youngnstudly 
Finally welded with the new TIG...kinda
So I managed to get my welder going this morning but I have an issue (or 5). I only ran 2 beads (fusion welds) on some thin wall 1.5" square tubing after tacking some miters together, and every time I light up, the arc gets very erratic for a few seconds before smoothing out. I can taper the current down to nothing and it does so quite nicely, but the start ups are killing me (well, technically the tungsten). I'm not sure if this is an issue or not, but the display reads "004" while the machine is idling and none of the adjustments, knobs, or settings will change the display. I did give it a full throttle "blast" (quickly) and the machine acted as it should. I started off at 6 L/min. on the regulator (straight Argon), the torch is hooked to the (-) terminal, the ground to the (+), there are no shielding gas leaks from what I can tell, post flow is set to 5 seconds, and I have finely pointed 3/32" 2% thoriated tungsten installed. On the second bead, I increased the gas flow to 11 L/min. just to see if I had a lack of shielding gas, and there wasn't really a difference in the arc start.
My second issue is that the old backup helmet I borrowed from my Pops has like a #6 shade in it and I almost blinded myself while trying to see if the welder worked. I remembered my cheap Auto darkening helmet from HF wouldn't work (after reading about the topic on here), and pulsing the pedal manually just made the helmet "flicker" wildly. I need to get a few new lens for the old helmet today before doing more testing. I haven't tried it in stick mode yet since I didn't want to blind myself. My eyes were acting goofy for 10 minutes after that last bead!
Does anyone see anything seemingly obvious that I'm missing here, or does this sound like I have an issue with the machine? Even on the thin wall tubing with a fair gap (the width of two saw blades), I felt in control the entire time even without using filler rod. Like I said, I was moving quickly in order to not go blind! I wanted to make sure I didn't have something wrong (operator error) before contacting Everlast...It's a holiday regardless, so they probably won't get back to me until tomorrow since they are enjoying the day off. BTW, happy New Year to all the Everlast forumians!
