Welding Tips and Tricks

I Googled it last night. My welder has the dubious distinction of being "the worst welder Miller ever made" However, it's the welder I have, and have had since new. The projects it has done have easily paid for itself three or four times over. It has three main complaints

1) Hot start, making .023 difficult, burning back.

2) Harsh arc

3) Narrow sweet spot that has little bearing to the guide on the lid.


Are there work arounds. Certainly for the settings.

Your interpetation of Google's results is slightly off.

The 250 is the ABSOLUTE worst pile of fecal matter pretending to be a welder.
The 250 was Indochina Thug Works Miller's first offering after buying Miller.
Much like a collapsed bridge in Florida, the 250 was designed as a low cost to manufacture replacement for one of the best MIG machines made, the MM-200. The 200 was a tapped transformer with a decent wire drive, and a good power supply. ITW loosed a bunch of college boys on the project and manufactured the MM-250.

The Educated followers designed, manufactured and sold a pile of s#!t.

Following the ITW 80/20 policy, ITW only responded when they couldn't even sell the s#!t to industrial purchasing agents.

Rather than fix the 250s sitting in back rooms across America, ITW opened a few up back at the lab and brought in more college boys and girls, girls & EEOC goals are more important to ITW than making ewelders, and retooled the 250X from the carion.

The 250 X is a far crappier machine than anything else in the time frame, but it is slightly better than the 250. Power supply still SUCKS. ITW assured Dealers who had built the Miller brand for 20 years the 250X would sell, and ITW would support dealers.
ITW's idea of support was shedding senior employees who could have made the 250X and possibly even the 250 function so they could be replaced by stupid broads working only long enough to find a husband to pay off their student loans and buy them a house. ITW needed more broads to make the EEOC numbers come out right. ITW also desupported the MM-200 in terms of parts because they could. Rather than put out retrofit kits to bring the 250 up to the pathetic level of the 250 X, ITW declared the 250 an orphan, and assured large volume buyers the machine then in the labs waiting to come out was far superior.
ITW also set forth to eliminate the LWS from the path a machine takes from factory to user. ITW could make more profit per unit that way, and they had an 800 number you could call to speak with a stupid woman who read to you from a computer screen.

Thanks for calling ITW, my screen says I can help you. Did you know the 250x features a gun cable that's 2 feet longer?
Have a nice day, glad I was able to help you.

OK, I have the second worst welder made by Miller I take it, you had a 250 ? Oddly enough, I don't feel so bad about it, I thought it was just me and my marginal welding skills. It is the only MIG I've ever used.

When you adjust the volts and wire speed , I've only just used the chart on the lid, what are the effects of them ?

No, I was never "blessed" with any of the 250s#!t. I own exactly 1 genuine Miller MM-200, born before ITW bought up Miller just as they had previously done with Hobart Bros, another fine manufacturer of welding equipment as well as developer of Plasma Arc Welding process.
I also own a Hobart Bros 400 amp MIG that runs and welds very nicely.

I did however watch the ITW takeover of Miller and what followed with some interest. I strongly recommend googling up the ITW 80/20 policy to get a sense of the company.

In fairness I was also a Hobart beta tester. I was parted from that program for delivering HONEST evaluations such as the 1/10 cent it would cost to add thread sealant, preferably locking to new MIG regulators and making them of better brass alloy would be most beneficial to customers 6 months out. I even made that information public on HoFart's weld Board as a matter of equity. Last I looked, it was still posted although now in the archives.

As to your magnificent blue monument to piss poor design employing electronics not yet ready to do the job;
Step 1, commit the part of the door chart relating to metal thickness to memory and ignore the rest.

Step 2, Also forget all the digital display only relevent information supposedly representing inches of wire per minute and or voltage you ever read. That crap is for college dulled idiot QC people sitting in a glassed in room overlooking the production floor with opera glasses.

When you set up a MIG machine you dial in or flip the current switch for the thickness. Then you pick a point about midrange of suggested wire speed and pull the trigger. See what you got and adjust speed accordingly. When it's right the arc will sound like bacon frying.
Bear in mind you can and will considerably change voltage by the amount of stickout so maintain attention to that parameter.

IF you have access to a scope, slap it on the machine and see how FILTHY the DC is. Given ITW standards of accepted parts, your capacitors could be crapping out at this stage of life. Fortunately good capacitors are available on secondary markets for cheap money.
IF you know how to use a meter, do a check of input voltage to the transformer and see if it is jumping around.
At least you haven't got lead free solder to contend with on that machine.

Also pay attention to your liner. That 15 foot liner ITW puts out only lives half the time the old MM-35 and MM-200 Genuine Miller liners lasted.

It'll weld, just not like an MM-200 will.

I'm in love with 252. I was made to believe the digital readouts were what separated the machines. I always begin with the door chart, then tweak from there. I'll warn you that as I learned from another welder, the needle sometimes is wrong.

