- Joined
- Nov 10, 2013
- Messages
- 837
I've had a Lincoln Square Wave 175 for many years and it has performed very well on steel but lately I've had the urge and some necessity to weld more aluminum. I'm a self taught welder (if you don't count hundreds of hours of Youtube) and through the magic of video research decided on an Everlast 250EX. I called Everlast direct and ordered the welder and water cooler on April 25th and the welder arrived by itself on May 3rd. I called Everlast's shipping dept and was told that the coolers had just arrived and were shipping out on the 4th.
In the meantime I needed a cart for the new welder and while it would've been nice to be able to use the Everlast I couldn't run it without the cooler and did the task with the Lincoln. The cooler finally arrived on May 9th.
Here's a pic of the partially complete cart:
I had the day off work (May 9th) and spent the first hour playing around with settings and used up the last of my Argon. I found a problem with the HF start working erratically and initially thought that there was a bad switch in the foot pedal. It didn't take long to figure out that I could scratch start the arc so I put a call in to Everlast tech support. Long story short, I played phone tag until I finally made contact about 6pm eastern time. Mark gave me a list of a couple of tests to run and also mentioned that the spark gap inside the welder may have gotten knocked out of position from handling.
This morning I removed the back cover and the screws from each side to open the welder up and check the gap. Mark said the gap between the carbons should be between .029" and .035", Mine was set at .015". When I put a wrench on the locknut to loosen the adjusting screw I found that both it and the screw were loose. (even though they were covered with anti-tamper schmoo). After reassembly the HF start was working fine and I got to play for a couple more hours running beads on aluminum and steel trying to get a feel for the settings. There is a huge difference between operating the old Lincoln transformer machine and the new Everlast inverter machine.
I still need to mount tubes to hold filler metals on the left side of the cart someday soon.
In the meantime I needed a cart for the new welder and while it would've been nice to be able to use the Everlast I couldn't run it without the cooler and did the task with the Lincoln. The cooler finally arrived on May 9th.
Here's a pic of the partially complete cart:
I had the day off work (May 9th) and spent the first hour playing around with settings and used up the last of my Argon. I found a problem with the HF start working erratically and initially thought that there was a bad switch in the foot pedal. It didn't take long to figure out that I could scratch start the arc so I put a call in to Everlast tech support. Long story short, I played phone tag until I finally made contact about 6pm eastern time. Mark gave me a list of a couple of tests to run and also mentioned that the spark gap inside the welder may have gotten knocked out of position from handling.
This morning I removed the back cover and the screws from each side to open the welder up and check the gap. Mark said the gap between the carbons should be between .029" and .035", Mine was set at .015". When I put a wrench on the locknut to loosen the adjusting screw I found that both it and the screw were loose. (even though they were covered with anti-tamper schmoo). After reassembly the HF start was working fine and I got to play for a couple more hours running beads on aluminum and steel trying to get a feel for the settings. There is a huge difference between operating the old Lincoln transformer machine and the new Everlast inverter machine.
I still need to mount tubes to hold filler metals on the left side of the cart someday soon.