Welding Tips and Tricks

anyone ever experience this? The spool on this flux core keeps hanging because the wrap overlaps. I'm not sure if the motor in this chicago electric is just weak or if the spool is messed up. The welder works great until the feed hangs, then it starts sputtering. I'm new at this so I'm not sure if there's a way to fix this or if something is defective.

Once I move the bind, it works fine until it circles around again.

picture was black, trying to display a different way. The tension has been pretty solid and when I get the bind out, it unravels good until it gets to that overlap again.. not sure how to fix it without trying to rewind the spool.. which I don't really want to do.

If your spool tension is too loose then the spool will spin even after you pull the trigger causing the wire to unwrap and overlap itself. Open up the side door and watch the spool when you run the trigger start and stop several times to see what's going on in there. It is possible to get a bad spool but not common.

Looks to me like you have an overlap in the wire that is biting you every time you reach an edge of the spool.

This is rare on a fresh spool. It's common on a spool someone had under-tensioned and tried to rewind it when it "spun out".

You can try, next time it stops, cutting the wire and pushing it back from under the overlap and rethreading it, if that makes any sense. I can see it, as I've done it, but it's hard to explain.

Steve S