Hello,
I received a powertig 250ex in the mail this afternoon. I got it hooked it, it took me a while to understand how the flow meter works. When I first started welding I had the argon way too high, to the point where I was getting air in the weld, yucky mess.
When I opened the package, to my disappointment, and lifted the welder out of it's box, I just about dropped the box. It seems at some point the plastic that was holding the handle was damaged pretty badly, in fact most of the back plastic was wrecked. This caused the handle bar to slip from the broken plastic back and, blah blah, it wasn't joyful.
After a while of messing with the knobs, deciding that I'd rather use the foot pedal, I realized that the arc is incredibly loud. I am really surprised as to how loud the arc is. I don't think it's volume has anything to do with arc stability as the arc seems pretty stable to me. It's like someone is inside of my ear, beating on my ear drum at an insanely rapid rate.
An easy solution would be to put in ear plugs (I hate ear plugs), but I'd rather not. I haven't yet figured out how to wear ear muffs with a helmet on, if anyone knows how, I would love to HEAR about it (ba dum tsh). I have a pair of fantastic ear muffs that I have placed some headphone drivers into so I can hear my music while I do things like cut, grind and sand.
I have another question, how do I adjust the arc gaps? Are there even arc gaps? Honestly, I am pretty amazed at how well the arc starts up. 100% of the time, so far, the arc has started up for me without any sort of trouble and even when I've been a bit further away from the metal than I thought I could have been.
But I'd still really like to know.
This part is a bit of a complaint. I am pretty disappointed in some of the designed layout of the welder in general. The power switch is on the back, there are screws on the bottom of the case, I know the thing doesn't weigh a ton but it's still pretty aggravating. When I first got the welder, I went to do what I have done with all the other welders I have ever owned. I was going install the electrical wires that power the welder on terminals in the welder. I learned that this task seems difficult to impossible. I looked inside and saw some sort of white goo all over the terminals along with some other wires coming from them. It looked like a complicated mess, it certainly wasn't engineered to be done the way I planned to do it. I am puzzled as to why it wouldn't be the way the other welders were.