• Help Support Hardline Crawlers :

Brakeclean + Welding = DEATH!!!

Clark

Well-Known Member
Joined
Jan 22, 2007
Messages
1,851
Location
Ravensdale
Copied this over from pirate, something i was unaware of and figured anyone who welds SHOULD know about this.

x2thl3.jpg
 
Same thing happened to me about 4 months ago... I was in my shop at about 11pm finishing up some work on a rear end for a guy. I was done setting up his gears and locker and I had just used about half a can of brake clean on the inside of his diff to clean out all the oil and **** in there. I remembered then that he wanted me to weld up the old vent tube hole and drill and tap a new one in the top of the housing. So I flipped the switch on the welder and in the second it took to lite the ark I hit the floor... Thats all I remeber. My dad found me at face down in my own :puke: at 3am when he goes to work. Thank god he say the light on in the shop. He called 911 and I guess I was air lifted to Harbor View. They did all the tests and got me on life support. I came around. They filtered my blood and kinda cleened all my fluids and gave me some recovery meds. I had a rough time for a few weeks after the night but now im doing better but I wont be doing that again. The doc said im lucky to be here. I told him thanks. Be safe out there guys... we get used to doing some things and I dided even know what hit me. Some of the things we do everyday dont mix well.
 
Damn that's interesting. Because we weld and use brake clean all the time here in the shop. Never had anything like that happen.
 
Damn that's interesting. Because we weld and use brake clean all the time here in the shop. Never had anything like that happen.

Yeah me either. I weld diffs all the time. Clean em with da brakaclean and start welding. They always light on fire. I lettem burn for about 20-30 seconds and blow it out and keep welding.

Kinda strange. Ive never seized up.:redneck:
 
Same thing happened to me about 4 months ago... I was in my shop at about 11pm finishing up some work on a rear end for a guy. I was done setting up his gears and locker and I had just used about half a can of brake clean on the inside of his diff to clean out all the oil and **** in there. I remembered then that he wanted me to weld up the old vent tube hole and drill and tap a new one in the top of the housing. So I flipped the switch on the welder and in the second it took to lite the ark I hit the floor... Thats all I remeber. My dad found me at face down in my own :puke: at 3am when he goes to work. Thank god he say the light on in the shop. He called 911 and I guess I was air lifted to Harbor View. They did all the tests and got me on life support. I came around. They filtered my blood and kinda cleened all my fluids and gave me some recovery meds. I had a rough time for a few weeks after the night but now im doing better but I wont be doing that again. The doc said im lucky to be here. I told him thanks. Be safe out there guys... we get used to doing some things and I dided even know what hit me. Some of the things we do everyday dont mix well.

And you just now though to share? Why didnt you post up something about it before?:corn:
 
The way I understand it, it needs to be chlorinated brake clean and argon welding for this specific thing to happen. Still plenty of other bad things for us to breathe and be aware of in day to day welding. I've seen guys get really ****ed up welding galvanised too.... :puke:
Makes a guy think twice.
 
And you just now though to share? Why didnt you post up something about it before?:corn:

Well sorry about the late post. I didnt really know what had happened to me untill I read this artical. I think some kinds of cleaners dont have the chemical that does this and some do. Bad luck when I picked mine I guess.
 
I was glad to see this pop up on PBB. I told my neighbor about it and sent it to him so he'd know not to use the case of brake cleaner he just bought to clean the aluminum boat he was about to start welding on....

Scary stuff for sure... It's amazing that just the right combo came together and got the guy in the article.. Talk about dumb luck.
 
The way I understand it, it needs to be chlorinated brake clean and argon welding for this specific thing to happen. .

That must be why Ive been lucky. I used to work in a shop and we couldnt use the chlorinated stuff for fear of contaminating the used oil tank recovery tank. If it had chlorine in it they would refuse to accept it. It sucks to get stuck with 200 gallons of contaminated oil.

Guess I just got in the habbit of buying/using the NONchlorinated brakeclean.:D Just been lucky I quess.:awesomework:
 
Well that must be it because we always get the non chlorinated BC. The chlorinated stuff leaves a residue on rotor's and other crap.

Now my bad experience with brake clean and welding went like this. This happened here at home.

I dont knwo what I was doing but I had one of those black oil containers you use when you drain your oil. One of the ones that has the drain plug in the center and a capped drain spout on the end for pouring.

Well I was cleaning up the welding surface prior to welding, used the container to catch the spill off of brake clean. Waited for it to air dry, probably 15 minutes or so. Then I started welding and a spark fell down in the drain bucket. I felt the heat building up under me so I stopped welding. Noticed the damn container was on fire. OH crap pulled it by the handle out of the garage and then the flame went down the center drain plug. All of a sudden this thing puff's up like a beach ball and turns into a flame thrower or a pissed off volcano. Singed my eyebrows, took off my eye lashes and scared this piss out of me.

That's my near death experience with BC and welding. :cool:
 
chlorinated bc i think works better, but yha, back in school almost 20 years ago they warned us tons of times about it.

recently i grabed the wrong can off the shelf while cleaning the carb on the zuke... it took all of a split second shot with the zuk running outside and i got real woozy....

gota watch what ya use....
 
refridgerant near an open flame (r12 IIRC) will also produce phosgene gas.
bad news.
 
Damn I'm lucky , I was doing some welding awhile ago and kept tasting (swimming pool) in my mouth,too bad I don't still have that can of brake clean to see what kind it was.Scary stuff.
 

Latest posts

Top