their knowledge about different variants of these. And And people have talked a lot about how these plates for armor were added after construction due to realized weaknesses in the design of the tank. So, that's pretty cool.

[00:04:34]The gangster weave on that armor plate that was welded looks pretty rough, but I covered that in a previous video.

[00:04:41]They likely were using a welding rod similar to modern-day 309 stainless, and it runs so poorly as a stringer vertical up that simply running horizontal stringers like that is a way that you can stack metal going vertical up far easier with a lot less skill.

[00:04:59]The molten puddle of those rods is so liquid that you just can't control it very well, and then it will look like it's running okay through the flux.

[00:05:07]Everything looks good, and then you chip the flux off, and it's the worst-looking weld that you've ever put down. 100% why they were doing those gangster weaves of sorts was out of necessity and less so because they just wanted to get the job done by putting a lot of metal down. It actually works. I did a whole video on that.

[00:05:26]On the backside here, you can see a pretty hefty repair in here. I believe that this would probably be original. I mean, you'd need like a 3-400 amp power source to be putting down this much metal in a repair. I mean, not to say it couldn't have been repaired at some repair facility before this was made into like an ornamental iron piece. I also found it interesting every one of these Shermans I looked at had these monstrous welds here and they stopped at this point and then they use smaller rods and by smaller they were probably still 3/16 rods to put down this big of a weld and then they welded it all the way out. Now that originally made me think it was submerged arc because the tractor torch could be set up like in this area and more or less it couldn't reach all the way to the end so they would just run the wire feeder down this way or well it could be this way and stop it before it hit the end and then they would hand weld it but regardless, I mean that's a you can see how big that weld is. I mean these are monstrous welds in their own right and then this guy is just ridiculous. Once again, the welds on the side are pretty rough. of undercut, lot of lack of fusion and that's pretty typical with stainless and chromium based rods and nickel alloys.

[00:06:42]They just don't wet out that well especially when you don't want to have a lot of skill. Realistically, an average reasonably skilled welder today probably couldn't make any weld look better than what you see here because stick welding, you know, nickel based alloys just isn't a very common skill especially with bigger rods. The bigger the diameter rods, the harder they are to control with the molten puddle.

[00:07:06]So as you can see here, the magnet does not stick to the weld at all so it is most definitely either nickel or chromium based so like a stainless steel or high nickel filler.

[00:07:17]One of the things too you guys got to remember is that 7018 and low hydrogen rods didn't really exist at this point.

[00:07:25]That was a technology that was developed during World War II but it likely wasn't in existence when this was made. Without a doubt, they would have been aware of how if you weld high carbon high strength steel like tank armor with a mild steel rod like say 6010 or something similar that you would have had weld failures. They would have cracked during cooling and on impact forces they likely would have cracked due to what's called hydrogen embrittlement. At this point in time they surely knew that high nickel content welding rods could have welded high strength steel without the weld failures associated with other common rods and that's likely why they used that to put this together. And that's likely why almost every weld on here that I tested with a magnet showed that it was non-magnetic aka nickel or chromium based welds.

[00:08:16]In today's world we understand things like hydrogen embrittlement and metallurgy so much better that we have fillers that allow us to weld higher strength alloys along with procedures with like preheat, inner pass temp limits without resorting to expensive nickel that may actually be weaker depending on what your intended use is.

[00:08:38]And once again we can see the armor plate is likely some high carbon steel and the weld that's holding it on is not. It's likely high nickel based.

[00:08:49]Same thing with the welds up front, the stringer welds.

[00:08:53]Same deal.

[00:08:55]All of the welds that I tested on the tank were all non-magnetic. Interesting.

[00:09:01]It's pretty crazy how many people drive by this on a daily basis and don't really think anything of it yet under a hundred years ago these things were rolling out of factories all over my state as well as every other state in United States or at least parts for them.

[00:09:17]First house I ever lived in as a child was next door to a giant factory and apparently that factory actually produced some of these tanks. For all I know this could have been produced by that factory. Interesting.

[00:09:30]Anyways, thanks for sticking around for the video. Hopefully you learned something and if you have anything to comment feel free to do so. Until next time.