Welding Tips and Tricks

Just playing around the other day and decided to see what would happen if turned my welder to "TIG mode" while my stick electrode stinger setup was still plugged in (electrode positive) - I also plugged in the foot pedal. Sure enough - HF start works great to light up and the foot pedal seemed to control the current quite well as I was laying down the bead.

I've read about folks who've put a stick electrode into their tig torch, but here I was using my regular electrode stinger. I could see this being handy in those really tight spots where accurately striking an arc with the electrode the regular way might be a bit difficult. Stomping the pedal to start was dead easy and super easy to control. Sorta like cheating how easy it was to light up the stick electrode.

Of course, I'm sure the welder mfrs would say the welders aren't "designed" to do this, but as both TIG and stick are constant current processes, I'm thinking this might be a viable technique.

I have a friend who let the smoke out of two power sources running tig in stick mode cause he only ever used scratch start and doesn’t like all this new fangled technology .
I figure the reverse could be true too. I’ve also heard that pedal with stick operation is common practice in Europe. Maybe one of those guys can comment.


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My HTP221 will allow foot pedal use in stick mode bit will not allow high freq in stick mode.

Remote amptrol is common here especially as we use almost exclusively 7018 throughout where you guys often 6010 the root - it's slightly harder to dial in a setting with 7018 that gives adequate root reinforcement without it getting away from you if fit up is less than perfect or transitioning position - however I never seen a pedal it's always a box with a dial - some just give full range of the machine - some will allow fine adjustment within a range - depends a bit on the machine - out Ranger 305D changed after changing the main board that fried.

On most newer inverters, running stick in tig mode with electrode holder plugged into +, simply bypasses any arc and hot start controls. Polarity hasn't changed.