Welding Tips and Tricks

Hello brains trust, occasionally when tack welding I get a bad start where the HF arc starts inside the ceramic cup and not at the tip of the electrode. I resharpen the electrode and clean it put on a new cup and it still happens, the next day it never misses a single start. Using Miller syncrowave 350 that has good clean points set 6 thou.

cheers Rusty

Couple ideas
1. I hate thoriated tungsten for starting, it wanders a lot and upsets me when welding wire mesh. I prefer lanthanated or ceriated

2 . Make sure everything is clean including tungsten

3. Before you strike the arc scratch the tungsten just a little bit on the material or even just touch it before you start. When you hit the pedal don’t be shy, get right into it

as stated,,,,make sure EVERYTHING is clean. Same goes for the work lead also and try to keep the work lead as close to work as possible.

Make sure your tungsten itself is polished shiny clean, most people pay very little attention to all the gunk or oxidation that forms on their tungsten and it directly impacts arc starts, think about it, if you've got a fine coating of aluminum on your tungsten, well, that stuff is pretty damn conductive, slightly more so than tungsten itself in fact, since HF will pretty much go wherever it likes, there's nothing stopping it from arcing off of contamination rather than the tungsten itself if the resistance is lower.

one thing i find that helps a lot is decent earth on the part itself.
use a third hand with bronze feet. that helps make starts so much better.

I started polishing my tungsten with scotch brite in a drill it seemed to help a lot

Polishing by spinning, and especially grinding that direction, is really bad. All the marks should go longitudinally. If they don't, they cause the arc to jump all over the place. Any tutorial on grinding will show you the direction the wheel needs to travel.

Think of it like this. The electricity runs down the scratches. If they point out to the sides... Guess where the arc goes?