Welding Tips and Tricks

Hello all, I'm fairly new to the forum and have been really grateful for the wealth of knowledge! In my work I do a lot of stainless and aluminum welding building and maintaining equipment for a bakery. Mostly tig welding but some mig and stick. Anyway, we recently got a new OTC Daihen Welbee P400 welder in the shop. It's a multiprocess machine, but we are using it primarily for stainless solid wire and flux cored welding. Does anyone have any experience with these machines? There is very little info on them and the manual leaves a lot to be desired. It seems to be a very well built and fully featured machine, but very complicated to set up. I'm more familaiar(and comfortable) with just voltage and wire speed. But this machine has more settings than I even know what to do with. I'd like to get ahead of the learning curve and maximize its capabilities. I'd really appreciate any info or advice from anyone with experience on these machines. Thanks.

Fordseniormastertech wrote:Hello all, I'm fairly new to the forum and have been really grateful for the wealth of knowledge! In my work I do a lot of stainless and aluminum welding building and maintaining equipment for a bakery. Mostly tig welding but some mig and stick. Anyway, we recently got a new OTC Daihen Welbee P400 welder in the shop. It's a multiprocess machine, but we are using it primarily for stainless solid wire and flux cored welding. Does anyone have any experience with these machines? There is very little info on them and the manual leaves a lot to be desired. It seems to be a very well built and fully featured machine, but very complicated to set up. I'm more familaiar(and comfortable) with just voltage and wire speed. But this machine has more settings than I even know what to do with. I'd like to get ahead of the learning curve and maximize its capabilities. I'd really appreciate any info or advice from anyone with experience on these machines. Thanks.

post some clear pics of the front panel, betcha I can figure it out.

Here are some pictures of the machine, the front panel, and a weld that I made with it yesterday. It seems to weld really well. The setup and features are just vastly different than anything else I've used. It seems to run the best if you set amperage and amperage only based on material thickness and joint type. You can control voltage and wire speed independantly but I haven't had much luck making that run very well. It's working really well for us so far, just looking for any info to make it run better and info on how to use all of the extra features.

It looks to be a fully synergic machine, so it's already doing it's thing. I think you've convinced yourself that there is something hidden in there, but it's all there laid out from what I can tell. You select the torch trigger type, wire diameter, wire alloy, shielding gas type, waveform if any; "travel speed" I'm sure about that, as I'm sure it references some other change in operation--you'd be able to tell us more than we could tell you. Surely you've played around with ALL the buttons to see what they do, right? I know I wouldn't be able to resist! Remember, extra features don't always apply to all scenarios. I doubt you will get a whole lot more than what you are already getting; It's already on the correct gas type for pulsed welding, and surely you've selected the right wire diameter and filler metal type?

Yes, I have played with different features and settings to some degree. So far only on stainless though, as that is the majority of what we work with. And it has been working really well so far. I'm curious to see how it does on aluminum when the chance comes. Thanks for the input though. Do you know of anyone else using this make of welder? This is the first one I've ever seen.

Those machines are very high quality high end machines. They are more common in Europe than in North America.

Good to know. Kinda makes sense now. I had never even heard of them before. There is very limited support for them it seems. And even searching the web, there is almost no info on them. All of the videos on YouTube of OTC welders are robotics, not manual. Seems like they are primarily used for robotics.

Yup, I was about to say, they have full networking capabilities and monitoring capabilities, synonymous with what is typically needed for quality-controlled manufacturing type of production lines (IMO).