More on oil-cooled welders and 4 mm rods

Christopher Tidy · 2006-10-11T03:59:11+00:00

Hi all,Thanks for the advice I received a couple of weeks ago on the subject of oil-cooled welders. This last weekend I burnt a couple of pounds of 4 mm electrodes, mostly welding fillets on 3 mm and 5 mm steel. I tried both 6011 and 6012 "Weldrite" brand electrodes. I tried to get hold of some of the Murex electrodes that Tim recommended but the welding store didn't have them in stock. I used my Cytringan "Bantam" welder, which is very similar to an Oxford. It provides up to 180 A at 50 V OCV and up to 120 A at 80 V OCV.The advice I received at the welding store was that some small welders might struggle with 4 mm 6011 electrodes, but that an Oxford-type machine stood a good chance of coping. My machine seemed to cope with running 4 mm 6011 electrodes on 5 mm steel with good penetration. It didn't seem to be struggling either. The 6011 electrodes ran very nicely at 120 A and quite acceptably at 110 A (both at 80 V OCV). My welds looked okay. I still haven't quite mastered the art of a perfect restart and a neater crater fill at the end of a weld, but I guess they're just a matter of practice.If anything my machine seemed less happy running 4 mm 6012 electrodes, which wasn't what I had expected. Both 4 mm 6011 and 6012 give a recommended current of 120 A to 180 A. The identical current recommendations puzzled me a little as I thought that rutile electrodes needed more current than cellulosics. But 6012 only needs an OCV of 50 V, whereas 6011 needs 70 V, so it gives me the option of running at up to 180 A on my welder. I found that I had to run the 6012s at 165 A to 180 A. Apparently 6012 has a sodium binder rutile coating whereas 6013 has a potassium binder rutile coating. As far as I could tell 6012 welded very much like 6013. I bought them mainly because they were cheap (£8 a box) and I was curious to try them.I also tried running 4 mm 6012s at 120 A and 80 V OCV. This was useless. There was nowhere near enough power. Obviously 120 A at 80 V OCV doesn't give...

Oct 11, 2006 20 Replies

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Mark Rand 19 years ago

Persakley :-)

Mark Rand RTFM

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