Busted 30 lb welding spools

Those look like standard spools used for all kinds of wire. I have bunches of them at the plant. People don't throw stuff like that away because the boss may find a use for them.

I have several long extension cords wound on them, as well as excess air hose.

See if there is an electrical supply place that will give you some, or suggest a customer that buys from them and might let you have some.

An arbor for your lathe might be a simple as a threaded rod with a couple of wood/aluminum hubs for the ends of the spool. I am sure you could come up with a fixture to hold the broken spool and let the wire out to rewind on the new spool.

Watch out for crossed up spots as the wire comes off the original spool. Have to stop the lathe fast, or leave the take up spool rather loose, so it will slip when tension is too great.

Paul

I would either fix the broken one or re-wind it to another. Re-winding, even by hand doesn't take very long. I transfered an almost full 40lb reel of .035 mig wire from a Lincoln style reel to Miller years ago. Used an old washing machine agitator to hold the clumsy metal Lincoln style. My Miller ate the re-spooled wire with gusto! not a single hitch or problem with it and it was far from being a pretty job.

Just try not to contaminate the wire with salt from your hands and such.

I just threw out 3-4 of those style reels last September. Only been lying around for ~20 years or so, finally gave up on keeping them...

Sounds like a job perfectly suited towards a student or a youngster. Re-spooling the wire by hand could be a chore, for use as a punishment or worthy of reward when done.

I've built a bit for my 1/2" drill motor that fits into a series of short pipes, each larger than the last, all drilled for keeper pins. I can use that to spindle a spool from 5/8" up to 4" diameter. Pull the trigger and draw the wire off the old spool onto the new, guiding the wire with the other hand.

A simple stand or clamp to hold the drill vertical, and a spindle for the old spool make it much easier. Try finding a coffee can or some such that will match the diameter of the broken spool and use that (rammed tight to the old spool) to help keep the wire from wrapping around the spindle as the old spool unwinds.

Tin Lizzie

Yes

Yep on all counts... What REALLY sucks is that I gave some almost empty spools away...

Re: stiff wire, I know that I need to remember to never let it loose, or else I will have to deal with a REAL mess...

i

You might consider getting some 10 lb welding wire spools instead of thirty lb welding wire spools. The 10 lb spools are easy to handle and will go on small mig welders ( although the 0.45 wire is probably not usable on a small welder).

Dan

At this point I am desperate to find 10, 30, or 60 lb spools.

i

Be very careful! I've seen 200 lb spools leap out of a set of rollers and go flying through a window. DO NOT use your lathe, it might kill you! We do it all the time due to damages spools but we've been doing it for 132 years. If I were you, I'd scrap it or do it by hand.

If it was an item broken in shipping, why are you messing with it at all? Yes, you, and YOU particularly Iggy, will probably figure out a rescue for this. But it is something that can become kinked or fouled up easily, and then the shipper will deny all claims.

Steve

>

Done perfectly and ideally, it may be salvageable. I would try putting it on a spindle that is oriented vertically, so that the wire can't go anywhere. If one loop has passed under or over another, there is potential for jamming or kinking, and game over. The deeper you go into the spool and find this overlap, the longer your running end is, and the more complicated it is to get straight before proceeding. If it is under power, then it sets the scene for a spectacular failure, and no refund.

Good luck.

Stve

These two spools of Inconel wire cost $1070 each originally (I called to find out). I bought them for $40 each. I do not want to return them.

i

On Dec 30, 5:37=A0pm, Ignoramus7319

Relax. Unless you need to use some of this wire immediately, what is the panic. The wire will not spoil. And if you do need to weld something with this wire, cut off some pieces and TIG it.

If I remember you took a welding class at a community college. Why do you not see if they have some empty spools? Or will save you an empty spool when they get one. I can not see why you would need to get it all on useable spools. One ten lb spool ought to hold you for a while.

I have respooled welding wire from 30 lb spools on to 10 lb spools. Some of the welding wire on 30 lb spools was from Boeing Surplus. It was smaller diameter wire. Anyway it is no big deal. I think I used an AC servo motor and a variac for the slow speed. But a DC motor or a 3 phase motor and a VFD would work just as well.

