Blinding Arc

[Cippee]

I have seen this happen mig welding aluminum. Some pieces of the wire blow off and they burn amazingly bright. The first time it happened I was like what the hell is this light out the corner of my eye. When I looked it was a small piece of aluminum burring on the ground. It's cool it burn so bright white.

[srp]

Oh boy,

After thinking a while, it just did not make any sense how the gas flow could make one flash really bright. I raised and lowered the flow 4 times and every time I raised the flow, it would not flash. Also it would not do it on any pulse speed.

I went to the weld shop and got a gas lens and hooked it up, with a gas lens it would flash constantly at any flow or pulse. I got into the habit of looking down to test and not look right at the arc, I looked down and seen my shoe was untied. I thought that's it, the helmet. So I pulled a brand new one out of the box and it did the same thing. These cheap helmets will work on AC and DC on the Syncrowave and will work on the older 250EX AC and DC but it will not work on the new 250EX on DC all all.

So now I will buy my first ever good helmet. Its crazy because it cycles so fast, you can not tell its the helmet.

[jakeru]

As a workaround to not having a top o-the line low amp TIG welding helmet, whenever welding in DC mode, just flip the pulser on.

It doesn't seem to matter very much what pulsing frequency you use, and you don't even need to run a very "severe" pulse setting. Just having some bit of pulsing in there seems to help trigger the auto-darkening helmets, IME.