[brangerII]

Hi everyone, I am fixing up an old machine that I picked up and have run into a snag. First off it is an AEAD-200LE from around 1978, serial number is HH063882. It was working pretty well but was incredibly dirty inside so before mounting it to its new home I decided that I would wash out the inside as it had a huge mouse nest in it, a lot of poo, and a thick layer of dirt. I just used the garden hose, no solvent, and I blew everything out immediately with compressed air and let it sit in the sun for a few hours prior to starting it.

It fired right up, AC and DC welding circuits work fine, 115v DC outlet works fine, but neither of the 110v AC outlets work. After messing with it for a while I noticed that one of the big 12 ohm resistors directly under the outlets was smoking. I shut it down, found that one of the clamps was rusted really bad, so I cleaned that up and still have no power. My meter says that it's only making about 4-6v AC.

Measuring between the end terminals on the resistors, the "good" one reads 11.2 ohms, and the "bad" one reads around 13 ohms. Between the clamp on the bad one and the bottom terminal, I get about 3 ohms. So I guess I feel like that resistor may not be great but it's not dead?

The manual says there is a fuse next to the 120/240v terminal strip. I don't have a fuse, I have what I think is a 10 amp auto resetting breaker, but I think it's not tripped - I have continuity across the two terminals, but one of them goes into some sort of little round thing (thermistor maybe? Am I even checking continuity correctly on that?

I read some other threads where the fine adjust rheostat caused problems, before I go spend money on replacing that, what else should I be checking? Anything I missed?

 

[Shade-tree welder1]

Pics also helps ,Does that one have switch for weld or power selection?

 

[brangerII]

Yep, it has a power/weld toggle switch. It was on Power and the fine adjust was on 100%.

Here's the resistor that was smoking. I cleaned up the rusty clamp, the inside of it and the spade terminal are clean shiny metal.

Here's what I assume to be the circuit breaker. The thing that the blue wire is connected to just dead ends on the other side of the plate it's mounted to, so I assumed it was a thermistor.

 

[Shade-tree welder1]

Check switch make sure it works , check clean brushes make sure they move freely in holders. There should be 3 of them, if you haven't done so already. If the resistor is bad or worrying you, you can swap the leads to the other end. Sounds like it was trying to make power and weld at same time these machines don't work that way. There should be a regulator board some were for the AC power. Something shorted out to make it to try and do both.

 

[brangerII]

Just to update this: I was able to fix it. The problem was the 110v outlet, which I had replaced. I didn’t realize that the little tab had to be broken off (IIRC the hot side) like you’d do for a switched outlet in a house. I just happened to notice that when I was studying the old outlet before I threw it away. I guess since there were two wires on that side of the outlet, that indicates two circuits with a shared neutral, and they were feeding into each other?

Both of them work fine now after removing that connector tab.

 

[Shade-tree welder1]

Hopefully that didn't cause any more damage ,good catch. Parts for these machines in that age group ,hard to come by. Mine welds but no AC for power board bad.