Decided to make a Tungsten Grinder for myself.

[zeppelin builder]

best ones are enclosed filled with gylcol mix,works on the diamond wheel perimiter and tip is moved closer to center of spindle or away to alter angle , i get good results with a grinder but dont get caught on a big job doing it, elf n safety will nail you

 

[Hood]

Offset grind.
If I work on the princilpe that the pin, chuck end, is concentric and the offset with the tungsten is caused by it not clamping with the tungsten held centrally, would different sized collets for the other end to centralise the tungsten make the grind better?

It is a cheapo, doesn't have a collet, just the ends are split.

 

[Hood]

Had a rake through the drawer that I keep the Tap and Die holders in as I knew I had a couple of pin vices there. I had bought them when I did a tiny coil on the CNC coil winder I made (pic below of coil,core 0.5mm dia, wire 0.1mm dia, 20mm long and 6000turns)
Anyway I knew they had some runout but knew it was nothing as bad as the one I used the last day so thought I would give them a try. That is when I found a small box with Eclipse on it and remembered it had been amongst the tools I got when my Grandad died. Opened it up and there was a nice we pin vice with 3 collets, it wasn't through hole so I threw it in the lathe and bored it out. Just tried it on the grinder and it is a vast improvement and that is with me having to stick the tungsten way out because the hole in the arm is smaller than the collet nut, I just ran it with the bevel of the nose in the hole so not ideal but at least I know now it will work.

Pic of the shallow angle ground.

Then I did a steeper angle to gove a two stage point angle.

 

[rory1]

Cracking job hood

 

[zeppelin builder]

i take it the compound one is for ac on an inverter
on the old machines it ended up like a ball no matter how you ground it

 

[ukracer]

i take it the compound one is for ac on an inverter

Interestingly comment...

 

[Hood]

Cracking job hood

It is looking promising so far.

i take it the compound one is for ac on an inverter
on the old machines it ended up like a ball no matter how you ground it

You can control the amount of balling with the AC balance, not sure if really old machines had such a feature or not but I know my TecArc 251 AC'DC transformer machine did.
I think it used to be the norm to have a blunt tungsten for AC welding and to let it ball but nowadays the consensus seems to be to grind to a point and if the balance is right the balling will be small and at the end of the taper.

Having said that I am just self taught and often talk from my erse.

 

[zeppelin builder]

aye the dinosaur machines only had adjustable hf for stabilising the arc/cleaning if you gave it the berries the tungsten would ball instantly had to match the tungsten to the amperage carefully
of course the inverters are different and a bit weird at first when you weld alu and the tip keeps its profile, tend to spend 10 minutes dialing it in to do a five minute weld then switch it off and lose the setting ,if you stash it in the memory thats fine but we never do

 

[Hood]

The Parweld I have doesn't have a job store but it keeps the previous settings when switched off, really it is pretty quick to set up anyway. The Boatyard got a trial of a Sifweld and they asked me to show them how to use it as the welder there had never done Tig and the guy that brought it to demo didn't have a clue It was horrible to set up, just a single dial and it stepped through as you turned, you then had to press to enter the setting it was at then turn dial to get the value you wanted then press again to accept then repeat again for the next setting, what made it even worse was there was a lag and often you thought you hadn't pressed the dial properly so pressed again which exited the setting and you had to go back. The screen was also poor, not much contrast and was quite hard to see which setting you were actually on. It did have a job store, not sure how many as I got that annoyed with it I never looked that far into the menu.

 

[Hood]

Used the tungsten grinder today for the first time and it did a reasonable job