Dan

True. Sometimes I want to have sometihng right away.

i

Respooling stiff wire can be tricky (forming springs, for example). You'll most likely be better off by making a fixture that will support the full spool, somewhat intact.. such as an axle of allthread with plates and nuts on each side, with a small rubbing block (or similar) to offer a small amount of resistance to turning.. just enough that the full reel won't coast, or cause unnecessary tension.

Any time stiff wire is removed/taken off of a spool, the wire will tend to straighten slightly. Spooling machines have an arrangement of rollers that put a "set" curvature in the wire as it's fed onto the empty spool, which compensates for the straightening that takes place between the spools. This coiling action causes the wire to cling slightly to the empty spool as it fills. Otherwise, when we release the tied end from the spool of welding wire, the entire length of wire would try to unspool/expand.

So you can't expect that the wire will get the proper "set" just from winding it around a spool.. it won't unless it's dead soft wire (like lead solder). The coil set is somewhat permanent, as we can see by feeding a length of wire out of a MIG torch.. it's still curled, just not as tightly as the wire that's still on the spool.

If there are tangles at the beginning of the full spool, it will be easier to just cut those away, and save them as filler for TIG use.

There are basically 2 parameters that need to be considered, monitored/adjusted for a good spooling job.. the coil "set", and tension. If too much tension is applied in the transfer, the wire won't peel of of the new spool properly, due to turns being wedged between other turns, and may even bow the sides of the spool outward. Tension should remain very light, and the proper amount of coil "set" will ensure that the wire clings to the spool as it fills.

On production spooler machines, the coil set is carefully adjusted with a series of small ball bearing posts (~3/4" OD with partial grooves ground into their outer races) arranged so the coil set can be adjusted to a predictable coil size for the empty spool.

A simple example of this is to pull a strip of paper at an extreme angle, over a sharp edge.. the paper ends up being curled. The same applies to other materials, and the harder the material, the less curl will be introduced unless more pressure is applied.. not tension, but pressure. When spooling common coated MIG wire, it's crucial to not remove the protective coating/plating from the wire, so a MIG wire spooler has only rotating smooth surfaces to guide the wire.

In the wire path, just before the empty spool, the wire passes thru a series of 3 fixed points, located relatively closely together. The 3 fixed points should be rollers, so they don't introduce tension. The 3 points act as the sharp corner that the paper was pulled over, but the "corner" becomes the center roller. As the center roller is adjusted slightly into the path of the wire, it creates the coil set.

The amount of coil set is determined by how much the wire is slightly deformed/bent just before it reaches the empty spool. What coil set adjustments on spooling machines accomplish is generating the proper diameter of the coil just before the wire loads on the empty spool by slightly distorting the wire, not by tension.

A simple respooler can be fabricated with a small motor and a couple of axles. The drive mechanism could be a belt or even a friction wheel (applied to the empty spool/axle), from say, a small gearmotor. The drive reduction speed could be low to start with, and as the operator gets comfortable with the feed speed, the drive can be sped up.

Unless one would care to build a fairly complex spooling machine, the operator will be responsible for guiding/laying the turns across the width of the spool.. maintaining a level wrap.

Perhaps rather than unwinding and rewinding the wire, could you make a new spool that you can disassemble and then just transfer the wound coil from the broken spool to to the split spool.

This way the wire can retain the original shape.

Roger Shoaf

If it was ME, I'd mount a pole to a big piece of plywood, then put the spool wire over the pole. This will keep it from spinning out. Find the outside end, and loop by loop, raise them. By doing this, you can pass the whole coil through any bight that the wire may have run through and keep your constant spiral. Take the completed roll that will now be bigger than it was, and duct tape together securely in three places. Mount this on a cylinder or rim, and add some long spokes so, again, it can't hop off the spool. Get the end under control and cut the tapes. Keep a hand around the coil. This will be a two person job. Then have a second person roll the wire up onto a reel. If you have to do this using several reels, you can stop when the reel is full, tape the wire, and start again when you get a fresh reel. We used to straighten out wireline like that, and that shit is about the worst thing to work with that there is when it comes to a springy steel that comes on a roll. We had a system that we would never divulge, and we got some damn fine perks and kudos when we could save a very expensive roll of wireline.

