300DX Troubleshooting: help needed

[farmboy weldor]

at my votech/boces school we have a dynasty 300dx tigrunner, today i was goin to start certifications and practice for that on aluminum.

my teacher told me use pure tungsten 1/8". i do this and the tungsten does not ball up, what should i do to make it ball up, i finish a weld without filler, and try to strike and arc again and the arc never gets estabilished, it just kinda jumped all over the aluminum, i checked and the tungsten was not contaminate, but still was not balled up.

Questions: 1. should or can i run pure tungsten for aluminum on an inverter?
2. how do i get the tungsten to ball up?

my teacher and i sat for 2 hours tinkering trying to fix it, and nothin ever seemed to work, ive even takin the owners manual home to try to decifer some of it. could this be something as easy as tungsten choice?

my teacher thought maybe somebody had a program running that would not allow for me to run the welder properly, so i tried and tried and tried to reset the machine to the factory parameters and settings, but never could. i followed up on every piece of help it gave , but still nothin

maybe this is a problem for a miller repair shop, or then again it could just be as simple as tungsten... im not sure

any help is greatly appreciated, id really like to start with aluminum on the dynasty rather than the old lincoln precision tig.

[Laiky]

pure and thoriated are NOT recommended on miller inverters, you should be using Lanthanated 1.5 or 2%, or ceriated. I prefer the lanthanated. Under no circumstances should you be trying to ball tungsten on these machines. For alluminum grind to a point (about 20-30 degrees) then put a small flat on the tip.

[joebass]

Your instructor is wrong! Never use pure on a Dynasty, also one of the advantages of in inverter are a pointed tungsten for AC. If your school doesnt have Lanthanated, or Ceriated use Thoriated sharpened to a point with a .020 flat. After trying out most diferent tungstens, I prefer 2% lanthanated on my 300DX but I used Thoriated the first yera I had it.

[farmboy weldor]

thanks for reinforcing my idea, i told my instructor it isnt good to run pure tungsten on inverters , and he didnt believe me :eek: lol oh well ill try to convince him tomorrow,

and ive been lookin at the manual for a while and figure ill just reset each parameter to the default manually if i have to

thanx for clarifying

[Engloid]

pure and thoriated are NOT recommended on miller inverters, you should be using Lanthanated 1.5 or 2%, or ceriated. I prefer the lanthanated. Under no circumstances should you be trying to ball tungsten on these machines. For alluminum grind to a point (about 20-30 degrees) then put a small flat on the tip.
I don't see why you couldn't weld with balled up tungsten and turn your frequency down to about 60hz....if you wanted to.

That said, if you want a narrower arc, for a fillet weld, higher frequency will do best. If you want a wider bead for other reasons, ball it up and turn down the frequency.

When I was using a 300dx on a job recently, it had a factory sticker on top of it saying to use 2% tungsten.

[Paul Seaman]

Engloid:
Miller does recomend NOT using pure on inverters. The recomendations are Lanthanated and my preferance Ceriated. I use 2% Ceriated pointed or with a .020 flat on the end.

Pure is said to work the machine harder than is necessary, especially when balled! With as much as these machines cost I would never use a pure tungsten. Just because ANDY said not to, I need not another reason!!!

Peace,

[RadMan]

Hmmm


If using a pure tungsten electrode will somehow 'damage' a miller inverter, I'm gunna have to edit my christmas wish list real quick!

[Paul Seaman]

I've welded with the transformer machines and an inverter which I own, and I can tell you for certain the Inverter will do much more than a transformer can. If the only perameter of change required was using some different tungsten then I am perfectly OK with that, this D200DX is AWESOME.

Peace,

[RadMan]

Seaman


My local miller sales rep is 'threatening' to park a dynasty in my shop for a bit.........I can hardly wait.

[Engloid]

Engloid:
Miller does recomend NOT using pure on inverters.
The reccomendation doesn't mean that it's not possible to weld otherwise. If a person likes the old style 60hz/pure tungsten type of welding, it will do fine.
Just because ANDY said not to, I need not another reason!!!
I'm sure Andy would not argue that there's more than one way to make a good weld. If your plans are to take only the advice of one person in the welding field, you will miss out on a huge wealth of information that could be gotten elsewhere.