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Lead welding, anyone?

An interesting idea but if I tried it I’d have to shave my beard off and get a full-on Covid-busting face mask to keep the fumes out of my lungs!
 
My dad was a GPO Telephone Engineer, up poles and down holes, and used to take me with him when I was on school holidays. He used to show me 'sweating a joint' in underground boxes. He used a paraffin blow lamp and huge stick of lead and a wooly cloth to wipe it.
 
Of course, there'll be some baby boomers on here that 'sweating a joint' will mean something totally different. :)
 
Our roofer, Richard, is a superb lead welder. To my amazement when I first watched him, I found he uses a small oxy-acetylene torch, with a tiny flame. The results speak for themselves.

He also has a great detail he puts on flashings, a 'flood catcher' (my name for it) on the upstand part, so that his upper flashings of our solar panel system catch a torrential downpour and direct the water to the side, rather than letting it just run onto the top of the panels (and thus overwhelm the seal at the top). It seems to work brilliantly, and he makes it by welding on a 4mm (thickness) strip, about 2" wide, at right angles to the main flashing (the strip runs horizontally). Similarly he does hidden upstands along the sides of the valleys, under the tiles at the edges.
 
I've done some. I ended up having to use a oxy map setup as for a large part of last year I struggled to get hold of an acetylene bottle so couldn't use oxy acetylene- which would have been better.

Cleaning the joints and making sure the strips of lead 'welding rod' are nice and clean is important. Really want decent thickness of lead otherwise it's difficult not to blow holes in the material. The thinnest I had to contend with was code 4 which was less than ideal.
 
Looking for info on lining a gully next to a dormer, I came across this, which is perhaps relevant here. It confirms what's already been said - that oxy-acetylene is what you want, with clean lead and clean lead rods. It's from the three volume Waverley Book Co compilation, Bernard Jones' "The Practical Metalworker". Not dated on the title page but I'm sure it's from the 1920s.

IMG_20250405_105646636.jpg
 
AndyT said:
Looking for info on lining a gully next to a dormer, I came across this, which is perhaps relevant here. It confirms what's already been said - that oxy-acetylene is what you want, with clean lead and clean lead rods. It's from the three volume Waverley Book Co compilation, Bernard Jones' "The Practical Metalworker". Not dated on the title page but I'm sure it's from the 1920s.

View attachment 32817
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Thanks for dropping this snippet in here Andy, not a lot of it but concise, informative and to the point.
Cheers, Andy
 
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