Welding Tips and Tricks

Worked for a few days helping out. Welder was a very old and was a very wore out old Lincoln Ideal Arc 250 that had no ideal what a Ideal Arc was! It came on the Arc if I'm any judge. This was my first time using Lincoln 5/32 Wearshield® 60 Hard Rod. This is the real world of some shops. On a working welder I tested one of the rods and it did run well at about 160 Amps.

I've found that you really have to lay on the amps to get hardfacing rods to work right for some reason.

I have some 3/16" Stoody 31 that will take every bit of 200A and want more.

http://weldingweb.com/showthread.php?t=178581

The stability & open circuit voltage of the welder influences hard facing rods a fair bit - if your lucky enough to have a voltage control go to at least 70 volts - I tended to use up to 90 volts on the older " Petbow " sets that had separate amps and volts controls - no matter what you run most rods do not run smoothly & most don't like to work out of position - I was always taught to keep amps to the absolute minimum to avoid dilution with the parent metal ( except when buttering the first layer on new material ) 160amps for a 5/32 seems OK - but no 2rods run the same - I would probably be running more like 140 with " Murex " rods. I would think the inverters with adjustable " Dig " would be good for this type of work but never had the chance to try one - it's always outside some place with an engine drive.