Recovering some MIG wire

[Mark RandParticipant @markrand96270]

Many years ago I scrounged a part used 15kg reel of MIG wire from a skip when we were cleaning out the Weld Lab at work. The reel wasn't in pristine condition, having been hoyed into a skip and hasn't got any better in the decades since. It was the wrong size for my welder, which only goes up to 5kg reels, meaining that I had to decant wire from it every time I needed to use some:-

In this condition, it could no longer be used because the wire tended to fall off the side and get kinked. I cut some scrap chipboard from a wardrobe build into circles on the bandsaw, used the bolt circle feature of the mill's DRO to stick a dozen holes in them and drilled an axle hole in the middle:-

These cheeks got bolted to the sides of the reel with lengths of M8 studding that I've used when making formwork for concrete walls. Then the assembly was mounted on a bit of bar that was clamped to the milling table (it being in about the right place):-

I'd scrounged some empty 5kg reels from a very helpful local welding shop, the third one that I'd phoned. Mounted on a mandrel on the lathe I could wind them at a leisurly 150rpm, although it did get a bit exciting when I overshot the low-stop-high positions on the lever and went to 600rpm! I ran it through one of those foam cleaner things you can get and also used bits of clean shop rag to guide the wire, tension it and clean it further. It had built up some contamination over the years :-

The end result of all this was a reel and a bit of clean wire which fit the welder and are now stored in zip-lock bags until I next need them:-

Finally, why go to all this faff over a bit of MIG wire. Well, it's Inconel 82. It welds carbon steel, stainless, cast iron and any combination thereof and I've used it for such purposes several times. It also costs about £700 if you need to buy a 15kg reel, when you can find it.

Edited By Mark Rand on 21/10/2022 16:40:25

[Mark RandParticipant @markrand96270]

Getting MIG wire off a broken reel onto new reels.

[Nick WheelerParticipant @nickwheeler]

I was wondering why you were faffing about with a £25(that was the last one I bought, probably a bit more now) reel of wire, that needs to be neatly wound onto the reel. Doing it with free inconel is worth the effort.

This morning I finally got around to binning the 15kg reel of 0.6mm steel wire that I scavenged from a move at work. Far too much of it was rusty to bother with, and it didn't fit my machine. Nearly twenty years of it getting in the way meant it went to the tip with the old fridge.

[Speedy Builder5Participant @speedybuilder5]

Gloves, fingers and hospital visit comes to mind. What brake have you got to stop the lathe super quick if a snarl up occurs. The best I have done is to run the lathe with a slack drive belt, but even this is a dangerous sport.

Bob

[Nicholas FarrParticipant @nicholasfarr14254]

Hi, in my last day job, there was one on one of the welders that keep snagging up on the reel every time it was coming of one side, when I looked at it, the side that was snagging had split away from the tube part of the bobbin and the wire was pulled down in-between the reel of wire and the split side and wedging it. This was a fairly new reel and was probably split from new but couldn't be proven, so just had to change it. When an empty bobbin came off another machine, I just put the split one and the empty one down on a bench, hooked up the wire to the empty bobbin and just circled it around the split one. Just did this circling around for about ten minutes whenever I had a slack period between jobs. It took two or three weeks to transfer the whole lot, but it wasn't all neat and even, but it reeled off without any trouble when put back onto the machine again, this was though, general fabrication steel wire.

Regards Nick.

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