Welding Tips and Tricks

Need help! Most people will say you should not have bought a Chinese machine. I agree but I had very little choice as we live in Thailand and you can only get Chinese made welders at reasonable cost over here. Import duty on a Miller works out close to 100 percent. The machine I bought is a Welpro 250P AC DC. Works fine when tig welding stainless but I have had no luck with aluminium. I am using pure tungsten and trying to weld a tab onto a yacht mast, thickness around 6mm. Using pure Argon at 20 CFH. The moment the tungsten arcs it balls up and burns back into the cup. This happens in a matter of seconds. I have used the calculator on the Miller website. I can however not find any help regarding the settings for my machine as its adjustments are not the same as the high end inverter welders. I will post a photo of the welder as soon as I can. Any help will be appreciated.

Check your AC balance setting. Sounds like you're running way too much electrode positive.
Also pure tungsten, IMHO, is for light-bulb filaments. 2% Lanthanated tungsten works like
a champ on both AC and DC.

Hey,

This topic has been moved to tig welding thread.

Mick

Thank you for the replies,

I am having some issues posting a photo of the machine but I will give a brief break-down of the settings I have.

Per flow 0-1 s, Peak current 10-250 A, Base current 10-90%, Down slope time 0-10s, Arc force 0-75 A, Pulse frequency 0,5-300 hz, Pulse duty cycle 10-90%, Clean area width 20-80 %, Post gas 0-10 s. The link is to a PDF showing what Welpro supplies. http://www.thaiphatmachine.com/phocadow ... WELPRO.pdf. Page 14 is the one I have. That is the Welpro 250 p AC dc.

No AC Balance?

I am aware that this topic has been discussed in another thread but I was not able to find a answer to my problem there. I am hoping that someone has a machine with similar controls to mine who can shed some light on my problems. I have some 2 % lanthenated tungsten on the way but at the moment I am stuck with the pure tungsten. It came with the machine as part of the package so by rights it should work to some extend. Right now the only puddle I am getting is from tears of frustration!

Thanks again

My guess is that the clean area width would be the,same as your AC balance. Play with that setting. Pure toungstens work fine on inverters but 2 percent lanthanated tungstens work good to. Also make sure you are using the right size tungstens roentgen amps you are using. Using a smaller tungstens then recommended will cause it to ball up really bad.

Thank you all for the tips and pointers. My problem was using the wrong settings on the Clean Area Width (AC Balance). Still lots to learn but heading in the right direction.

Hey,

Glad you got it sorted,

Mick