Welding impacts daily lives in surprising ways

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (WLNE) — Bending steel isn’t just for super heroes, as average folks have been doing it for thousands of years.

Ancient Egyptians used fire to work with copper over 6,000 years ago, not only bending, but welding.

From there, it was a long, slow road to get to modern metalworking.

It’s no easy feat to wield fire, bend and meld metal, but the skilled artists at The Steel Yard in Providence make metal magic.

“We’ll just bend stuff with a torch,” Artist and Fabricator at The Steel Yard Ti Dinh said. “It’s like a giant blowtorch you heat metal with.”

Also known as gas welding, the oxyacetylene torch uses oxygen and acetylene gases.

Acetylene is an extremely unstable gas with a wide explosive range, but it burns at the highest temperature among common gas fuels, at nearly 6,000 degrees.

This makes it ideal for working with metal.

“You use less heat to bend because you’re just morphing it together,” Dinh said. “Welding is such a large amount of heat, but it’s really tiny, really specific and goes right into the joint.”

Arc welding uses heat four times the surface of the sun to fuse materials together.

An electrode comes in contact with material to be welded and as the electrode is pulled away from the metal, an electric arc is generated.

The metal fuses under that brief intense spark of extreme heat.