I just got my Arcdroid today and told a friend about it, he said to be careful because the mill he works at had one and it fried itself! Obviously I was curious and didn’t understand how that could happen and definitely didn’t want to do it myself so I asked him and the electrician at the mill told him this…“The ground fell off the plasma and arced back through the plug to the actual droid. So all the plasma was going through the tiny ground wire in the 120V plug”…is this possible! Has anyone else heard or or experienced this? Is there a way to prevent this from happening?
mmmm…I’d bet there were some other factors at play. The ground clamp is actually positive on plasma cutters, torch is negative. I’ve forgotten to clamp a couple times and it just doesn’t cut through. Which is a common occurrence. The biggest danger from there would be a consumable failure.
Having your wall supply (proper 240v for most plasma cutters) wired correctly is important. Any welders or plasma cutters I’ve seen damaged were all the fault of bad wiring. I think there was one user on the forums who did fry 1 or 2 ArcDroid’s by not hooking things up correctly, but I can’t recall the cause. Was definitely an error in wiring, something hooked to high voltage that shouldn’t have been, probably the trigger. There’s only a couple of connections, if you double and triple check your work, you’ll be fine. Forgetting to clamp something should be avoided but it happens and shouldn’t be a big deal.
I’ve forgotten the ground lead a couple of times, all it did was not cut. No issues back to the plasma at all.
Start simple, just plug the torch only into the arcdroid.
The issues i’ve seen with blown up droids has usually come from torch height cables, or the voltage divider of the machine not being set correctly. Have never heard of anything from a clamp falling off.
