Forging the Future with Friction Stir Welding
Friction stir welding (FSW) produces stronger joints through solid-state processing resulting in minimal distortion, shrinkage, and residual stress due to lower heat input. The tool holders support both OEMs who require fast throughput for mass production, as well as shops producing smaller batch quantities.
Tooling Solutions for FSW
Element Six (E6) (Didcot, Oxfordshire, England) is a supplier of superhard tooling solutions, including a range for the friction-stir welding of steel. Its FSW PCBN tools have been developed and field validated in conjunction with The Welding Institute, and leading FSW machine providers to offer a complete package of solutions, tailored to a diverse range of customer requirements. E6’s FSW PCBN tools have demonstrated successful FSW performance under various conditions, including underwater as well as in circumferential welding. They have also been evaluated with structural steels, high strength steels, ultra-high strength steels and Inconel. E6 has also demonstrated aluminium to steel dissimilar joining.
World’s Fastest FSW Tooling
Mazak MegaStir (Provo, Utah) is the only friction stir welding (FSW) tooling provider in the world that can process projects at 10 meters a minute. “In fact, MegaStir is two-and-a-half times faster than any other joining technology,” said Dale Fleck, general manager, MegaStir, at FABTECH 2025. “Most friction stir welding performed today in a commercial environment is about half a meter per minute. So, we are 20 times faster than the common standard commercialized solution.”
MegaStir tools can be used in the Mazak HYBRID Multi-Tasking family of machines, which delivers DONE IN ONE® part-production efficiency. MegaStir offers solutions for both ferrous and non-ferrous alloys. The FSW tool holders provide process feedback to control force and monitor temperatures. The technologies enable welding in a single pass, minimizing distortion and allowing thicker material combinations.
Application areas include aerospace, automotive, oil and gas, marine, rail and more. Fleck noted a challenge in automotive with investment casting is the ability to remove the porosity that results during casting.
With FSW, which is primarily a joining technology, users can also join dissimilar metals. “You can join complex assemblies and build parts in an additive fashion using friction stir welding,” Fleck said. “You can also clean up the base metal using friction stir welding. So, we take a casting that is inherently porous and we run a tool through it in a single pass, which cleans the metal.”
Fleck said the ability to join a combination of dissimilar metals with FSW enables engineers to develop the latest and greatest technologies and applications, benefitting from more flexibility in the design process, such as with the light weighting of materials, and high speed production on small batch equipment, as examples. “When you can do everything on one machine, you don’t need to have a large factory with lines of machines when everything can be done in one on a Mazak machine,” Fleck said. “It allows for small batching, but also highly complex engineering at the same time.”
In addition to OEMs that benefit from the fast throughput of the MegaStir FSW system, the process also appeals to shops running smaller production quantities. “You can customize solutions for every individual need,” Fleck said.
