Thread: Restarting rods

12xp's aren't low hydrogen are they, I forget, my thinking here tho was that the better low hydrogen rods have a little bit of iron powder on the end of the rod (new rod) to facilitate easy starting, then if u restrike the arc with the same rod it's harder cos the bit of iron powder is not there hence difficult to get the arc going... but that's not gonna be the case if the rods are just gp rods


Pete

Nope, 12XPs are GP rods. It probably doesn't help that they were 2.0mm rods, so it doesn't take much to cover the core.

Anyway, I did a bunch of welds with them on the weekend and it worked well - I did the scratch technique until it started a steady arc and then transferred across to the work zone. It usually took 3+ scratches on a 2" wide area of scrap to get a steady arc going.

hello,
I sometimes get this problem, I find that giving it a light tap on a nearby hard surface generally stops this, but like you said this causes to much flux to fall off the rod. You might find that by shopping around for different brands of rods may stop this, for example: Murex 6013 rods re-arc better than NuWeld 6013 rods, or so i have found. I hope this helps