Thursday, September 9, 2010

MIG tips revisited.

I came up with an idea to turn a 0.8mm hole in a .6 MIG electrode into a smaller hole...

take one of these:



Actually I used something like this, but same principal:




Stick an M6 thread into a bit of plate to use as a handle on the tip.. and slowly work you way down till it parts.

It ends up looking like the opposite number to this:



Last step is to drill out the length of the body to 3.5mm. laying your 'handle' on the drill press table gets you straight, but then you need to hold the tip from spinning (vice-grips). Then drill as close to the end as you dare.

The resulting nozzle hole is pretty much the same as my 0.5mm purchased nozzle, and it looks like the reduction is .1 to .2 mm deep.

The nozzle works very will in my new extruder with all metal isolator.

More on that later.

6 comments:

  1. i am using a mig tip for my extruder has well. but i still have some more work to do on mine. but i am putting the nicrome right on the mig tip for my hot end. i did get to to work a little bit on my test but i need to do some more work on it still.

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  2. So, am I right in understanding you are actually making the 0.8mm hole smaller by squashing the tip?

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  3. I tried squashing the tip in a vice... squash, rotate, squash... didn't make the hole much smaller at all...

    But by rolling it in a tubing cutter, you are actually stretching the tip... The cutter works by pushing the copper out to the sides... this makes the inner hole smaller.

    You can't reasonably expect to compress the copper... but if you stretch it, the same copper has to make more hole... which is then smaller...

    Works for me anyways.

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  4. Another note:...

    I just tried to make a video with me parting off my last MIG tip... used a drill to turn the tip this time. It didn't actually make the hole smaller!

    The only thing I can thing of is that by doing it by hand, I was putting more lateral loads into the tip, causing it to stretch more.

    My first tip measures under .5mm. The one I just tried is under .8mm and doesn't seem to be much smaller than the native hole.

    I'll have to buy more tips (they are cheap) and try again.. I was hoping to get down to .3ish hole size.

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  5. Thanks for the idea!
    I found out that a blunt cutter/washer works much better than a sharp one!

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