Quote Originally Posted by mattcreswell View Post
I've welded before, but only MIG & stick. Not a lot of experience but I can get by. I had issues such as described here. Fortunately I have a friend if mine who came over & helped me work through it. I bought my 180 from a guy who had it sitting up for a number of years in his wood shop. I took the torch a parts & cleaned it thoroughly. Only problem was I reassembled it like a moron by not reading up. I also didn't clean the inside of the cup either. Once that was all cleaned, reassembled properly & the ground buffed clean, everything worked just fine both AC & DC. Also a new electrode that's ground properly I've found helps a lot too!
Thanks matt, I have had this machine for a year now, a farmer had it first and I cleaned it real well and it has worked great on DC, the cups I used were all new and nice and clean and I was able to weld DC in text book form so I think the torch is good to go... I'm going to be able to sleep tonight with the idea that I need zinc blended electrodes and just to take the grounding contamination out of the equation I'm trying to light up with a 1/16 that should just ball up nicely ... No need to put a point on it

trying to upload a pic because everyone likes to see pictures