Welding Tips and Tricks

Coiling up lead can actually help fight arc blow.

Poland308 wrote:Coiling up lead can actually help fight arc blow.

Yes. By creating an electromagnet.

If the electromagnet adds to the flux, rather than counteracts it, it can make the arc blow worse. It just depends on which way it's coiled, and on the field that it's adding to (or counteracting).

Main reason I ask about it is, once when I was having weird gremlins with a Sync 250, the Miller tech asked whether the torch lead was coiled on the machine handles, and he said I should always be sure to uncoil any coiled lead, lest the magnetic field do possibly weird things with the circuitry inside... on my engine drive welder, I flake the leads (bunch them up into sine waves, in effect) rather than coil them, to avoid causing arc blow...if the leads are in sine waves rather than coils, the magnetic fields should cancel each other out...