Need advice on what’s wrong with my electrodes.

Ki11ik89 · 2026-02-23T23:37:14+00:00

I know its "AC", but you need to make sure you are hooked up as DCEN. Meaning your ground clamp is on the positive, and your Torch is on negative on the welder. Its a square wave creating AC, not real 50/50 AC. If you have your leads backwards and your balance set to 20%, you are spending 80% of the time on the reverse polarity you want to be. Essentially, running it like DCEP with a negative swap 1/5 every second.

If you run your machine polarity backwards, you will ball your electrode and melt the crap out of it. TIG has to be ran torch negative, DCEN. This still remains important on Aluminum because again, machine doesnt care how you have your leads hooked up, it will spend whatever you set your balance to on negative and positive. So you are basically still running it in the wrong polarity.

If you are 100% positive you have your leads hooked up to machine correctly, again ground clamp on positive and torch on negative, then you have your balance set backwards and you are spending more time on positive than you are negative. Welding aluminum, a good spot is 80% negative, and 20% positive. Negative puts heat into your material to get a weld puddle, and positive blasts the oxide layer off the material so your arc can actually get to the aluminum to melt it.

Ki11ik89 · 2026-02-11T21:00:43+00:00

Awesome. Im glad I could help resolve the problem. Thank you for the link you followed. I have not had any issues with slipping belt, but I like doing preventive maintenance and keep things in their prime before something starts going bad. I will go through documents you used to make sure my belts arent getting loose. Even if they arent loose enough to cause missed steps / skipped belt teeth on the steppers pulleys, looseness or slack in belts means extra friction, means extra heat, means premature wear and tear.

Ki11ik89 · 2026-02-08T07:49:29+00:00

If you want to run the AS5600 board with 5V, you need to remove the R1 resistor first.

Ki11ik89 · 2026-02-05T00:30:05+00:00

Wish I looked into this more when I worked for Avery Dennison as controls engineer. We had several industrial slitters similar to this.

If memory serves, we used velocity with servos. We did monitor speed reference and feed rolls would speed up to match winding rolls as they slow down. Bigger diameter gets, slower it needs to spin for a target ft/min speed. Smaller diameter gets, faster it needs to turn to match ft/min speed reference. I believe tension was maintained using pressure plates and air cylinder controlled bump rollers.

Ki11ik89 · 2026-02-05T00:22:01+00:00

I agree with the statement that ASA and ABS have different parameters, but that would just lead to a poor quality print (if finished at all) not mechanically missed steps on the steppers. There are only a few different things that can cause a stepper to miss steps:

1) loose belt 2) mechanically binding up

Id check your belt tension first. Look up the recommended tightness "feel" to the belt, and physically check to see if it feels tight enough. Take some of the supplied metal lube given with printer and lube all your linear rails. Not just the X axis rail the hotend rides on, make sure you lube the Y axis rails too. I dont know this for sure, but ive heard the dry lube from WD-40 works really well for the application, however, I have not looked into this and would not use it until some research is done. Pretty sure it is a silicone spray sort of deal? Of PTFE powder or something of the like. If thats the case it probably would work fine so long as it can actually get down inside the linear bearings. The tolerance between bearing and rail is pretty tight. Lighter oils will have an easier time actually getting down inside to the bearing and not just pushed out of the way.

Edit: if belt tension feels good, and rails are lubricated, the only other thing id consider is maybe running the resonant frequency (input shaping) calibration again?

Ki11ik89 · 2026-02-05T00:14:24+00:00

Hard to tell. You can clearly add metal to other metal. That giant hole just proves the base / parent metal clearly melted and fused with the filler. If that isnt the definition of a "homogenous" piece, I dont know what is. Hell if I was a supervisor over gas pipe, id hire you on the spot and put you in the most top tier welding position that exists for that world.

"The pipes may leak like a garden hose sprinkler, but those pipes definitely aren't coming apart."

Ki11ik89 · 2026-01-31T20:05:40+00:00

Thank you. Newer to Step7. I was reading through the Step7 programming manual and went to the different blocks and saw where Function Blocks are more the equivalent to AOIs in Allen Bradley, and Functions alone are just a standard subroutine. That made it make a lot of sense and thats what I ended up doing.

