How to Change a Welding Wire

Video Transcript

"On behalf of Expert Village I'm Terry and today I'm going to show you how to use a welder. Obviously with a mig welder, unlike a stick, where you just change sticks as you burn it down, with a mig welder you have to change the wire so I'm just going to demonstrate real quick how to change the wire, it's part of the maintenance. I've already placed the new spool on, took the old spool off. I did that by removing the ring and placing it back on there. You also have a tension tightener which holds tension on your wire. If you get slack in your wire, this whole spool will unroll so you always want tension. Ok, so I cut the wire off the old spool now I just want to pull it through. Once it goes through the gears of course it won't push the wire anymore so then you can just pull it out with your pliers. Wind the wire up so no one trips and falls on it. I usually hang onto it so I can use it for wiring something around the shop, you can throw it away it's no big deal I also use it as a filler sometimes. Ok, so we come over here, we have to take the tension off the gears, off the guide gears that guide the wire. You want to clip off the bent end because if it's bent when it goes through this liner, this liner is coiled like a liner on a break line or a clutch cable and if you have any kinks in there it's just going to make it hard for it to go through there, through the liner. You want to guide it through the hole, take your gloves off for this. Make sure it seats down in the guide wheel and that it goes into the liner. Once you do that, flip the gears back down. You pull your trigger and it'll come out the end. Now you want to keep a watch on the end of your nozzle. The best way to do it so it doesn't hang up is to take your nozzle off and take your tip out. Then you can turn your wire speed up. You want to keep your liner as long as you can with no kinks so there is no obstruction because once the wire jams in there it can get balled up seriously and you can feel it coming through gun so you'll know it's getting close. Then you can turn it back down to operating speed, slide your tip on, screw your nozzle back on, clip it to a start point and you're ready to go."