I was welding in a very tight area tonight. I had to use the end cap on the back side of the torch to fit the torch where it needed to be. I could not get the best angle on the torch, therefore I had to back the torch away from the bead so I could get the angle I needed to melt both pieces of metal. At times I am sure I had about a 1/2" gap between the base metal and the electrode, which is actually pretty large for TIG welding.

I was only welding for about 2-3 minutes maximum at 150 amps being the highest pulse setting. So I know I was not exceeding the duty cycle of the welder. Could the gap size I had going on cause the voltage to be too high on the machine putting it into protection?

Once the protection came on, the welder acted like I did not have the ground clamp hooked up. You could see the high freq arc, but it would not touch off. I would wait for a while for the light to go off and it would not. I had to shut the machine down for about 10 seconds, then turn it back on. When I did, the protection light turned red for about 1 second and then went off. Then the machine worked fine again.

The above situation happened a total of 3 times. Then when I moved to the outside of the project and was able to weld like I normally would, the welder never missed a beat. Any input on what is happening?