Hey all,

My Miller 252 is misbehaving.  The wire regularly jumps the rolls right before feeding into the whip.  I wind up with a tangled mess of wire at the rolls and I've been wasting a lot of dual shield every time I have to re-feed.  I can't figure out why it jumps the track.  The line seems to be aligned and the gap is tight.  The liner is pretty new. 

If I have the least bit of twist or bend in the whip it will usually cause this to happen.   Doe the whip and gun need to be replaced periodically? 

-Adair

What size wire are you using?  Rolls usually have a size range where they are optimum.

.045 rolls for .045 wire.  Could the rolls be worn out?  They've only been through three spools of dual shield. 

-Adair

1st thing I'd do is pull the liner and look at it. It doesn't take much to kink a liner. I used to have that problem pretty frequently where I used to work. The day shift guys used to jam my machine into a corner to give themselves more room. Almost every time they did this, they either jammed the gun into the wall or wrapped the gun around the machine so tight that the messed up the liner.

If you pull the liner out it should lay nice and straight. A kink is pretty easy to spot. If it looks kinked, replace the liner.

Check for some tension on the spool (the knob in the center of wire roll) you should have a little bit of tension on the roll or it will freewheel and cause a birdsnest

Also you want to have just enough tension on the drive rolls to feed the wire, too much drive roll tension will flatten the wire and cause it to jam up in the liner this is a common problem with innershield wire or dualshield in you case. Look at the wire feed tube there is a little part that guides the wire into the gun assembly inside the machine - you want to check this for wear and alingment

Miller also has a forum that may have more info for you.

 

is the dual shield wire .045 ?  I thought that wire is bigger ?? in size cause of flux core

Steves Welding

IronWolf,  the dual shield is indeed .045. 

I found an old liner that I had changed out but decided not to throw away.  I swapped them out and adjusted the alignment as best as I've learned.  The welder worked flawlessly.  I can't see that the old liner has a kink in it,  but I'm going to bet that the little nub that sticks out towards the rolls was misaligned during one of the pile ups and took a set. 

Thanks all for the input.  Happy to have a better understanding of how to balance this out.  I bet it all started by too much pressure with the rolls. 

-Adair

The way that I was taught to tension the drive rolls is to hold the wire as it comes out of the gun and adjust the pressure so there is just enough to make the wire kink back. As the wire comes out it will bend back. This works best for me

Clinton,  That is a great tip.  I looked at some of the scraps of wire from before I replaced the liner and the dualshield was really compressed and scarred with teeth marks from the rolls.  I'm sure I had too much pressure to correct for a friction problem in the liner. 

-Adair

This is a common problen with innershield wire, we use .045 NR 212 wire at work and every time I grab a machine that someone else was using I have to check the drive roll tension. It is often cranked all the way down and I wonder how they got anything done.

I had one guy that awlays had a problem with the wire, one day he decided that the drive rolls needed oil on them- what a mess.