VIDEO: Clearing a Wire Jam

Something has happened here, a bit of a problem and I'm glad it happened because I can show you how to fix this

This issue is something that you're going to run into from time to time with any MIG welder

and it has to do with the wire feed. So come and take a close look here

This is the drive mechanism that you see here and there's a wheel inside that is essentially

pulling the wire off this spool and pushing it all the way through the cable to the end of the

welding gun. Now earlier on I made a video that caused the wire to fuse to the tip of the welding

gun. So of course that wire is not going to move anymore but the motor drive was continuing to try

to push the wire in and it can't. So now things have shut down even though the gun does not have

its wire fused to the end. We're still not feeding any wire and this is the reason why

So all the drive mechanisms operate the same way. There's a sort of spring-loaded

thing you can apply more or less tension to it but you flip it back, open it up and if you look

inside there you can see that we've got a wire that is now buckled and kinked

So we need to take this apart. Now what has to happen here is

okay we've already broken that now so I basically need to restring this just as if I was putting on

a new spool of wire. So I'm going to get rid of the crinkly bit. Now we've got this wire

we've got this wire it goes through the hole. I'm going to have to get some pliers. The wire

here goes all the way through the cable. I need to pull it out now. I need to pull the whole thing

out and throw it away and then restring and start feeding that through which you'll see. But just

let me grab some pliers and we'll pull that old wire out. So I'm going to try to pull it okay

that's not coming. I don't want to break it off so let's see if we can pull from this direction

There we go. See it disappeared there and we're going to pull this out. Unfortunately

there's no option except to waste this welding wire. It's not that big of a deal though

Okay I actually probably should have taken the tip off first. There we go. Okay I think we're still clear. Actually

we may not be. There may be a bit of stuff in there. I'll know in a minute. I'm gonna try a

nice straight section. If there's stuff in there I can try and drill it out with a very fine drill

bit. Oh no. No there is something in there. Something jammed. I'm going to try drilling

this out with a very fine drill bit. Oh hang on a sec. There we go. We're through

So I think that should be okay. Yeah now our job. I'm going to leave the tip off because when I feed this wire in I want to make

it as easy as possible for the wire to come all the way out. With the tip in place that's another

source of restriction because the hole in the tip is just barely big enough for the wire to go

through. So I don't want to have that complication just yet. So here's the challenge. We've got to

get this wire over this drive wheel with the wire in the little groove you see and then the wire

continuing along here and then the wire going into that hole. There's a hole in that brass thing

there and that's the entrance to the passage in the cable. So I'm going to grab myself some needle

nose pliers right now. I think that might help and then we'll feed it in. There we go. We're in the hole now

Okay I've got it started and now this is going to come down

Now if I've done this right then I'm going to turn the welder on and I'm going to hit the trigger

and it should just start feeding through. I have shut the gas off because I don't want gas

I don't want to waste gas, have it running when all I'm trying to do is string some wire in here

So let's switch it on. We'll see what happens here. Now to make this operation as easy as possible I'm going to make

sure there's no kinks or twists in the cable and I'm going to keep my eye on this. Is it feeding

through? So let's see. Yep. I'm just going to keep doing that until I see wire coming out

I can feel it. It'll be here soon. There we go

So this isn't something that you need to do very often. You do need to do it when you're changing wire sizes or when you get a little bit of a

fusion there going on. A hopeless little fusion. I'm just going to put the outer cap back on and we're ready to roll

Same drive mechanism, same type of drive mechanism, same type of spool on all MIG welders