[Shop-talk] soldering/brazing aluminum tubing to steel tubing

[John Miller]

On 12/19/2018 10:08 AM, John Innis via Shop-talk wrote:
> I do not have experience with soldering or brazing, but I did have a 
> similar issue with coolant lines on vehicle.  I ended up using a 
> threaded connection on the steel pipe and a compression fitting on the 
> aluminum tubing and a threaded adapter to join them. 

I would think connecting such dissimilar and potentially reactive metals 
requires some thought.

I have an installation on one car where a very clean and somewhat 
abraded steel tube is inserted ~1in into a similarly cleaned brass tube 
slightly larger ID and then some heated Metalset A4 epoxy was poured 
into the joint and it's been in place for a decade, but YMMV.  This 
could have been soldered, I guess, but the steel tube was part of a 
valve I didn't want to heat.

Butted end-to-end?  Any reason you can't use similar metals on both 
sides and shuffle the parts involved off to the local TIG guy?   Can you 
at least get the AL out of the equation?

John.