Willie

You have Mark IV version, mine is just a Mark II. The 250x has digital readouts and only dials for speed and voltage . And it's the tweaking those two that I'm trying to understand the effects on the weld.

As a maintenance millwright I shied away from electronics, it was much easier and more satisfying to make Sparky work.

Franz@ check out AvE vids on you tube.

"maintenance millwright" I know that tune. Guy who gets paid for walking around with the grease gun and eyeballing rollers & bearings right? May occasionally go get coffee for the gang or may even set up a coffee machine in the gang box.

The sad reality is the 250 might have been a good machine design IF it had been built by a welding machine manufacturer. Unfortunately the electronics weren't up to the job ITW Idiots thought they could do, and ITW bargain basement components sourced from low priced vendors did it in before the contraption was built. If only Neverlast had been around back then.

Real simple, ignore the labels on the pots and figure out which one controls wire speed. Think of that as fine tune.
Use the other one to set your range for thickness of weldment.

Some day I'd love to pop the hoods on a 250 and a 252 side by side and see what obvious changes were made to the innards.

BTW, it'c ©, not @. It annoys me when people get us confused.
No idea what you're referencing with regard to AvE videos.

Downwindtracker2 wrote:You have Mark IV version, mine is just a Mark II. The 250x has digital readouts and only dials for speed and voltage . And it's the tweaking those two that I'm trying to understand the effects on the weld.

Wire feed speed is the amperage and controls penetration.

Voltage controls the bead height and width. More volts increases the width and flattens the bead.

Less volts narrows the bead and makes it taller.

Starting with the wire feed speed they give you, adjust volts to taste.

Once it runs right, if it penetrates too much, reduce wire feed speed a little. Then adjust volts to make it run right again if needed.

If not enough penetration, increase wire feed speed - and volts too if needed.

Note: my mm210 mig machine says the door chart is for 230 volts AC input. Since I have 247 volts at my plug, I end up turning down the wire feed speed slightly.

Think fire hose. More pressure is more voltage. MIG machines modulate to keep voltage constant. Wire speed controls amperage. Within the range of fine tuning more wire speed makes more heat. Use a chart to begin voltage, and wire feed rate, then tweak a bit to control. If you feel wire stubbing, turn down feed, or increase voltage.

Thanks, I'll have to think about those things as I blunder along.

On the first two complaints, they have installed a switch for that diode, and I don't do car bodies. I can live with the ESAB type arc, I don't know any different. On the changes I think they replaced two small caps with one big one in the later models. There were different types of caps, but I didn't pay much attention.

Franz@ you'll all together too serious, you need a dose of Canuck humour. AvE does funny tool reviews.

Maybe in your plant, that's what millwrights do. But in our plant, as millwrights ,we fixed engineers' and operators' screw ups. Between those two groups, we kept busy. And when our parts came back from the jobbers, we had to make the machinist's mistakes fit, as well. I think there was a kick back involved there. It's more pleasant making the mistakes in the first place, then fixing other peoples.

I've been retired now for almost four years.

Back in 67 in the beer foundry I was buds with the millwright & the lead plumber. Trades worked together insuring we all walked out every day.

The foundry had 3 drill presses a couple welders and a collection of plugged up files along with some pipe wrenches and a couple chain hoists that were born before the first world war. CO, Buster and I had no problem with the foremen not knowing or caring where we were cause we always came up with new toys and new tools to do things with. Of course such things were possible before OSHA. In an era where pounding on something with a sledge to get a coupling apart, we built a 40# slide hammer and a 30 ton hydraulic puller to make our lives easy. We even had a steel runnered rocking sled for getting motors and pumps where they had to go.
Also had one foreman who never knew where his crews were, no lock out tag out, and Krauts who saw no need to throw timbers into gear trains for safety.

You ain't lived till you spent a year in a beer foundry. Stupid gets carried to whole new levels by in house engineering, and you get to see forklift jumping along with men wedged into chain conveyors who can and do stop a 50 horse drive. Beer barrel bowling is also fun when the forklift stops and the barrels don't. It's a survival training center.

You survive the beer foundry moving up the food chain is easy.

Are you sure you're pouring proper "Hydro" into that machine? Some of that Canadian "Hydro" ain't fully up to specs.

When you mention hydraulic puller, it reminds me of the time we shot a 20mm redi-rod through the roof. We were pulling a block off one of the big wire drawing machines. I guess it had been on there since new. I had made a strongback from 6" channel with 1" key stock welded between for spacer and we tried our 20t ram ,no go . So we rented a 50t ram. The roof was only thin aluminum . Next strongback I made was from 2" solid square hot rolled in an overlapping H pattern and I picked up four bolt holes. That moved it. In a pulp mill we used a 100t and a couple of rosebuds on one coupling.