Welding Tips and Tricks

My Everlast 185dv is loosing arc in the middle of welding. It will be fine at the start and then about every other dab it drops in amps and then comes back. Almost like its on pulse but it's not. I have put a new collet, body, tungsten, bottle of gas, and cleaned the ground. Anyone got any ideas?? Also when I weld aluminum I always have contamination but only when I dip the filler rod. It never contaminates until I start adding filler but I have tried three different filler rods and it still does it. I can lay a perfect bead when the welder acts right without filler. But then the filler rod totally screws it up. It usually only does it on aluminum but lately it does it on steel to. Can anyone help??

Also the tungsten is almost immediately balling up when I start a weld and turns the tungsten blue. It does this both on steel and aluminum every single time. I can only make a weld about an inch long before the tungsten is completely round to a big ball on the end. At this point I'm beginning to think something is wrong with the machine because nothing I do helps. It seems to be getting worse the more i weld with it.

Are all the machine connections tight? I would check that first. Check for gas leaks everywhere as well with soapy water.

I had a gas leak in it but fixed it before i put the new bottle on it. And I did check every connection I could find. All are tight.

Possible that it's a broken wire in the torch, or cable. Try wiggling it as you weld.

I don't know about the current dropping off, but the tungsten issue sounds like you possibly have the leads switched.