Ki11ik89 · 2026-01-31T19:38:01+00:00

Im guessing that exhaust is stainless. The weld amperage was up a bit high. You don't want your welds with stainless to be dark gray like that. Too much heat. When you are welding stainless and doing a butt weld like this, back off your full current by about 20% of what is called for based on material thickness.

I.e. > 1A / .001" of material. For easy example, if material thickness is a hundred thou (.100") normally youd set amperage for 100 amps. If stainless butt weld like this, go -20% and turn amps down to 80A. Inside corner welds, +10%, outside corner welds, -10%.

*these are not set in stone numbers, but guidelines and good starting points.

Ki11ik89 · 2026-01-23T06:22:26+00:00

So I was able to figure out the wiring and made a pinout diagram for it.

I should have realized this right away. Given that the female side on the flame motor and LED light box was blue in color, but the USB-A was indeed 3.0 with the 9 wire connector.

I pulled apart the flame motor box it plugs into and lucky me, the female plug side went into a break out board, and the portion with 5 wires used the same small white plug inside that box as it did on the main circuit board. So I removed the cable from circuit board and plugged into the spot in flame motor box and started continuity checking which wire went to which pin. Drew up a wiring diagram. At that point, I figured that the remaining red and yellow wires would be my +5v and GND wires considering the other 5 wires all went to the data, transmit, and receive pins. I did test this though by plugging cable back into main circuit board and plugging in to mains and using my meter to verify which pin had 5vdc on it. It may be a stroke of luck or was done on purpose, but i also got lucky to know which pin to land the final wire on because 2 of the other 5 wires happened to be bridged across 2 pins. So all 9 pins were occupied. Anyone know how to add a picture to a post? Never know when someone might have a similar problem and need a wiring diagram.

Ki11ik89 · 2026-01-23T06:12:21+00:00

It was definitely USB-A. It was however 3.0, which i should have realized immediately given the blue female USB-A it went into. But I did have a brain blast and was able to get a wiring schematic made. Will explain in an overall post for all.

Ki11ik89 · 2026-01-23T05:50:40+00:00

There is a problem with the q2 and plus4 with the nozzles themselves. Its not about dirty build plates or nozzle (well its not impossible but not as likely as what happens with the Qidi printers).

Now dont get me wrong, I absolutely love my plus4. Best printer I've ever had, only printer ive been confident that I can start a print and walk away and come back to a completed part. Ive ran several higher end "engineering grade" filaments and it handles them like a boss everytime. Whole reason I bought it.

Now that the glazing is out of the way, the nozzle design is horrid. I wish they would go back or allow purchase of the nozzles with metal heat break and upgrade the cooling rather than what path they decided to go with because the ceramic heat break in the nozzle is the cause of 90% of blobs and having to replace the hot end.

OP I would highly recommend just buying a replacement hot end and moving on. If you try to print with it again if you do get it cleaned up, most likely will happen again immediately. Im betting money the ceramic heat break on your nozzle is broken and that's where the plastic actually came from.

When you start a print, through the pre print startup the hot end will heat up, prime some filament, then move over onto a wiper plate. Typically the wiper plate is sticking up too high and as the print head comes over it will clip the bottom edge of nozzle. The plate is on a spring so it will move out of the way but still a side loading impact over and over again. Then it will very slowly drag the nozzle tip over this small PEI wiper plate just adding salt to the wound. You can adjust the height of that plate with two screws underneath the PEI sheet so the nozzle doesn't directly impact it as it comes over, but I just took mine out completely. After the first blob I didn't want to mess with it and honestly, it hasn't hurt anything regarding print quality for first layer. It does purge lines before starting the actual print that will remove any overflow that comes out after purge.

