Welding Tips and Tricks

Hi All,
I'm a new guy here but 'old' on TheWeldingWeb. At 66 years old, welding has been a hobby for me the past 10 years. I began cheap and dumb and I am now cheap and smart! I have bought, restored and sold about 15 arc welders: 8 Lincoln AC-225s, 2 Lincoln AC/DC 225/125, 3 Linde AC/DC 250 and a few others. I have passed courses in oxy-acet, stick and tig. I have fair equipment: oxy-acet, Lincoln Mig 180, 3 identical 90amp DC-inverters in parallel (stick of DC tig) and finally an old school Airco Heliarc AC/DC tig welder - the big one @875 lbs. My out of practice welds are something to behold - bring an air-sickness bag! I seem to be good at acquiring capability but weak on using it! Nice to meet you all.

Hey, welcome to the show. you'll find somebody from just about all fields here.

Mick

Rick,

How does the 3 welders in parallel work? Does that take you to 270 amps? Do you then set each at say 30 amps to get a 90 amp output? Just curious.

Len

Braehill wrote:Rick,
How does the 3 welders in parallel work? Does that take you to 270 amps? Do you then set each at say 30 amps to get a 90 amp output? Just curious.
Len

Hi Len... yep - all as you said.

I only tried it on stick - although I suppose I could try it on Tig.
Each welder is rated at 80 amps stick and 100 amps Tig.

On stick, the most I could get was 70 amps - as measured with a DC clamp-on meter.
Frankly, 70 amps output was just sufficient to run 3/32" 6011/10, 6013 and 7014 but not 7018.

On stick, the output voltage was stated to be I think it was 22 volts... quite low to think about paralleling.
I tried paralleling two welders and measured 140 amps output on stick - both welders set at max.
With two welders and 140 amps max, it was way better: I could run 1/8" in all the above electrodes but not 5/32" 7018.

When I got the third identical welder, I tried paralleling the three and measured 210 amps output with stick.
With three welders, I could easily run 5/32" 7018 at 160 to 180 amps.

The only limitation was/is that with the low 22V output voltage, you can't draw a long arc - that's OK on steel but when stick welding aluminum it's really limiting as you really need a higher voltage machine as the arc length varies rapidly.