Preface

My fascination with welding tool steels began when, as a novice, I tried

to weld two pieces of ground flat stock together with mild steel filler wire
and no pre-heat. The weld was neat and tidy (which was always my
trade mark), so I thought that I had done a good job. As I was welding
the two pieces of tool steel, I had heard funny noises like somebody
tapping two wrenches together several times! ‘Never mind’, I thought,
but as I moved the welded pieces to one side, they just fell apart!
I couldn’t believe my eyes - what had happened? It defied all the laws
of my logic that two pieces of metal should fall apart when they had
just been welded!
When the trauma of this subsided, I went to my boss to confess my
ignorance. He laughed and told me that you are supposed to pre-heat
tool steels before you weld them. I then asked him how much pre-heat
tool steel needed, but he said, ‘I don’t know, just heat it up’. I did as he
said and it worked! But I had to find out more information just in case
there was more than one type of tool steel and possibly a more accu-
rate method of choosing a pre-heat. The more I searched, the more I
realized how little anybody understood of this area. So the challenge was
on - who would I ask and where would I find this type of information?
I joined The Welding Institute and began regular visits to my city’s
central library. All I needed was a book on how to weld molds, tools and
dies but this did not exist. All I could find was general information on
how to weld tool steels.
So, slowly but surely, I started to build up my own bank of informa-
tion from trade literature, from welding and metallurgy books and from
x Preface
valuable advice from a close friend who is a metallurgist. This gradually
evolved into specific working practices which best suited my customers'
demands.
Eventually, it came to the point when I had so much general informa-
tion and enough years of practical knowledge that l decided to combine
them into the book that I could not find when I needed it. I had found
my niche, my project!
I hope what I have put together answers most of the questions that
you might have been asking yourself about the confusingly technical and
practically demanding but overlooked corner of industry that deals with
the repair of molds, tools and dies.

Steve Thompson