An inspection BW is fault finding. It’s not pulling off the covers and removing the gremlins from it that are eating your components.
It’s getting out the meter and tracing the fault back to a specific component(s) causing the fault. It’s not a 5 mins job and an engineer isn’t going to quote you 30-50 notes to do it. It might come back that it’s a 5 min job to find it and they might be generous with you but it’s unlikely.
A welding service engineer my company uses is £50 per hour + Travel + VAT. 1 Hour Minimum Charge.
If they pull the covers off, have to clean everything first, start from the very beginning as its a Chinese machine with no circuit diagrams or authorised service manual, that's going to be two hours at least. Then chuck a board or some components in, you are into hundreds.
I've just looked online, and can't even see Cobel tig machines being sold anymore, what I can see is a load of cheapo looking boards on ebay.
Chuck it on ebay, get £100 for it and buy a decent used machine like a parweld or thermal arc.
These generic chinese machines have usual suspects when fault finding,trust me i know.
whats more,they are designed albeit old fashioned with seperate detachable modules.the filter board, the power board,the inverting stage and the rectifying stage all easily isolated.it is literally pulling off a connector. If it was a fronius,or even a newer jasic,it could have 1 board, heavily varnished,with lots of desoldering to isolate and test.
You could swing a cat in the cobel.space to work everywhere.
if it is more than a simple component replacement,every board in this is available to buy to the public,the dearest probably $50.2 to 4 week delivery but for a person who cant afford to spend more on a rarely used toy it is a viable option.
billy bodge in his shed would take a long time to find the problem.somebody who knows what they are doing,maybe an hour.ten minutes isnt unrealistic if lucky.
the covers are off,its very clean.
A 15 year old kemppi that has never been serviced or cleaned,the covers dented and screw heads ruined by somebody who doesnt know the difference between a philips and pozi bit.....and needed for a big order tomorrow?
I respectfully disagree and don’t believe change out of a 50 is viable for a problem diagnose and fault find on an inverter like that from a good service engineer but one thing I think we do share in common and that is I do wish the op the best of luck and I do hope he gets it sorted within his budget whichever route he goes down. My posts are not intended to dis him or his welder but just to offer advice from my own personal experiences, which I can see your doing the same so there is no harm in the disagreement.
Had a bit of a play with it last night to see if if could see any arcing inside anywhere. Nothing obvious jumped out at me. What i did notice was that the only pot that appears to change anything is post gas. The other knobs (pulse settings, duty cycle, peak amps)don't do anything whether there flat out or set to low. Would this be indicative of a problem with the board the pots are mounted to or just because the welder isn't really seeing enough amps for the other functions to work.
Is there a simple way to check that the torch isn't at fault? Could it be damaged and not passing the current properly?
Will try the other suggestions and report back.
Thanks
I would say the pot values don’t work simply because it’s stuck on minimum current. So your pulse settings won’t be able to do anything because that requires going below base current momentarily which it cannot do. Post gas However doesn’t have any link to current settings so it’s able to work.
I think it’s pretty obvious no body here is able to fix your machine over the forum. There just isn’t enough info on them been fixed and they are not supplied or supported by our network of distributors or service centres in the uk. This means they are not frequently worked on and difficult find someone with knowledge or experience on that brand of machine.
You have 4 options the way I see it.
1) take it to a service centre or service engineer to be assessed and possibly fixed.
2) find out where in the world it’s supplied/manufactured and try and see if anyone in that supply chain is technically supporting on it and can help or get you parts.
3) continue to tinker and persevere with it Asking on various forums and hope you find the problem and able to fix it.
4) kiss it goodbye, stick it on eBay as spares/repair and make it somebody else’s problem. If you put on the listing you are willing to post anywhere in the uk and kick it off at 99p no reserve you’ll be pleasantly surprised at what these wallys will pay for such a thing.
I would set it to mma initially to test.less variables in the way.
measure the pot that controls current,even in circuit will do to see the reading steadily rise or fall
Hi I bought a Cobel tig ac/dc 200 for 30 quid in an industrial auction, looks like the same one as you have. Took it home and plugged with a plug in RCD for safety and tried to get some welding current with a tig torch and the fans came on but nothing else.
Took the cover off and I can see straight away that two power leads coming from the switches at the back are hanging free which starts to explain why the fans work but thats it. I've marked the wires that are free in my welder ones with a yellow arrow in a copy of your original picture on the left hand side.
Could somebody help me with where they plug into? Its not obvious where they should go to me.