I am interested to know how many of us have a clarke 160TM, and I suppose how many came from which retailer. I suspect we can outnumber the portamig people...
just waiting for weldequip to come back from xmas leave and i can join your club too....
soon, so close, i can almost smell it.
belated xmas everyone. i worked 12 hours yesterday, but hey.. I got to make forty old people smile, and lost count of the xmas kisses. shame they were all oveer 80 with no teeth..
ive got one too, ashamed to say i got it from machine mart, but tbh my local one isnt too bad the guys have a conversation with you,
Aktough i bought a esab auto darkening helemet from weldequip
So who can be the first post a picture of a 160TM? Machine Mart don't seem to have managed a picture yet so you can beat them to it. And do they have a bottle mount on the back?
farmerboy4 has a pic in his range rover thread. Yes it has a bottle mount, and it'll hold a Y size BOC cylinder, although it does feel a bit wobbly when you move it around.
Anyone else think the earth lead is flimsy/too short??
Plugs are a fudgy area for these things. On the one hand a 13 amp plug seems to be fine, and you'll not blow the fuse. On the other hand any 13 amp plug that's asked to supply anything near 13 amps for any length of time will get tired and start smelling like an electric train set due to arcing at the fuse holder.
My own unofficial recommendations are to go for a good quality 13 amp plug and replace it every year or two. Of course officially my recommendations would be install a 16 amp round blue plug on an appropriately protected circuit.
Proper official way to do it (so far as I understand) is to take a dedicated spur from the consumer unit to your 16 amp blue socket.
The consumer unit would have a 16 amp MCB for that spur (MCB is a circuit breaker - breaks the circuit if too much current is drawn), as that's the limit of the socket.
Normally the consumer unit will have a single RCD (residual current device - it's there to check if current going out is more than current coming back in as that would mean it's shorting to ground and electrocuting someone).
If you were to supply the welder from a 13 amp plug the socket would normally be supplied from a 30 amp ring main. So the fuse in the plug is your protection from high amps, but you'd have the same RCD protection as if you did things the proper way.
One of the troubles with using a dedicated 16amp socket, is when you want to use it else where, but it is no big issue. As you can always get a 13 amp plug a short piece of flexable electric cable and add a trailing 16amp socket to it. This way if need arises you can always plug into a 13amp socket via the adaptive socket and cable
i bought my 160tm read the bit about the no suitability of a 13 amp plug so we ignored it and put one onto it any way (mk) so off we go welding for 5 or 6 weeks doing repairs on my old mercedes and making garden heaters lol using low settings for 1 mm steel with .6mm wire untill i decided to try some 10mm steel butt joints lol
anyway cut long story short whacked up the power and it stopped working .....dum de dum dum duuurrrr..
we took the plug apart expecting to find it melted to death etc nope all fine (this is not what we wanted to see at all hoped the plud was a goner) scratched heads worried a bit pulled out the fuse it was blown fair enough
my eyes are crap so passed it to mate to show him how comprehensively it had destroyed itself and he says bloody hell ya muppet it is only a 5 amp fuse
power been on those settings for 5 or 6 weeks not even drawn 5 amps constantly so i wouldnt worry bout 16 amp for auto use it aint gonna murder 13 amp plugs too regularly
dave