Steve

I've had that happen before. Luckily yours didn't form a sphere of wire.

It is pretty easy to rig up a spool mount for a large hand drill. That is how I did it.

Even better is if you have a variable speed foot pedal to run the drill. That way you can use both hands to guide the wire.

I rigged up a mount for the broken spool using a piece of all thread and a circle of plywood. You have to have a friction brake on the wire spool so the new spool is tight.

BTW I just finished sorting out my TIG rod rack. It began life as a plan file for rolled up blue prints. It is 16 inches wide, 36 inches deep and 48 inches tall.

I had it all loaded up with my entire collection of rods, and then.....

I forgot to take into account hundreds of pounds of rod in cardboard square tubes in a slightly damp basement. Lets just say the collapse was epic. Yesterday I finally tackled it and replaced the cardboard with 1-1/2" pvc conduit. I then sorted and reloaded all my rods. I didn't realize how much Inconel 625, Haynes 556, 4047 aluminum and Hastelloy C-276 I had. Unfortunately I am down to about 1 lb. of Hastelloy W, my favorite rod of all time. Arc-zone is selling Hastelloy W on eBay for about $60/lb. Painful.

I found a lovely PDF on the Haynes site

It is a guide to the most popular super alloys

I would love to set up a wire straightener so I could convert all the spools of fancy wire I have into TIG rods.

Ernie Leimkuhler wrote in rec.crafts.metalworking on Sat, 01 Jan 2011 02:20:54 -0800:

I did that once at work from advice I got from RCM. It was a lot easier that I thought.

At work we have several swiss lathes. They have bar feeders that take

12ft. bars and feed and support them. The entire bar rotates in use.

We had a job that was to be made out of 1/8"dia. OFHC. The copper took a long time to come in so we had the lathe set up for another job. The due date was fast approaching. When we opened the cardboard tube that the copper came in, we found that the copper bars were bent. Some in several places. It would take too long to re-order more stock. Then I remembered what someone on RCM said about how piano wire is straightened. Since we had nothing to lose, I took a piece of

10" X 3/4" PTFE (teflon) and drilled a 3/16" hole through the length. With a few scraps of wood blocks I clamped the teflon in a vise with two blocks on the ends and one in the middle(opisit the other two). Clamping down on the vise bends the teflon. The copper is lubed lightly and fed through the hole in the teflon. From the other side the copper is chucked in a hand drill. As other people hold the bar lightly in their hands the bar is drawn through the teflon as it spins. The bend in the teflon needs to be enough to bring the bar to its yield point. As the bar passes the bend, it is bent and then un-bent. Worked great! The bars came out as straight as you could ask.

I'm sure the same thing would work for straightening your MIG wires for use as TIG rods.

At work we have a machine to measure, strip, and cut wires, which we use to make harnesses for our products. On the input side there is a straightener made from 3 vertical rollers over 4, followed by 3 horizontal rollers beside another 4. Each set has an adjusting screw to set the amount of deflection and resistance for different sized wires. Bending the wire past the yield point back and forth a few times leaves it straight and equalizes/relaxes internal stresses so it stays straight - they use the same setup with multiple wide rollers to straighten sheet metal after pulling it off of a large coil. If you just bend it in one direction the correct amount you can make it straight but the internal stresses aren't relieved, so if it is sheet metal and you do any cutting or machining it will curl back up. The rollers are ball bearings but with a groove in the outside of the outer race, about 1" OD. You can see a decent picture if you enlarge the first pic of ebay item 360330494274. The two larger rollers are an idler and encoder, not part of the straightener. Not sure where you could find the rollers but every now and then I've seen just the straightener on ebay as parts, or you could maybe find a junk machine local to you to strip.

----- Regards, Carl Ijames

Two ball bearings clamped together form a groove where they meet.

I've purchased straighteners from Sjogren for various jobs. Too expensive for a one-off project, but it wouldn't be difficult to throw together a quick and dirty straightener based on the photos here: