To buy or not to buy?

[MNellis]

Thanks for the help and the advice.

I stopped by my local welding supply shop and they were very helpful as well. It turns out my torch is missing all the pieces in addition to the conductor cable/tube. After a solid explantion of how the cooling torch works I went back and took another look at how things were set up.

It looks like they had it set up to use a constant flow of water since they were not using the water solenoid. It was odd, it looks like they had the incoming water going through the cable first then the torch head which, as I understand it, is a reverse of the usual recommendation but not necessarily bad.

I bought a bunch of consumables, some stainless/steel/AL rod, an Argon tank and flow valve. All that's left to do now is hook up some water and go to work. It's amazing how much you can spend in consumables to get started. The power source is almost the cheap part.

As you mentioned, I don't want to spend a bunch of money on a water cooler just yet so I'll use my hose and a long drain hose. I don't want this to be the long term solution due to scale and mineral deposits in the torch.

A couple more days and I'll fire it up and start burning up some metal. I think my first project might be to build a rack to hold the Argon tank to cart since there is currently no provesion for one now.


Thanks again.

[fun4now]

sounds like you are off and running. congrats and have fun.

[MNellis]

sounds like you are off and running. congrats and have fun.

Thanks,

The more I thought about what you said the more it made sense. I took my Water Cooled torch back today and exchanged it for a non-water cooled torch. For what I'm currently going to do, the hassle of hooking up the water just doesn't makes sense. In fact, I found some plans on eBay for building a water cooler so maybe I'll give that a try at some point in the future.

Thanks again.

[fun4now]

i would not bother buying cooler plans, too many have made them and are willing to give the info away. do a serch her and the hobart board and you will get more info than you can stand. its realy simple and after reading a few posts about it you will have the idea and then its just a question of deciding what shape you want and or what parts to go with. i got a heater core out of a ford truck for my cooler. its a neat project but i have seen the e-bay plans i think i even have a coppy some one was nice enough to send me a long time ago when i first decided i would like to build on. i'll look around for you to see if i have them.
not trying to cut a e-bay guy out of a sale, heck i should probly list them but for us guys on the sites we need to stick togather and help one another out, isent that the point.