At a loss troubleshooting a brand new Vulcan Spool Gun

[FunWelds]

I picked up a new Vulcan 160A Spool Gun to try my hand at aluminum welding with my MigMax 215. Problem I'm having is, I can't seem to get any wire speed adjustment to occur (it's to slow to weld with). I exchanged the gun this morning and tried the new one a few moments ago - same thing

I've ruled out tension being an issue because the cold feed button jets the wire out of the gun as one would expect whereas the trigger is a snail pace comparatively. When cold feeding, I can also clearly hear drive motor and see the pulley going crazy around. However when I pull the guns trigger without changing anything the wire casually comes out at a rate of maybe an inch every 2 seconds or so with no drive noise of the motor - no matter what speed setting the control dial is at. I know its getting an electric signal on some level because its operating the motor by both the cold feed and units trigger. Likewise, I know its not over/under tensioned for the same reason else I'd see similar results from both. I've checked the gun's wire control connection to the welder and reattached several times over. Also to help rule out an issue with my welder, albiet not quite the same given its not using the "spool gun" setting, my mig gun feeds wire at various rates. Does anyone have any ideas?

I called support on the first one and they confirmed that all my symptoms pointed to a defective gun. When I swapped it, I went to a different store to seek a unit from a different batch and the clerk checked the stocking dates of both for the same reason. I don't suspect my luck would be that I have two bad units in a row with the same issue but I suppose it is possible.

Only other thing I can think of is that it has something to do with my Migmax spool gun selector setting but don't really know any way to test that unless I have a neighbor in these forums I could test the gun on (Hint hint)

At any rate I've been struggling with getting this going for almost 2 weeks now and I'm coming up on my wits end. I could really use some new ideas and advice.

I appreciate your time and any thoughts you might have.

[FunWelds]

I think I may have figured it out... The Migmax 215 has something called autosense and I think thats why I'm not able to perceive the speed difference when testing when not welding. Does that sound right?

[M J D]

I think I may have figured it out... The Migmax 215 has something called autosense and I think thats why I'm not able to perceive the speed difference when testing when not welding. Does that sound right?

Yeah. Limited speed until an arc is detected.