ESAB recommended filler metals and suggested preheat group, by ASTM steel grade

Which filler metals ESAB recommends for welding a given ASTM steel grade, and which of its four preheat groups (A-D) that grade falls in. Answers 'what ESAB rod do I use to weld ASTM A106 Grade C pipe'. WHICH WELDING PROCESSES THESE PAGES COVER: all six that the source covers, as of 2026-09-16. ESAB's table runs across FACING pages. The left page carries the preheat group, stick (SMAW) and gas-shielded wire/rod (GMAW/GTAW); the right page recommends fillers for the same grade rows under submerged arc (SAW), gas-shielded flux-cored (FCAW), self-shielded flux-cored (FCAW) and metal-cored (MCAW). 699 of the 794 records now answer at least one of those four. The other 95 give the left page only, for two different reasons, and neither is an omission that can be quietly filled in: 57 of them sit in 10 ASTM blocks (A269, A487, A508, A333, A334, A420, A989, A536, A494, A589) where one row of the block is blank on the right and nothing in the PDF says WHICH end it is blank at, so every row in the block could be shifted by one; the remaining 38 are rows where ESAB prints no right-hand recommendation at all. A row we cannot place is left empty rather than guessed, because guessing would invent a welding recommendation for a named steel. HOW THE ROW ALIGNMENT WAS PROVED, since the right page carries no ASTM or grade column and a row's only identity is its position: every block is anchored in a second, column-major reading of the same PDF and its four left-hand columns consumed out of that reading character for character, then each row placed by the span of the surviving blank lines rather than by packing lines from the top. That is checked against the source itself, not assumed -- of the 704 placed rows, 347 name an alloy on BOTH pages (308L, B3, 2209, NiCrMo-3), and in all 347 the two pages agree; shifting the join by one row inside the same block drops that agreement to 36%. The hand check the brief asked for passes: A47 and A48 both read 'OK NiFeCI-A/NiFeCI-A0' on the left and both land on 'NC 55' under gas-shielded flux-cored with the other three processes blank. Every record comes from one section of one manufacturer's databook, headed on the page itself as 'Recommended ESAB Filler Metals' -- so this is that vendor's advice, not a vendor-neutral cross-reference, and the name says so. Two things follow from that. First, the filler values are ESAB product names (Atom Arc 7018, Spoolarc 120, OK 61.81) and ESAB group codes, and a group code is defined separately for each welding process: 'Group 1' for stick means SW 6010 / SW 10P / SW 6011 / SW 6013 / SW 7014, while 'Group 1' for MIG means Spoolarc 29S / 82 / 86 / 87HP / Aristorod 12.50. Same label, different products; the databook expands both in its own legend at printed page 7-2, and each record now carries the expansion for the group its own row names, quoted from under that legend's process heading. Second, the preheat value is a letter and not a temperature: A-D index a preheat-temperature-by-steel-thickness table at the head of the section. That table is now carried too, so a record states the temperatures its letter points to rather than only the letter -- but they remain what the source calls 'suggested ranges', adding 'Check your welding procedure for a more specific preheat temperature.' A vendor-neutral version of this cross-reference does exist but is sold rather than published: AWS's Filler Metal Comparison Charts (FMC:2000). Adding a second manufacturer's catalog would put a second brand's product codes beside these, not turn either into generic ones.

The data

Showing the first 400 of 794 records. Every record has its own page, with its source and the quoted line that states it; these list the rest.

• Records 1–400A508 · 1, 1A … A203 · D, E, F
• Records 401–794A131 · DH32, DH36 … A381 · Y60, Y65

Where this came from

Every record above links the page it was taken from and quotes the sentence that states it. These are the 1 source this dataset was assembled from.

• assets.esab.comhttps://assets.esab.com/assetbank-esab/assetfile/22174.pdf

Machine-readable

• data.jsonThe whole dataset — every record with its source URL and source quote.
• Open Knowledge Format bundleOne JSON object per line — every record's frontmatter and quoted span exactly as it is held here, in one fetch.
• data.csvThe same records as one flat table, for a spreadsheet or a dataframe. The last four columns are the source URL, the quoted sentence it was read from, the date we last checked it, and which columns are our reading rather than the page's words.
• How this is made and checkedWhat "verified against source" does and does not mean.

From your own code

Same records, same quotes, without scraping the page: refsource is on PyPI and npm. Each value comes back carrying the URL it was read from and the sentence on that page that states it — .source and .quote sit on the value itself rather than in a side channel, so the checking step is available instead of skipped.

pip install refsource
refsource lookup esab-filler-metal-recommendations-by-astm-steel-grade astm_spec=A508

npx -y refsource lookup esab-filler-metal-recommendations-by-astm-steel-grade astm_spec=A508

Set your AI assistant up to use this

Two files and no account. Put this in .mcp.json at the root of your project — Claude Code, Cursor, Windsurf, VS Code and Codex all read that file — and your assistant can look this dataset up instead of recalling it. The server is remote, keyless and read-only.

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "referencesource": {
      "type": "http",
      "url": "https://referencesource.org/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Add to Cursor · or, on the command line: claude mcp add --transport http referencesource https://referencesource.org/mcp --scope project

Then one line in the project's CLAUDE.md or AGENTS.md, so the assistant knows when to reach for it:

When a question needs "ESAB recommended filler metals and suggested preheat group, by ASTM steel grade", call the referencesource MCP server at https://referencesource.org/mcp (tool `search_records`, dataset_slug `esab-filler-metal-recommendations-by-astm-steel-grade`) instead of answering from memory — every record it returns carries its source URL and a verbatim quote from that page.

What each tool does, and the servers built over single registers: Connect your AI assistant.

794 records. last verified against source 2026-09-16. due for re-check by 2028-09-15.

Licence. Factual compilation with source citation. Manufacturer catalog data (ESAB) taken as facts with short attributed quotes linking back to the published databook; the databook itself is not reproduced.