Welding Tips and Tricks

If someone could sticky this and maybe give it a better title..

So those of you with MIG welders with no actual Wire speed, voltage read outs IE your wire speed and voltage are depected with numbers or letters in the order of 1 2 3 4 ect or A B C act.. will want to both caculate your wire speed and voltage..

wire speed will be the easiest as you will only need to run wire out for 6 seconds mesure it and multiply it by 10 to get your inches per minute for each setting..

for voltage you will need a multimeter and a friend or a video camera to capture your actual welding voltage for each setting. as just measuring it for each setting with out it welding will get you readings that are way off track.

then what you will want to do is put all this recorded data on your door chart in a manner something like this

Voltage setting
1. 14.3V
2. 15.4V
3. 16.5V
4. 19.2V

Wire Feed setting
10 120IPM
20 140IPM
30 160IMP
40 180IMP
50 200IMP

Doing this will help you better understand what you have going on as far as settings as well as better use things like the miller weld setting calculator to find what setting you need to be at, as all door charts are a approximate guess of a setting how ever often are not right on as every welder will be different.

Question, to those that know. Open circuit voltage readings are going to be one thing, while welding they drop down. Does wire feed speed also change on a mig machine as well? I've seen the method of calculating WFS (trigger and count 6 x10)... it would be interesting to see if this holds while welding, as many wire feeders draw the current for the feed motor off the main transformer, and things change when the arc is running. Could be that the no load WFS setting is more a relative equation?

Part of that reply is based on my current messing around. I've had a generator welder for many years and recently added a millermatic 130 to it. One fellow on welding web talked about getting a little more out of a mig plugged in by turning the rpms up a bit and raising the voltage output. WOW, turning it from 115 volts and add a few ripms to get 120 while welding really kicks it up.
Ya cant do that with your mains plug, but some of the variations in plug in welders must have to do with the voltage thats getting to the machine in different places and shops. 5% variation is generally acceptable in electrical terms, but it can mean a lot with how a welder operates. ie; 115 to 120 volts can be acceptable in most applications, yet we think that is more a variation of one welder to another.
Good reason for good shop wiring, and heavy extension cords if you need to use them.

Poleframer wrote:Part of that reply is based on my current messing around. I've had a generator welder for many years and recently added a millermatic 130 to it. One fellow on welding web talked about getting a little more out of a mig plugged in by turning the rpms up a bit and raising the voltage output. WOW, turning it from 115 volts and add a few ripms to get 120 while welding really kicks it up.
Ya cant do that with your mains plug, but some of the variations in plug in welders must have to do with the voltage thats getting to the machine in different places and shops. 5% variation is generally acceptable in electrical terms, but it can mean a lot with how a welder operates. ie; 115 to 120 volts can be acceptable in most applications, yet we think that is more a variation of one welder to another.
Good reason for good shop wiring, and heavy extension cords if you need to use them.

To answer your question yeah I think it dose how ever I don't know how much and I'm not sure how a person could Evan find out for sure.

Yeah I know what you mean on Voltage drop in the incoming power, makes a huge difference between working and not on small transformer machines. Inverters not so much as they lower voltage a different way

Poleframer wrote:Question, to those that know. Open circuit voltage readings are going to be one thing, while welding they drop down. Does wire feed speed also change on a mig machine as well? I've seen the method of calculating WFS (trigger and count 6 x10)... it would be interesting to see if this holds while welding, as many wire feeders draw the current for the feed motor off the main transformer, and things change when the arc is running. Could be that the no load WFS setting is more a relative equation?

I know that the 6sec. X 10 method won't work on wire feed systems with a slow run in. Cobramatics are one I'm familiar with. They run in at a percentage of feed speed then go full speed once the arc is established. There is an on/off for this feature on wire drives that have them though.

I guess if you wanted to get really particular you could run the wire drive with no load (latch lifted, no arc) and use a an RPM reader to get the (number of rotations/unit time) multiplied by the circumference of the drive wheel, then do the same with it loaded and compare.

I wouldn't be surprised if there was some difference.

PeteM wrote:

Poleframer wrote:Question, to those that know. Open circuit voltage readings are going to be one thing, while welding they drop down. Does wire feed speed also change on a mig machine as well? I've seen the method of calculating WFS (trigger and count 6 x10)... it would be interesting to see if this holds while welding, as many wire feeders draw the current for the feed motor off the main transformer, and things change when the arc is running. Could be that the no load WFS setting is more a relative equation?

I know that the 6sec. X 10 method won't work on wire feed systems with a slow run in. Cobramatics are one I'm familiar with. They run in at a percentage of feed speed then go full speed once the arc is established. There is an on/off for this feature on wire drives that have them though.

I guess if you wanted to get really particular you could run the wire drive with no load (latch lifted, no arc) and use a an RPM reader to get the (number of rotations/unit time) multiplied by the circumference of the drive wheel, then do the same with it loaded and compare.

I wouldn't be surprised if there was some difference.

all you would really need to know is the RPM to compair the diffrence in feeding welding vs not welding.

i know a person could change it up so that the WFS was not powered off the welding transformer

Poleframer wrote:Part of that reply is based on my current messing around. I've had a generator welder for many years and recently added a millermatic 130 to it. One fellow on welding web talked about getting a little more out of a mig plugged in by turning the rpms up a bit and raising the voltage output. WOW, turning it from 115 volts and add a few ripms to get 120 while welding really kicks it up.
Ya cant do that with your mains plug, but some of the variations in plug in welders must have to do with the voltage thats getting to the machine in different places and shops. 5% variation is generally acceptable in electrical terms, but it can mean a lot with how a welder operates. ie; 115 to 120 volts can be acceptable in most applications, yet we think that is more a variation of one welder to another.
Good reason for good shop wiring, and heavy extension cords if you need to use them.

My millermatic 210 has a note about this on the door chart.
The chart says it was calibrated for 230v input and that higher/lower input voltages require a person to adjust up/down as needed.

My input voltage is consistent at 247v and the settings are often just a little hot - but I like the way it welds like that anyway.