Hi,

I just bought a lincoln 225 AC stick welder with a 50' extension chord for 75$, very happy! I can finally finish my project. It looks 10-20 maybe 30 years old but still works good exept for one problem. I tried it before buying and found that it was hard to start the weld, as in the stick would not ''light up'' (sorry for the lack of better english term) easily. It would not stick though. But once it started it went fine. I have noticed my ground clamp is in very poor condition so I will be repairing that, but here is my question: The ground cable is about 20' long and the handle cable about 25' long. How does this affect my welders performance? Would reducing the length of either the ground or handle cable by about half have any positive affect on my welder and if so in what way? Any other tricks to make it work like new and have it be easy to start?

Thanks.

 

Having different length work and electrode cables don't really matter. But with AC, you are going to want to have them the same gauge. Some times a work cable is shorter if you have a bigger table and it's clamped to the edge, and the electrode cable is longer so you can maneuver around the table.

 

Thanks gustav! Yesterday I fixed the ground cable and did a lot of welding to get used to it, it works very well, I am very pleased. I ended up shortening the ground and power cable about 3' just to start over with clean and undamaged wires. However I noticed that the ground cable is smaller than the power cable. I think the ground is 0 guage and the power cable is one size bigger, is that a big problem? Seems to work very well though.

 

AC stick welders (im guessing its a transformer type) are by default harder to start, what kind of electrodes are you using? if it's not rutile, than buy some it will help you a bit

 

The kectrodes I think is 6011, I'll have to check next time. Since the ground clamp has been properly fixed it is very easy to start, no problem at all.