A new welding method for fully automatic welding of pipelines has been developed. The proposed welding procedure is a new variant of the well known friction welding process. An intermediate ring is rotated in between the pipes to be welded to generate the required heat to realise the weld. In the first part of the present paper, the working principles of the new welding process are briefly described. Since a literature survey revealed that the deceleration phase has an influence on the mechanical properties and heat affected zone microstructure of friction welds, the enhancement of the mechanical properties by controlling the deceleration was investigated for the welding process. The influence of the deceleration phase on the properties of the welds is discussed. The pipes used were 3 in. pipes (outer diameter: 88.9 mm) with a wall thickness of 7.6 mm, made of the pipeline steel API-5L X42. Three welding ring materials were used: a thermomechanically rolled steel, a quenched and tempered steel and a normalised fine grained steel. The parameters studied were the duration of the deceleration and the rotation speed at which forging is performed