This chapter presents a brief review of the history of brazing and soldering. It illustrates complicated soldering techniques and masterful goldsmith work, as demonstrated by the famous gold mask of the Egyptian Pharaoh Tutankhamun. The chapter includes the image of a painting from Egypt circa 1475 B.C. that shows a goldsmith soldering with a blowpipe. Numerous similar images have been found in the tombs of ancient Egypt that offer insight into the practices of gold workers from the period, including the use of processes such as smelting, forging, and joining with both brazing and soldering.

Brazing and soldering processes use a molten filler metal to wet the mating surfaces of a joint, with or without the aid of a fluxing agent, leading to the formation of a metallurgical bond between the filler and the respective components. This chapter discusses the characteristics, advantages, and disadvantages of brazing and soldering. The first part focuses on the fundamentals of the brazing process and provides information on filler metals and specific brazing methods. The soldering portion of the chapters provides information on solder alloys used, selection criteria for base metal, the processes involved in precleaning and surface preparation, types of fluxes used, solder joint design, and solder heating methods.

This chapter briefly reviews the history of brazing from ancient times to the early 20th century.

This chapter discusses the process, principles, and modeling of the diffusion brazing system. The applications of diffusion brazing to wide-gap joining and layer manufacturing are also discussed.

This chapter discusses the processes involved in the wetting, spreading, and chemical interaction of a braze on a nonmetal. The chapter reviews the key materials and process issues relating to the joining of nonmetals using active brazing. Emphasis is placed on the differences in brazing to metals by established methods. The chapter also describes the designing process and properties of metal/nonmetal joints.

This chapter presents an overview of families of brazing alloys that one is likely to encounter in a manufacturing environment. It discusses the metallurgical aspects of brazing and includes a survey of brazing alloy systems. A discussion of deleterious and beneficial impurities is provided with examples. The chapter also describes the application of phase diagrams to brazing.