Weld surfacing is employed for the fabrication of new components for use in chemical and fertilizer plants, nuclear power plants, pressure vessels, agricultural machines and even aircraft and missile components. Though weld surfacing is carried out by various techniques, automated submerged arc welding (SAW) is the popularly employed technique due to its high quality and reliability. Also, by the proper selection of the process control parameters, single wire surfacing becomes one of the cost effective means of depositing a corrosion resistant overlay. However, for use of SAW in its automatic mode, the control parameters are required to be fed to the system according to some mathematical formulation to achieve the desired end results. A mathematical model was developed to predict the weld bead geometry for pipes. The responses, namely, penetration, reinforcement and width as affected by open-circuit voltage, wire feed-rate, welding speed and nozzle-to-plate distance, have been investigated. The theoretical predictions of the effect of current and electrode polarity on the melting rate were also presented in this paper.