Old boy new machine

[anch0rman]

Hi y'all,
I'm new here, but long past retiring.
I've been involved in engineering and car repairs all my life.
I'm not a welder by any means but have done lots of heavy stuff on furnaces and steel girders etc.
I have an ancient Clarke 150 TE turbo mig welder Which uses gas. I've never done great welds with it so I tried fluxcore wire. Even that was poor so I guess my technique was bad, until I learned fluxcore wire needs the polarity between electrode (wire) and earth clamp to be reversed. I don't know if that can be done on this old mig welder.
So, I bought a new Parkside inverter fluxcore with 0.9 wire included.
I haven't tried it yet, and I've never used an inverter welder before.
I'd love some pointers as to what to look out for, and how best to use the new machine.
Thanks.

 

[Robotstar5]

Welcome aboard, have a look through the tutorial section

 

[Parm]

Greetings, where about in south Northants are you?

 

[addjunkie]

 

[eddie49]

Hello and welcome to the Forum.

To run gasless fluxcore wire on the Clarke 150TE you would have to reverse the polarity of the torch with respect to the workpiece clamp, making the torch negative rather than the standard positive. That task should be fairly simple, involving the bolted ( or spliced ) connections at the positive output of the bridge rectifier and the output wire from the inductor ( choke ). Some cables may need to be lengthened or replaced. You may want to consider adding panel-mounted Dinse sockets and plugs if you want to make the swap easily reversible.
The difficult part of this swap involves those welders where the torch trigger switch connects to the control board with just a single wire. The second wire from the switch is connected by "borrowing" the heavy welding power cable inside the torch sleeve. There are ways of solving this issue too.

In the meantime, the Lidl/Parkside inverter fluxcore welder is an excellent choice, and it will get you started on gasless welding without needing to modify your Clarke MIG. Basically you just plug it in, switch it on, dial up the metal thickness ( from 0.8mm to 3mm ), and off you go!

Here is a circuit diagram for the Clarke 150TE:

M

Thread 'Clarke 150te wire feed speed problem'

Jun 17, 2012

Hi All,

I'm a first time poster and I'm hoping someone might be kind enough to offer help regarding a recently bought (via ebay) 'spares or repair' 150TE that had a wire feed problem.

Initially the welder did nothing on pressing the trigger but I found a broken connection on the torch and replaced that.

Now, when the trigger is pressed the relay makes and the feed wire motor turns but the speed cannot be adjusted. I have tried adjusting the potentiometer on the PCB but it makes no difference to motor speed. I removed the potentiometer from the PCB and tested it off circuit using...

• Mogmeister
• Replies: 21
• forum: Clarke