Welding Tips and Tricks

My father-in-law just gave me an old wire feed welder. I can't find a name on it anywhere but as far as I can tell from the serial number it is a Hobart built in 1986. It is a 240V model. The problem I am having is that sometimes when I press the trigger without even starting a bead it trips the breaker, sometimes it doesn't. The breaker is a 50 Amp with 6 gauge wire. I'm thinking it is a bad contactor but I'm not sure if that could be it or not. Any ideas??? Thanks

Welcome to the forum.

Welcome to the forum. Any chance you can test the machine on a different circuit? Breakers can go bad, an easier fix than digging into the guts of the welder.

Artie F. Emm wrote:Welcome to the forum. Any chance you can test the machine on a different circuit? Breakers can go bad, an easier fix than digging into the guts of the welder.

Thanks, Artie. I was hoping it was the breaker but I was able to try it at a friends and it did the same thing. I did have to replace the plug on it. Would that have any effect? I would think if something was wrong with the plug it would trip it all the time.

Have you opened up the plug to inspect the insides? Are the wire connection schemes secure? Screw-down terminals? If they go loose on you, that would/could cause problems. I've had them go loose on me before. Then I loc-tite'd them. Now that I think about it, I should have soldered the bare wires to the terminals after having tightened the screw-deals down.

Oscar wrote:Have you opened up the plug to inspect the insides? Are the wire connection schemes secure? Screw-down terminals? If they go loose on you, that would/could cause problems. I've had them go loose on me before. Then I loc-tite'd them. Now that I think about it, I should have soldered the bare wires to the terminals after having tightened the screw-deals down.

Thanks for the reply Oscar. I opened up the plug and as far as I know, everything looks good.