Wednesday, March 07, 2007

Welder Back

I got on to some welding yesterday and forgot to connect up the water to the water cooled TIG torch. So today I had to mend the little melted sausage. It had broken of its own accord a while ago with the hose at the torch end succumbing to age causing a rather alarming trickle of water to spring up while I was welding, and water is not something you want about you with the electrons in transit hither and thither. Anyway, that episode meant that I had a good idea of what I was up against. I managed to get both ends off and reconnected in a couple of hours before lunch and then get the water hooked up and start welding again in the afternoon.
When I mended it before, I was surprised to find the torch wire running through the hose that carries the water, so the whole length of wire and the torch are cooled by the water. The metal in the wire must be something pretty nifty. My welder isn't designed to take a water cooled torch, so it is a bit Heath Robinson, but it means I can weld a lot longer at one stretch without the torch getting too hot to hold.
The welder was a bargain from a company called DAYOK in Taiwan, it has TIG, stick and Plasma cutting facility. It had joggled one of its wire connectors loose when it arrived, which made me think I might have invested in a bit of a squib, but the company encouraged me to persevere and on unscrewing the cover I found I just had to plug the little sucker back in and it all worked fine.
Charcoal on cartridge 38x53cm