Tool Reviews

A welding helmet lens usually gets scratched by dry wiping, shop towels, grinding dust, or a dirty shirt sleeve—not by the cleaning solution itself. Scratches scatter the arc’s light and…

Short tack welds make helmet delay more noticeable than long welds. The arc may last only 0.2 to 1 second, so a delay set for continuous welding can leave the…

Most auto-darkening welding helmets do not need a battery replacement very often, but a weak cell can make the lens slow to darken, stay dark, or stop working altogether. The…

MIG welding does not have one correct lens shade for every amperage setting. The right shade depends on welding current, wire diameter, transfer mode, shielding gas, arc length, and how…

An auto-darkening welding helmet should be tested before every work session, not just when it comes out of the box. A lens can fail because of weak batteries, dirty sensors,…

A plasma cutter needs a complete electrical circuit to cut cleanly. The torch creates an arc, but the current must return through the workpiece and work lead to the cutter.…

Auto-darkening helmets do not all react to the same arc equally. A setting that works for a 180-amp MIG weld may be too insensitive for a low-amp TIG job, while…

What Plasma Dross Is Plasma dross is the hardened metal left along the bottom edge of a plasma-cut part. It forms when molten steel does not fully exit the cut…

Plasma cutting can produce clean parts quickly, but poor layout planning wastes more metal than the cutting itself. The usual causes are oversized gaps between parts, ignoring the kerf, cutting…

How to Plasma-Cut a Bevel for a Weld Preparation A plasma cutter can make a fast, clean weld-preparation bevel, but it will not automatically produce the same consistent angle as…