Jeep cast aluminum Power Steering Pump bracket TIG weld repair (jakeru's #5)

[jakeru]

I repaired a cracked cast aluminum power steering pump bracket a customer brought in from a jeep. Apparently they were either really hard to find, or really expensive from the wrecking yard.

Anyhow, it's piece of cake to repair this with good strength if you do the right prep work before you weld, and have halfway decent TIG heat control. Oh yeah, having a decently powerful TIG machine and matching capacity torch helps too.

Here is the cracked bracket before welding, prepped with some carbide burr action:


Luckily the cracked bracket had not snapped completely into two separate pieces, so I didn't need to mess around with getting two pieces aligned properly before tack welding. Sometimes that can be so important to get right, that you find yourself planning the whole welding process out around just getting that first tack in there with everything in just the right position. Not an issue with this case.

After TIG welding (with 5356 filler rod):


Note that I built up the section much thicker than it was originally. In all honesty I should have removed more paint and prepped further away, because I ended up depositing weld material on a much broader surface than I originally anticipated I would. However, with the beefy deposit material, this is now a much more rigid bracket than an original one and IMO, much less likely to crack.

(I try to eliminate the original root cause of the problem that caused a failure, if I can figure one out.)

I flat filed the surface where pump/mounting hardware goes, to prevent any interference:


This repair took me ~40 minutes. Note the yellow paint was pretty "lighweight", and mostly all burned off from the aluminum part coming up to welding temperature. (And what didn't burn off I think hand-scratch wire brushed off with very little effort.)