TIG Pedal build

[Charst]

Hi all!

I bought a nice used TIG welding machine the other day. It is an Italian make you might have never heard of. It is a ca. 2002 "SELCO Genesis 200 AC-DC" with water cooling and lots of nice features and it is in perfect condition - BUT! - It came without a foot pedal for the amperage control. Especially for welding aluminum, the use of a foot pedal makes life alot easier (to have proper heat control). So I searched the web to find a pedal that would work with my new welder. But finding the combination of a 10k Ohms potentiometer control with a 7-pin connection plug of military standard and a reasonable design/rigidity was in vain...

During my search I got the impression that there is some kind of "two class society" when it comes to welding equipment. You either find cheap stuff from the far east or the high end manufacturers stuff which I sometimes found ridiculously expensive.
Finally I decided to build a pedal by myself.
The only components I did not have was the potentiometer, the signal cable and the plug. I got the first two from an electronics market for less than € 20.-. All other parts (except for the sheet metal) came out of my scrap box. As an example: The switch - needed to initiate the arc start - is a micro swith from the controls of an old Honda motorcycle. My research for the plug gave prices around €50 so I decided to build that one as well. Attached are pictures of some sketches I made, of the pedal and the DIY-plug.
It was fun to build and it works perfect. The weight is about 4 kilos so it does not hop around when pushing the pedal.

Greeting

Charst

[DIYer]

Thanks Charst! We've added your TIG Pedal to our Welding category,
as well as to your builder page: Charst's Homemade Tools. Your receipt:

TIG Pedal by Charst

tags: TIG, controller

[Crusty]

You're definitely right about there being two classes of TIG welders - affordable and workable if a good choice is made and really expensive commercial grade. I've found my Lotos TIG welder to be usable for everything I need to do and I could afford to buy it so that's what I use. Many of the asian welders come with a foot pedal that's inconvenient to use, including my Lotos, so I modified it to overcome the deficiencies. I transplanted the controls onto a used bass drum kick pedal for a rugged and heavy pedal which stays in place (I know what you mean about chasing the pedal with your foot while trying to run a bead) and I further modified the drive to change the control box travel of 30º to a pedal which travels more than 60º using an XL timing belt drive and that gives me finer control of my welding current. The plus is that the pedal works in the usual direction instead of having to position it backwards as you must do with the supplied pedal. It's been working well for me and is rugged enough to survive the typical abuse of a welding shop.

Note to editor: This is already in my builder's page so no need to include it again.

[Charst]

Hi Crusty!
I like the idea of a fusion between musical stuff and welding equipment
Thanks for you comment!

Charst

[Crusty]

I think it's a better use of my time finding something which I can buy and modify to suit my application than to spend the countless hours building it all from scratch. Many of my designs incorporate things already made by someone else as a starting point. I get more done that way and at a reasonable cost.

[Bcampbell1989]

You're definitely right about there being two classes of TIG welders - affordable and workable if a good choice is made and really expensive commercial grade. I've found my Lotos TIG welder to be usable for everything I need to do and I could afford to buy it so that's what I use. Many of the asian welders come with a foot pedal that's inconvenient to use, including my Lotos, so I modified it to overcome the deficiencies. I transplanted the controls onto a used bass drum kick pedal for a rugged and heavy pedal which stays in place (I know what you mean about chasing the pedal with your foot while trying to run a bead) and I further modified the drive to change the control box travel of 30º to a pedal which travels more than 60º using an XL timing belt drive and that gives me finer control of my welding current. The plus is that the pedal works in the usual direction instead of having to position it backwards as you must do with the supplied pedal. It's been working well for me and is rugged enough to survive the typical abuse of a welding shop.

Note to editor: This is already in my builder's page so no need to include it again.

I bet it come with the same one as my ahp alpha tig. I love that foot pedal. For some reason my ankle does not do the forward pivot movement for a regular foot pedal very well so I much prefer the push straight down movement of the Asian foot pedals. Just wish I could find a way to keep it in place. I thought about making a bracket to attach it to my chair I sit in to tig weld

[Crusty]

Many of those CE TIG units use the exact same control box.

Before I reworked my pedal I attached the control box to an 18" square of 5/8" plywood and that kept it in the general vicinity of my foot.

[jdurand]

I used to have to make quite a few of those hot melt glue and epoxy plugs. I used to test aerospace and military gear so we needed to plug into the gear but nobody ever gave us mating cables. So... box of spare pins and glue. We just put a piece of paper over the female, stabbed the pins through, put a tube over and filled.

Then there were Winchester Connectors. If you could assemble a Winchester connector right on the first try, you could do anything in Ikea blindfolded and drunk. I finally got to bringing the Winchester sales rep in, pointing at some piece of aerospace gear on my bench and saying we needed 5 or whatever of the mating connectors. ASSEMBLED. No, I didn't care what the pin numbers were, which screw finishes, or anything else. FIT THE HOLES and not be missing parts.

[mwmkravchenko]

Nicely thought out heavy duty TIG pedal. Should last you a very long time. The onl thing that might ever fail could be the potentiometer.

[Charst]

Nicely thought out heavy duty TIG pedal. Should last you a very long time. The onl thing that might ever fail could be the potentiometer.

Hi!

How's your Shrinker-Stretcher doing? Is it already in operation?

My tip is that the filament will be the first thing conk out. We shall see...
At the moment it works just fine.

Charst