Thread: Mig welder tune up.

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Our mig is a Miller 210 that Dan bought probably 5 years ago. We could toss this thing in the dumpster and not be out one cent..............it has been absolutely flawless over those years, and has laid down miles of welds with zero problems. I cannot rave enough about this welder, even a hack like me can get decent results.

However, we started to have a problem with it skipping a little when welding. The wire was not feeding into the puddle right, and I thought I would pass along what we found out so it might help someone else if they encounter this problem.

First off, let me say we have not treated this machine well at all..........it gets ridden hard and put away wet. All we have done for 5 years was put refilled tanks of gas on it and a new spool of wire when needed. We also occasionally changed the electrode tips as needed, but that was it.

The first thing we found is that the wire was not running exactly true in the groove of the two feed rollers. A simple turn of the adjusting screw took care of that. But the biggest thing we did was remove the head where the gas and wire come out and blow compressed air down the wire liner. You should have seen the dirt that blew out of it. It was extremely dirty from grinding dust and contaminants from the wire itself. We also cleaned out the ports where the gas exits into the gun. Finally, we put a new proper .030 electode tip on the gun.

It is like a brand new welder again, and the heat it is putting out is way more than it has in years. The gas flow is also heavier because now we can hear it hissing when you are welding. The welds are so deep that Dan kept commenting it was burning him through his gloves. It has convinced us that once we are done with his car we are going to go through each piece of equipment in the shop, like our bandsaw, and thoroughly clean them and tune them up too.

Just thought this might help someone else out a little.

Don

Good advice don! Most of us definatly never think about proper equipment maintance, and those poor welding machines get overlooked until it breaks, then we decide to do routing maintnance. We also tend to forget those liners do not last forever and eventually get dirt and grooves carved in them, then we cant figure out why we are getting bad welds. Maybe this little reminder will keep all of our machines running alot longer.