i have a grounding issue and i was wondering what others are using for a grounding clamp on pipe? my clamp is pretty flat, so it works great for welding on the table, or on sheet metal on the car, but trying to piece together my downpipe, the clamp doesn't fully contour to the pipe and causes the welder to arc off like a TIG, so the wire doesn't even hit the material and sort of ***** up at the tip of my MIG. any help would be appreciated

 

Buy/fab a clamp that attaches to the pipe tightly and has a nice big plat tab coming off of it, and attach the grounding clamp to that.

 

Any of the pro's care to chime in? Trying to do all of my finish welding this weekend

 

We run a Millermatic 251 mig for general exhaust work. We just clamp directly to the exhaust with the supplied ground clamp. Nothing special. No arc wander.

 

can you post a pic of said clamp? i am using the one that came with my lincoln and it doesn't appear to have much of a contact point

 

I would remove the clamp u have. And use a vise grip with rounded jaws big enough to go over 3". Weld a bolt to the vise grip and connect ur ground with that its.
It's what we use at our shop..works great.
Hope that helps.

 

Some people recommend taking a foot or so of copper welding cable, stripping it to bare wire, and wrapping the bare wire around the pipe several times, then clamping the ground to the ends of the cable. That will give you a substantial increase in contact area...

 

I always use a standard clamp on my mig and never had an issue.

 

well, after many years, i finally bought a table vise. i went ahead and snugged the pipe into the vise and put the ground on my vise handle, made some beautiful welds...but i did see that copper wire trick on weldingtricksandtips.com, so i may use that in the instances that i can't use my new vise