Tried forge welding with a cheaper flux and it actually worked better

I've been using borax for flux like everybody told me to for about 4 years now. Last month I ran out and the hardware store I manage was out of borax, so I grabbed a bag of plain old 20 Mule Team from the cleaning aisle just to get through the weekend. Figured it would be a mess and I'd have to grind a ton of cold shuts out. To my surprise, the welds came out cleaner and I had way less slag to deal with. The stuff burned off slower and gave me more time to work the joint. I still don't totally trust it for critical welds like tool heads, but for decorative scrolls and gate work it's been a game changer. Has anyone else tried messing around with different fluxes and got weird results?

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2 Comments

roses694mo ago

Hold on, are we really calling 20 Mule Team a game changer now?

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dixon.ryan4mo ago

Nobody's talking about how that game's saving system basically punished you for exploring. You'd wander off the main path to find a secret area, then get ambushed by a random encounter and lose the last 20 minutes of progress because you forgot to manually save at the mule camp. Other open world games at the time had autosave figured out. That design choice alone kept it from being a true game changer in my book.

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