Welder Maintenance, What You Need To Know About Welding Machine Maintenance

Keeping Your Welder Properly Maintained For Longer Life

Whether it’s a MIG welder, Stick welder, or even a TIG welder, maintenance is important. From a tech support side of things, neglect is  more often the reason for a welder or plasma cutter failure rather than outright abuse and/or other damage. Ironically it stems from the desire for people to not “void” their warranty by not wanting to open the unit up and be accused of touching anything inside the welder. Every Everlast unit (and most other brands for that matter) are designed to be opened up and give access to cleaning and service by the customer on a routine basis.  We’ve seen numerous failures caused by  heavy accumulations of welding and griding dust, mud, insect nests, moisture and even mud getting into the units. Most of the Everlast welders manuals instruct the customer to remove the covers and gently blow out and clean their units on a regular basis (monthly or quarterly depending upon use). But this information is often overlooked even though it is close to the front of the manuals. Most dust in an welding environment is sucked in by the fan and deposited on the electronics. This dust is extremely high in metallic particles that can build up on circuit boards and create pathways for electrical current to run astray. In some extreme cases, we’ve even found heavy metallic build up on the cooling fan blades leading the unit to vibrate badly and even detonating the fan blade itself due to the imbalance and load placed on the fan running at speed. All this could be avoided if the rear cover and the top cover of the welder is removed on a regular basis and dry compressed air and a bristle brush is used to gently clean away any buildup or particles inside the welder.

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