Sip

A friend bought a SIP 177 with no foot pedal.
He then bought a pedal supposedly genuine SIP (from dealer).
He asked me, to have a look at it because he reckoned it was unusable so abrupt & requiring the touch of a fairy with the strength of a Gorilla to push down, not good for a beginner.
When I opened it up it is a joke, it has a 10K standard slide WW lin pot a micro switch 2 lengths of wire one \ brown blue to switch, the other 3 core brown blue green\yellow to pot, (no earth to metal case) with locking plugs, One Heavy spring & tin box, all for £ 130 or there about he was to to say exactly.
The spring is so heavy coupled to short throw of slide pot it is almost like an on off switch.
I would suggest you do not buy a pedal but make something, it cant be worse
Parts Lin pot = say £ 10 switch £2 wire £5 plugs £ 5 each tin box ?
These are retail prices, why would a Co like SIP turn out this poor advert for their product

rtech pedals arent much better,but at least theyre cheap

Foot pedals, as a value for money purchase have always been a sore point!! the one from SIP you describe seems a very bad design too.
P.S. if you want a laugh... SIP originally stood for,,, "Superior industrial Products"

£130 for any kind of pedal is pretty good, EWM ones list at £425 and Lincoln are around the £300 mark. Change the spring, do a bit of fettling to the microswitch so it's less of a hair trigger and crack on.
Most pedal cases aren't earthed by the way as they don't want to create a pathway for HF to use to get back to the set if the pedal shorts out on the bench etc. Suppression capacitors on the trigger and pot wires are common however as is metal screened cable.

Your starter for making your own pedal - nicely made and fitted with a substantial micro switch - just need to add a pot.

Not easy to fit a pot into that kind of pedal Chriso.



Minimal space, not much travel on the pedal and you've got to find a way of actuating a pot in a pedal never designed to have one. A sewing machine pedal would be a better bet.

chriso said:

Your starter for making your own pedal - nicely made and fitted with a substantial micro switch - just need to add a pot.

Click to expand...

We use that style at work (machine reset switches) there's barely enough travel to operate the switch let alone a pot.

They are not difficult to make.

Most TIG pedals pivot in the middle of your foot, so you can rest your weight on them and still control them. That switch shown would make it difficult to maintain a constant setting while balancing on your other foot.

Shenion
Love the simplicity
My design with a fair bit of control was going to use small toothed belt & wheel,
one end of belt attached to back of treadle onto idler wheel (plain) to toothed wheel on pot then to spring which is clamped to belt this then goes to adjuster bolt for tension.
As the SIP also will not let you set max required current was going to put in a cam that restricts pedal movement so allow you to set max pedal travel \ current.
Hell that sounds complicated but it is simples if you draw it.
Jim £ 130+ may be cheap for a product that is usable but for product no.
why would the HF even get to the pedal again poor\cheap design.

Rather than limit the travel, add a second pot to set the maximum. Then you will still have the full travel of the pedal. If you limited the travel to a small range, it would get real sensitive.

pedal

use a sewing machine pedal, lol.......

keeny said:

use a sewing machine pedal, lol.......

Click to expand...

They have a rheostat not a potentiometer. Apparently it's a different matter controlling a motor speed

I bought a sewing machine pedal. It used a stack of carbon balls that the pedal compressed as a speed control.

It was all in a ceramic module.Once that was removed, there was not much room for a potentiometer and the needed hardware.

HF easily gets into pedals, bad or no earth, accidentally depress the pedal with it touching the bench the torch is sat on and HF will go from the end of the tungsten then jump from the bench to the casing of the pedal sometimes if you are unlucky or the pedal is poorly designed.

The way i read latest regs any metal part of a machine should be earthed, & green \yellow used for Earthing only.