SipMerlin150
Member
- Messages
- 1,021
- Location
- Manchester, UK
Got bored one night and as I tend to dabble with electronics as a bit of fun, thought i would combine the love of welding and that together, and learn stuff on the way.
What i have learned:
Inverter welders are so complex, something that ends up being a simple repair is often missed despite checking components over many times.
You can literally fall down a rabbit hole - i know have an oscilloscope and a huge box of parts from IC's to transformers for future endeavours
Lead free solder and pcb lacquer sucks to work with
Replacement boards that look identical with the same component layouts and components are not the same.
Finally if something has blown up on the board, you can guarantee other parts have also left the chat
Mosfets do go bang very, very loud
Okay, i bought an old crusty parweld dual voltage welder for £14, as 'not welding' i found the top board to have a blown up 'Top223yn' switch mode power supply IC had smoked and fragged. No 24v power, but 325V present. Replaced the part still no life after giving everything a check over. Even tried supplying 24v externally and the board came to life but no welding output. Many hours and trying a generic chinese board that turned the welder into an arc gouger with 120v OCV, i went back to the original board. No obtainable diagrams at component levels available not even from parweld. Any how i noticed the 24v pulse transformer had a 0.5ohm primary while the chinese board one has 3.2 ohms.. hmmm well i soldered it into the old board and voila! Its working again.
I must of spent around 20 hours going over everything from the power in, the bridge rectifiers, the capacitors, cross referencing, google searches for specs/pinouts etc. , but i enjoyed it and in the end its working. I love a good victory!
What i have learned:
Inverter welders are so complex, something that ends up being a simple repair is often missed despite checking components over many times.
You can literally fall down a rabbit hole - i know have an oscilloscope and a huge box of parts from IC's to transformers for future endeavours
Lead free solder and pcb lacquer sucks to work with
Replacement boards that look identical with the same component layouts and components are not the same.
Finally if something has blown up on the board, you can guarantee other parts have also left the chat
Mosfets do go bang very, very loud
Okay, i bought an old crusty parweld dual voltage welder for £14, as 'not welding' i found the top board to have a blown up 'Top223yn' switch mode power supply IC had smoked and fragged. No 24v power, but 325V present. Replaced the part still no life after giving everything a check over. Even tried supplying 24v externally and the board came to life but no welding output. Many hours and trying a generic chinese board that turned the welder into an arc gouger with 120v OCV, i went back to the original board. No obtainable diagrams at component levels available not even from parweld. Any how i noticed the 24v pulse transformer had a 0.5ohm primary while the chinese board one has 3.2 ohms.. hmmm well i soldered it into the old board and voila! Its working again.
I must of spent around 20 hours going over everything from the power in, the bridge rectifiers, the capacitors, cross referencing, google searches for specs/pinouts etc. , but i enjoyed it and in the end its working. I love a good victory!