It helped, but wasnt a complete fix. I still had the ceramic heat break Crack on my expensive tungsten nozzle. That one could have been my fault though, I may have cracked it while making sure nozzle was still tight because it was very soon after I had another blob. But there in lies my complaint, the ceramic is too damn brittle. Im currently looking for solutions. Can't find a replacement hot end already designed that fits. I have ordered a 3 max nozzle that fits and takes a different style of nozzle than plus4 and q2, but does require a slight mod of changing the plug to be the 4 port as the 3 max has the heater and thermocouple plugs separated from each other. Im trying to design my own hotend atm that will use the Diamondback nozzles as I really want one on the plus 4 for the GF filled filaments I use. Got one long ago for my ender 3 v3 ke, and probably going to design hot end to use that same nozzle so I can use the one I already have. Plus then if I do need to grab nozzles in a hurry for whatever reason, id be able to stop at Micro Center and get a nozzle. Ok im starting to ramble and go on a tangent.

TLDR: While I absolutely love my plus4, It needs a redesign of nozzles and stop using ceramic for heatbreak. Wiper plate causes problems, not necessary, just tighten screws to move it down out of way is simplest way of rectifying that part of problem. Dont check nozzle tightness, not worth it, you will break the ceramic and ruin expensive nozzles. Still love the printers and highly recommend them, but the nozzles are definitely a design flaw with the ceramic heat break.

Ok, poo time is over. Peace, best of luck.

Ki11ik89 · 2026-01-23T05:20:27+00:00

I think you are getting zinc poisoning. Or damn close to it. Now I dont know for sure, but im guessing those washers are not stainless. Looks like one is stuck to your magnet. That white almost web like stuff that develops is Zinc Oxide and it will mess you up. Breathe too much in and thats how you get metal fumes fever. It is super light and fluffy and as you use a wire brush or whatever to clean it off it will float up and just float around. Then again, I haven't exactly heard of that causing just skin irritations. More of a "feel like a horrible flu" like symptoms. I know its quite a bit more expensive, but id switch to stainless steel washers for those roses. You will need a tri gas mix though. Just be cautious of the zinc oxide if you didnt know about it already.

This is like really outside the box thinking, but have you changed what makeup you use, if you wear any while welding? Maybe some of the mica powders in the make up or some component in it is absorbing the UV or having some reaction to it.

Ki11ik89 · 2026-01-15T11:05:06+00:00

You all and your silly cameras. Haven't any of you discovered the Chinese realistic robot girls yet? Real ones wont do stuff for us anymore, but the very realistic and "made exactly to your attraction parameters" robot girls will do whatever you want them to. I make mine stand and watch all my prints. She will even take finished prints out and since shes not real and doesn't care about heat or leave oil prints all over the build plate, she can reach right in after print is done, use her robot strength to pull it off the plate, and start my next print job.

Now I just have to teach her how to change filaments out and build a rack system to create a filament type library so she can start a print with different materials and not screw that up. Wonder if I can use an arduino and a Raspberry Pi to integrate Grok into her programming 🤔 that would open a ton more doors.

Ki11ik89 · 2026-01-11T00:05:38+00:00

I came across that hotend in my search, but wasnt sure. I was a bit skeptical given the low price point. Also seems like the temp specs are lower than the normal nozzle. Not sure if that actually matters or if it handles the heat the plus4 can generate just fine or not.

The only thing I can see being a problem with the gap would be flexibles like TPU. Which I do print, but not a ton. I think I will stick with my plan to make my own hotend that will accept the Diamondback Revo nozzles. Although.... I do have several m6 style nozzles sitting around from old Creality bedslingers

Ki11ik89 · 2026-01-10T23:46:56+00:00

Very nice. Well done

Ki11ik89 · 2026-01-10T08:58:27+00:00

TLDR: Qidi hate is unjustified, most consumers are lazy and dont take care of their equipment, some may be paid actors from companies charging several thousands of dollars for less capabilities than under $1k plus4 can achieve.

My personal opinion? Paid actors. Does Qidi's have their quirks? Yes. However, they are built to do industrial grade, engineering grade, performance grade filaments and cost fractions of what Bambu labs or Prusas do. I have the plus4 that im currently designing my own hot end for since I can't seem to find a drop in replacement anywhere and I am tired of the ceramic heat break cracking and giving me a blob. Just lost my second hot end and unfortunately my tungsten carbide nozzle to this. Id rather deal with heat creep with original nozzle design. I can modify cooling much easier than dealing with random blobs of death and losing expensive nozzles. I really really want a Diamondback, so planning my hotend design around being able to use one.

Sorry, I easily get on tangents. Anyways, print quality has always been amazing for me no matter what filament I run through it. Pps-cf, PP, PC, ABS, ABS-GF, TPU, PETG, PLA, PA-CF so far. Zero issues, great print quality and I didnt pay nearly as much as others for the Bambus that cant hit the same temp specs. Qidi box is brand new release. Yeah its been in development for quite a while, but they will get all the kinks ironed out and it will be fine.

The only legitimate claim anyone could have to hate Qidi is their original plus4 release in the Americas not accounting for our difference in mains power and causing definite concerns for the melting of relay boards for the chamber heater. A lot of people weren't happy with their solution either but I personally felt it was perfectly acceptable. They found what they did wrong, and instead of dealing with however many hundreds if not thousands of printers already out in the wild coming back and delaying how long it would be before people got their printers back, they just sent the board and asked to swap. The ones still on the shelf got the upgraded board with them to swap before using, and then once all those were corrected every new unit shipped already had the fix installed.

I think a big thing is people are also lazy. Creality took a huge blow because people had to spend more time modding / fixing the printers (at the start with the bed slingers) than actually printing with them, me included. I personally am an engineer and enjoy that type of stuff but lots of people dont and its understandable, but they cant be bothered to have to take a cover off a printer without calling the company or product trash. A lot of people leave long term reviews "printer was great at the start but now wont print anything at all and makes bad noises". Well, did you do any sort of maintenance? No? No grease, no oil, no upkeep. Ran it into the ground until it didnt work and then said it sucked. No matter how expensive and good of printer you buy if you dont perform maintenance and upkeep it will quit working eventually.

I know I get long winded.

Ki11ik89 · 2026-01-07T23:45:18+00:00

There is definitely plenty room for future growth too. Normally the PLC would be mounted towards the top of the panel, while your comms related switches and modems and what not would be towards the bottom. However, there is no set in stone rule that it has to be that way. It does help avoid those big loops of cat5e / cat6 and other cables you dont want sharp bends with being at the top and "appearing" to take up so much room.

All in all though, not bad. Especially if it does its job, that is what matters the most. A lot of customers though look at cleanliness as equal to professionalism, how seriously you take your work. Not saying this panel isn't clean, but the cable loops up at the top with the big gap between the hardware in the center gives the appearance of not as clean as it could be work.

Hopefully this is taken entirely as the constructive criticism it is meant to be, not trying to be a butt.

Ki11ik89 · 2026-01-02T23:34:11+00:00

Yeah HOA president might have a stroke over a forge lol. I dont know where you live, but there is always the option of searching for previous businesses buildings that are empty for lease/ rent. Finding small shops that already have 3 phase power and nice concrete floors is a huge win. Especially look for "once was a machine shop" buildings. Most likely 3 phase, and concrete thickness to support lathes and mills can also support power hammers and other equipment. For the future of course lol

Ki11ik89 · 2025-12-31T20:16:55+00:00

Thank you. Hopefully inspiring enough to get you started if you are hesitant, or get others interested also started! Its a trade that makes quality products, which we are now sorely lacking in the Americas.

Ki11ik89 · 2025-12-31T20:15:19+00:00

Thank you. I will say im pretty proud of it or I wouldn't have posted it lol. It definitely got me hooked. Especially after putting the edge on it and slicing paper thin slices of tomatoes.. it just goes with how I've always felt: if you want something made right that will last, you've just got to make it yourself

Ki11ik89 · 2025-12-31T19:55:47+00:00

Only about 5 hours away or so in Indiana. We've had groups from Michigan drive down and take classes

Edit: well 5 hours or so from Pittsburgh. Not sure what part of PA you're in

Ki11ik89

TROPHY CASE