Oh no! could the end be coming for my beloved Super 160P?

[jakeru]

No reason it couldn't go for very many years, IMO, provided you had the interest in maintaining it as needed. Everlast support has been helpful for supporting my machine (e.g., helping to obtain any needed replacement parts) so I'd recommend trying them first. If you don't want to be without your machine for very long, and are somewhat handy with electronics, you might be well off to diagnose and repair the problem yourself.

I have a 2007 Super200P that's probably at least somewhat similar to your Super160P. The digital current readout on my Super200P seems to have a small circuit board built into the back of it, which appears to connect to the rest of the machine with just four wires (red, black, yellow, and green.) It probably takes an analog signal and drives the LED segments based on it. You can see this small circuit board in the attached photo on mine is covered with hot glue:


If you knew the general specifications for it (e.g., what voltages are supposed to be present on which wires during normal operation of the machine), you might be able to diagnose whether the problem exists in this board using a multimeter, by testing for the presence of expected voltages going to this board.

If I had to just make a wild guess though, I'd guess that black and red wires are the power supply (with black being ground and red being some constant voltage source), and the signal reaches the board across the green and yellow wires (e.g., a voltage that varies based on the machine's welding current).

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If you wanted to revert the cooling fans back to the original "internal" design, I found a photo I took showing the make and model numbers of the fans of my Super200P that might be useful for ya:


I never got the Chinese flowmeter working reliably on mine, and pretty much upgraded it right away to a quality, brass, cfm-reading unit; never looked back. As for a pot going out in the footpedal, those live a pretty hard life, and upgrading to a very high quality replacement will probably go a long way towards making it last much longer.

As far as new machine purchases go, the main feature I think you could add is extra amps, which could be useful if you weld much thick aluminum. (You don't have a Helium mix at your disposal, do you? That's an alternative approach.) I'd say it wouldn't make sense to upgrade unless you are going to probably a full 250 amp unit, and that would also probably mean watercooling. If you upgrade it could still be worth fixing your old mahcine up, either to have as a "back up", or to sell as a well maintained, properly functioning machine.