can anyone weld cast steel?

Hi,
I'm a wood guy, so I'm kind of out of my depth here.
I'm looking for someone in the northern suburbs who can weld cast steel. (not asking for a freebie)

The fence clamp on my old Italian combination buzzer has snapped off, it's a small piece of cast steel.
It is quite a bad design and easily knocked when swinging the feed tables up, I'm surprised it has lasted this long to be honest. I was hoping to not only get it welded, but if possible, maybe strengthened a bit as well. Kind of hard to explain, but I've seen this done to other things, they sort of beef it up by pooling more metal onto it. I don't care how ugly it is:)

I popped into a couple of places, but they were either too busy to take on such a small job, or didn't know how to weld cast.

I would really appreciate anyones help. I would also be quite interested to see how it's done.

Cheers,
Aaron

Hi Aaron,
I rather suspect you are in fact referring to cast iron rather than cast steel. Machinery of all sorts is made from cast iron.

For those that do not understand the characteristics of welding cast iron its a whole different kettle of fish from welding steel or even cast steel.

First up, how do you tell?

Dead easy mate.Grab an angle grinder any somewhere it doesn't matter grind the maetal and observe the spark stream for colour and length.

Short sprigs and a dull red colour indicate cast iron.A long stream of multi branch sprigs and a straw yellow colour tell you its steel ,compare it to a bar of known steel.

Also cast iron does not bend and also will file wth a streak of carbon wiping off on your fingers.

If it's proven cast iron don't let anybody but an experienced welder versed in cast iron near it ,or your job might get ruined.

There are several grades of cast iron and different ways to weld them.

Grahame

You may find they just didnt want to do it, when you weld cast iron it has a tendency to be a bit brittle and not as strong as the original casting. I find, that I get a decent weld when I carbonise the metal a bit first then tig weld it and hammer the weld whilst its cooling down.