subject: MIG Welding Gun- The Number One Cause Of Swearing And Cursing When MIG Welding [print this page] MIG Welding Gun- The Number One Cause Of Swearing And Cursing When MIG Welding
A mig welding gun is a very important component on a mig welding machine. It's very important that your mig torch is comfortable and that the wire feeds through smoothly and evenly. Some of the main problems people can have are all related to welding wire feed issues. It is crucial when you are wire feed welding that the wire feeds along the gun very smoothly. Any obstruction or blockage will cause the arc to become erratic and inconsistent. When this occurs it is very hard or next to impossible to keep a constant arc voltage. Your welding arc voltage is a very critical piece of the puzzle in terms of welding spatter reduction.
Usually in most cases the cause of erratically feeding wire in your mig welding gun simply comes down to wear, tear, and dirt. Coming from a country and rural area I have seen a lot of different welding workshops of which I can compare to workshops in the city. A lot of these workshops out in the country quite often don't have a concrete floor. With all the wind out there a lot of this fine dust is picked up and blown throughout the whole workshop, and those places that don't have a sealed floor all their welding equipment gets totally covered in dust.
You can take a look at the wire feeding mechanism where the drive rollers are, and you will see them covered in dirt and metallic particles from grinding and stuff like that. All this rubbish will eventually work its way down the gun cable inside the liner. As the welding wire fees along it's going to pick up these bits of dirt and grinding dust and slowly over time the internal resistance is going to increase. This means that sooner or later the welding wire will start playing up and eventually fail by not feeding through the gun.
So what can you do to fix this problem with your mig welding gun. While the obvious choice is that you have a clean workshop. But what if you can't do this? What if you live in a dust bowl where it's blowing a gale every single day and there's dust flying around everywhere? Well the only real thing you can do is regular maintenance on your welding equipment. This means you're going to have to clean out the liner every so often, which all depends on how much welding you do. Simple things like when it's not being used cover it with a tarp.
Here is a hot tip for your mig welder. Go out and get some of those felt wipers that you can put just behind the drive roles. What these do is wipe off any crud that is attached to the welding wire. You can also use those cheap throw away earplugs. I have seen heaps of machines using this setup with the earplugs. Whether or not they are as good as using the bought felt wipers I'm not really sure, as I do believe that the felt wipers have some added lubricating agents in them. But that brings me to another topic which is about the quality of your welding wire in the first place. I don't have enough time to go through and talk about the quality of MIG welding wire now but you can check out the links at the bottom of this page for more information on a mig welding gun.
