Powermax 45xp lost arc delay (Solved)

Seen plenty of :
Set it to 10A and stick the leads into a wall socket!
Always funny ....

tommylight wrote: Seen plenty of :
Set it to 10A and stick the leads into a wall socket!
Always funny ....

Sorry I must have been doing it wrong all these years :woohoo:

tommylight wrote: Seen plenty of :
Set it to 10A and stick the leads into a wall socket!
Always funny ....

well it does measure the current..... probably just not the way you want it to!

at one point I had a sideline as a housebashing spark, and my best time (funniest) for business was always after a bank (public) holiday weekend.... husbands got moaned at by wives to fit light fittings and use to take the cheap ceiling rose down and end up with a load of red and black wires (blue and brown).... they join all the reds and blacks (or blues and browns) together in two bundles and turn the mains back on.... only for it to trip.... they have forgotten to consider the switch wires...

never had any money but those were the days of having a chuckle.... 2-way or intermediate switching got even better when they decide to change fittings on a staircase....

PCW wrote: Note that a normal external SSR block type relay's would not be expected to work well
as these often need a minimum current and have significant voltage drop because they use
bipolar transistors and must get their base drive from the switched power side

A MOSFET type SSR would be superior to a mechanical relay

In the interest of trying to understand why a MOSFET type SSR wouldn't work in my case, attached is the data sheet for the exact MOSFET type SSR that I had issues with. Any insight into why it didn't work reliably would be appreciated, as I said, I like to learn new things

Here is a link to the product as well (it was not cheap): www.grainger.com/product/SCHNEIDER-ELECT...D26BD&searchBar=true

Also, here is a video I made when I was having the issue:

I thought I had made one of pulsing with mechanical relay... but just picture a torch pulse with pilot arc as it should :laugh:

It may be of importance to note: When this was all going on, with the SSR, I noticed that if i had the ground clamp near the torch I had a MUCH higher chance (but not always and the length of time the pilot arc was stable varied) of getting a reliable pilot arc. If I took the ground clamp off the table, it would never fire. With a mechanical relay, I could disconnect the ground clamp and it still reliably pilot arc's for the proper length of time. In fact, I discovered the problem was the SSR by simply touching the two wires together while the ground clamp was disconnected (after I confirmed that a manual torch didn't need to be near the ground clamp to fire reliably). It sure was a roller coaster for a few days, but it got sorted

One final test may be to hook the works up to the 7i76's spindle on SSR and see if I had similar results, but as mentioned, after I went to a mechanical relay, it's been 100% reliable, so I never really looked back.

I will still try to get torch on amperage from my powermax 65 when I get a few.

Load current 0.0025...6 A (i.e. 2.5mA minimum current? .... possible issue??)

I've just stuck my ammeter on the PMX45 and this time I got the current rising to about 15.1mA in a little over a minute.

I will try again in the evening, and try to time it to rise to 10mA / 12mA.

But the current defiantly rises rapidly and then tapers off (like charging a CAP).

This is probably to stop debounce? Or quick refire signals?

(another reason why I switched to linuxcnc was I wanted to be able to use the halscope to learn a bit more about the timing of various elements {sure I could just hook up the oscilloscope..)

snowgoer540 wrote: Also, here is a video I made when I was having the issue:

Something funny there in that video as there is preflow but no arc. Makes me think its another issue.

Have you got a 7i76e? I thought you were using a 7i96?