Quote Originally Posted by sportbike View Post
I understand how Pots in them selves operate, I was just wondering how, if (or why) the welder uses both sides of the pot, or if they are even using them as dual sided pots.

If it is just a single ended voltage divider, lots of options exist on how it can be configured. If it is reading both the increasing side and the decreasing side, not so much.

For example, if it is just a single voltage divider, a resistor wired in parallel could be placed on a switch and make a PT185 a sort of high and low level control (0-25k on "high" and 0-13k on "low").
I get ya, now. I don't have a 185, so I can't be sure, but I will poke around in mine and see what I can find. I want to do some more tweaking anyway.
If it's straight resistance like tuning for an RC circuit you could put your parallel resistor between the wiper and one end, if a voltage divider than across both ends. I thought about having the panel control being used like that, but decided it wasn't worth the effort as the machine already has a nice two stage control like you described. I just run it on 120V for the low setting and 240V for the high. Problem solved.