Hi all,
I have recently upgraded to a Clarke 151EN welder after having "issues" with my old light duty hobby welder, which I'm starting to believe is actually fine..
To start the ball rolling, my old hobby welder that had limited settings and no wire feed was actually very good and produced some good welds for what it was.. I had a reel of SIP gasless wire in it and when that run out I locally purchased some Super6 Flux cored wire which gave the same good quality welds, I had actually got a couple of rolls of the Super6 Flux cored wire at the time, then I proceeded to use them all up and I needed more so I head to the same place and got a roll, low and behold the welds were awful very black and produced alot of splatter and no penetration, so I returned to the shop and had a chat then managed to find another roll on the shelf with the same batch number as my previously good rolls, however this didn't seem to work either!
That was when I wondered maybe the welder had past its use by date (its over a decade old and was well used. So I purchased a Clarke 151EN NO-Gas as gas bottles aren't convenient for me. This welder came with a 0.45kg (I think) reel of Flux core welding wire, now when I first started up the welder I was getting great results with the basic setup from the book, some test pieces on various thickness and quality steel using different settings and the welds were never bad..
I had just started to weld again and the first few seconds were fine until the wire run out, so I dug out the almost new reel from the old welder (I had it stored in a chest of drawers and the reel looks in new condition still), connected it up and tried the welder out and once again this reel is very very poor at welding..
So I have run into MachineMart and rather than purchasing the small reels I thought I'd treat myself to a 5kg reel of Flux Cored 0.9mm wire, I have fitted it into the welder and its giving almost the same results as the dodgy Super6 wire, I have gone through every setting and different wire feeds, every possible motion pushing/pulling zig-zagging/circles etc etc and its just very poor. Just for a quick test I even swapped the polarity, which yielded the same results.
The welds are not "pooling" they're more like speed bumping, they don't look far off to the second picture down in this forum thread.
http://www.mig-welding.co.uk/forum/threads/flux-cored-wire-problem.40866/
This is what the reel produced that came with the welder.
I haven't a picture of the 5kg reel welds.
Is it a possibility that I actually have gas wire after having read a few forum posts, it seems that items might be incorrectly packaged, mislabelled etc.
Many thanks.
I have recently upgraded to a Clarke 151EN welder after having "issues" with my old light duty hobby welder, which I'm starting to believe is actually fine..
To start the ball rolling, my old hobby welder that had limited settings and no wire feed was actually very good and produced some good welds for what it was.. I had a reel of SIP gasless wire in it and when that run out I locally purchased some Super6 Flux cored wire which gave the same good quality welds, I had actually got a couple of rolls of the Super6 Flux cored wire at the time, then I proceeded to use them all up and I needed more so I head to the same place and got a roll, low and behold the welds were awful very black and produced alot of splatter and no penetration, so I returned to the shop and had a chat then managed to find another roll on the shelf with the same batch number as my previously good rolls, however this didn't seem to work either!
That was when I wondered maybe the welder had past its use by date (its over a decade old and was well used. So I purchased a Clarke 151EN NO-Gas as gas bottles aren't convenient for me. This welder came with a 0.45kg (I think) reel of Flux core welding wire, now when I first started up the welder I was getting great results with the basic setup from the book, some test pieces on various thickness and quality steel using different settings and the welds were never bad..
I had just started to weld again and the first few seconds were fine until the wire run out, so I dug out the almost new reel from the old welder (I had it stored in a chest of drawers and the reel looks in new condition still), connected it up and tried the welder out and once again this reel is very very poor at welding..
So I have run into MachineMart and rather than purchasing the small reels I thought I'd treat myself to a 5kg reel of Flux Cored 0.9mm wire, I have fitted it into the welder and its giving almost the same results as the dodgy Super6 wire, I have gone through every setting and different wire feeds, every possible motion pushing/pulling zig-zagging/circles etc etc and its just very poor. Just for a quick test I even swapped the polarity, which yielded the same results.
The welds are not "pooling" they're more like speed bumping, they don't look far off to the second picture down in this forum thread.
http://www.mig-welding.co.uk/forum/threads/flux-cored-wire-problem.40866/
This is what the reel produced that came with the welder.
I haven't a picture of the 5kg reel welds.
Is it a possibility that I actually have gas wire after having read a few forum posts, it seems that items might be incorrectly packaged, mislabelled etc.
Many thanks.