SAW · Carbon steel
EM12K
The most widely used submerged arc wire, whose medium manganese and silicon killed chemistry make it forgiving on plate that is not perfectly clean.
What the designation means
Point at any character to see what it claims. The classification is a sentence written in fields, not a product name.
- EElectrode, the bare wire that carries the welding current under the flux blanket.
- MMedium manganese content, sitting between the low and high manganese classes of submerged arc wire.
- 12The nominal carbon content expressed in hundredths of a percent, so roughly 0.12 percent carbon.
- KProduced from a silicon killed steel heat, which raises the silicon level and improves wetting and tolerance of surface scale.
At a glance
- Process
- SAW
- Family
- Carbon steel
- Positions
- Flat groove welds and horizontal fillets only
- Polarity
- DCEP for most single wire work, with DCEN or AC used to raise deposition or in multi-wire setups
- Shielding
- None; a granular submerged arc flux blanket shields the arc, and the flux and wire are classified together as a pair
- Minimum tensile
- -
Typical uses
- Long seam and girth welds on tanks, vessels, and pipe
- Structural beam and girder fabrication on automated equipment
- Heavy plate groove welds where a single pass covers a large cross section
How it runs
- Silicon from the killed steel practice improves wetting and tolerance of light scale
- Deposit strength and toughness depend on the flux paired with the wire, not on the wire alone
- Very high deposition rate with the arc completely buried under flux
- Slag lifts as a hard shell once the bead has contracted
Storage and handling
Store coils dry and covered; the wire itself is not moisture sensitive, but the flux it runs with must be kept in a heated hopper and rebaked if it gets damp.
Compare with
SAWEL12The leanest of the common submerged arc wires, usually paired with an active flux that supplies alloy back into the deposit on fast single-pass work.SAWEH14The high manganese submerged arc wire, chosen with a neutral flux for multipass welds where the deposit has to reach higher strength and better toughness.GMAWER70S-6The most widely used carbon steel wire feed consumable, with enough silicon and manganese to weld through light rust and scale while wetting out into a flat bead.