Impurities in the metal?

[rsallen]

Had to go look.
It has an Arc One branding.
Got it about 3 years ago nice large view screen, never had any problems with it.
AND it's a pretty metallic red!

 

[Tractor Seabee]

Many years ago I was working as a pipe fitter welder for a cheap contractor that bought Italian made pipe at half the price of domestic made. During both flame cutting and welding we would hit spots that literally blew up in our face due to impurities in the metal. It was welded seam pipe and on one job we had 500' of 4" pipe where the seams literally opened up at 200# water pressure. He tried to blame us for poor welding when we spent more time repairing leaks at those impurity spots than we did doing the job to begin with. He never would admit he made a mistake but he never bought that pipe again. Sometimes you get a bad batch of metal from the foundries I am sure.

Ron

 

[Arc weld]

I worked at a tank shop that had a bunch of laminated plate come in for a big job. Needless to say, it didn't cut very nice with a torch and I think they sent it back.

 

[haveissues]

I vote for helmet as well. My old hood would always flash me on low amp tig so I bought a miller with x mode. Works much better.

 

[Shield Arc]

I worked at a tank shop that had a bunch of laminated plate come in for a big job. Needless to say, it didn't cut very nice with a torch and I think they sent it back.

I worked in a General Motors assembly plant on a model change over shutdown. I was in the monorail system crew. Several of the beams I cut with a torch had laminated webs. Be cutting along pretty as can be, then get a face full of sparks!

 

[rsallen]

It's not the helmet.
Used it late yesterday afternoon. Worked as designed.

I'm just trying to figure out what was going on.
But if I can't figure out what to do about it (if I ever run into it again) I know I'm going to start throwing something/everything away one piece at a time.

 

[flusher]

Has anyone else here run into this?
Your welding along and everything is going swimmingly, then you run into something in the metal that flashes so bright that you can't see past it even on the darkest helmet settings. It's so bright that by the time you feel your way through it you're seeing dots before your eyes.
I've run into it once before but once I got past it things were fine again. Today though I just finished welding a new flex section on to an exhaust manifold and I swear half the welding was like that so **** bright you can't see past it then back to normal for half an inch then back to flashing back bright and so on and so on till I finished.
Took fifteen or twenty minutes before I could see clearly again.

What am I running into? Any ideas?

Haven't run into that yet. Last week I was welding an engine block--grey cast iron with Ni-99 rod and noticed that the arc was a lot brighter than when I used stainless steel filler rod (Super Missile rod) on that block. Had to change from 9.5 to 10.5 on the auto darkening helmet.

 

[Mark @ Everlast]

The only common thing that will make a brighter flash that I can think of if you are welding metal that has been galvanized.

 

[rsallen]

The manifold was stainless.
And the replacement flex section was from China so no telling what was in it.

But honestly it was flashing so bright I couldn't even tell which piece was causing the problem.

Any ways I don't think it was the helmet. Couple days ago I put together a small job I've had laying about using some 1/4 inch stock.
Helmet worked as designed.