The next time you start a RF Welding project, think to yourself, " What have I told my buddy helping me about Welding Safety?" Equipment Gone Bad: Note that some equipment failures can be just "a pain", but others might be a safety problem. Try to keep your equipment clean & working right: 1) If your arc welder overheats too much it could either be a "goner", or even cause it to start smoking internally. Pay attention to "duty cycle", especially if your machine has no cooling fan or a warning mechanism: a warning light or an automatic breaker. I was welding along at home & noticed that the rod was sticking a lot to the work-piece. And I noticed that it SOUNDED different suddenly. I soon realized that my cooling fan had died. I replaced it, & it's been working fine for years now. 2) Can't see what you're doing very well? Check your lenses & clean them on both sides (use your leather glove). 3) The circuit breaker kicking off? Maybe you need to go to a bigger breaker. Plus you might have to use a smaller rod & make more "passes". 4) Is your helmet lens getting messed up from hot sparks? Add a protective cover lens (they are cheaper than your main lens). 5) Is the torch doing excessive splattering? You may be getting the tip too close to the puddle, or the cut. Or you might just need to use tip cleaners (or have both problems). 6) Is your torch not cutting very well? If you have the smaller (& cheaper) single stage gauges, you might try cranking up the cutting pressure again. This was going on for my single stage outfit, & I just assumed I was real low on acetylene. But when I shut off the tanks later, I saw that the O2 cutting pressure reading was still at 20 PSI. So I was only using 20 PSI to cut instead of 40! I pulled the gauge's needle off & re-set it. It was good to go again.
