Liquid-Cooled spot welder (She Thinks my Stryko's Sexy) B-16-10

Hey all-

So some time ago... pert'near a decade... a well-exercised Stryko B-16-10 spot welder was vested upon me.

Data plate says:
Model B-16-10 Style F, no 15124
220v single phase 43A,
10kva @ 50% Duty Cycle, secondary volts 1.4 2.2
6500 secondary amps at 16 throat 6 gap,

It had eleventeen layers of paint, and several types of grease coagulated in the pedal-spring-stuff, and a bunch of dirt and weeds inside. I've dealt with all that, and am correcting wear in the pivots, etc., What I can see of the electricals look great, so I have no worries that it'll wake up and play.

It has water-cooling hoses to the electrode holders... which is nice... but I'll be setting it up (for the time being) in my old shop, which is not heated, and I have no cooling facilities for it.

I COULD fit it with a pump, radiator, and glycol... but I really don't think I'd be using it at a load requiring substantial cooling, at least until my new shop (which WILL be heated) is done. I have NO idea what this little beastie is capable of as far as material thickness, but I suspect it's no slouch. I'd probably be using it most for 20ga or thinner, but if it'll nail 1/4" plate together, I'd probably find a reason to use that capacity someday...

1) I haven't found a manual for it anywhere, but I see lots of 'em. Anyone got one they could scan and email me?

2) Would it be even partially acceptable to set it up with a regulator and just flow compressed air through it at reduced pressure to provide cooling?

DaveKamp said:

Hey all-

So some time ago... pert'near a decade... a well-exercised Stryko B-16-10 spot welder was vested upon me.

Data plate says:
Model B-16-10 Style F, no 15124
220v single phase 43A,
10kva @ 50% Duty Cycle, secondary volts 1.4 2.2
6500 secondary amps at 16 throat 6 gap,

It had eleventeen layers of paint, and several types of grease coagulated in the pedal-spring-stuff, and a bunch of dirt and weeds inside. I've dealt with all that, and am correcting wear in the pivots, etc., What I can see of the electricals look great, so I have no worries that it'll wake up and play.

It has water-cooling hoses to the electrode holders... which is nice... but I'll be setting it up (for the time being) in my old shop, which is not heated, and I have no cooling facilities for it.

I COULD fit it with a pump, radiator, and glycol... but I really don't think I'd be using it at a load requiring substantial cooling, at least until my new shop (which WILL be heated) is done. I have NO idea what this little beastie is capable of as far as material thickness, but I suspect it's no slouch. I'd probably be using it most for 20ga or thinner, but if it'll nail 1/4" plate together, I'd probably find a reason to use that capacity someday...

1) I haven't found a manual for it anywhere, but I see lots of 'em. Anyone got one they could scan and email me?

2) Would it be even partially acceptable to set it up with a regulator and just flow compressed air through it at reduced pressure to provide cooling?

Click to expand...

Ever used one? Wear gloves and arm protection. Occasionally you will get sparks flying out at high speed, I got a red hot sliver embedded in my hand. That sucked.

moonlight machine said:

Ever used one? Wear gloves and arm protection. Occasionally you will get sparks flying out at high speed, I got a red hot sliver embedded in my hand. That sucked.

Click to expand...

:-D I haven't used one of these, but I HAVE used smaller ones... the portable-type tongs fitted to a stomp-pedal base. That one was substantially lighter-duty, so my bet is that this bugger has some serious guts.

It has a knob on the front that has 0-1-2-3-4-5... I can't see in there to tell if it's a tap changer, or coupling slug... anyone know what the relative expectations of those settings would be?

I have a 10KVA and for a long time we ran it with a 5 gallon bucket full of water and a little giant water pump, worked well but water got too hot after a couple hours of welding. It now has an old Miller coolmate 1 water cooler and we run coolant. I've seen shops use 55 gallon drums of water for cooling.

Hard to tell on your settings as I imagine it's different on different brand machines. Start at setting 1 and work you way up on scrap, you'll need to find the sweet spot with timing and temp, destructive testing (pulling the weld apart until the surrounding metal breaks, not the weld) will tell you what you need to know. We run a "modern" (early 90's I would guess) controller on our 10KVA, the nicest thing about the controllers is being able to set weld time accurately and repeatable.

I wonder if a vortex cooling tube could be plumbed to blow cooled air thru the water lines.
IIRC they don't work well with much back pressure, but you may get by.

That's somewhere along the lines I was thinking, Doug... thank you!

Anyone else have any direct experience on them?

DaveKamp said:

That's somewhere along the lines I was thinking, Doug... thank you!

Anyone else have any direct experience on them?

Click to expand...

I have 9 of them between 5 and 20 kva. What I do for cooling is a 13 gallon barrel with a pump in it that pushes water through a all copper air heat exchanger (radiator) then down a 1/2” trunk line that is insulated. It has two 10mm push fitting taps at each machine with a shut off valve, at the end it turns 180 has a spring loaded check valve setup as a relief valve giving 5 PSI of back pressure, this dumps into the insulated return line with again taps and shut off valves at each machine.

The radiator is on a pivot in front of a 5000 btu air conditioner set to three degrees below target temperature. I run two or three welders at a time normally if you're doing any sort of fixturing you will never have an issue with heat. Some items have dozens of welds and with no fixturing and I can get the water warm, but if I go for lunch it's cooled back down when I get back.

Tip alignment is important. And most manual foot operated spot welders don't have enough holding pressure so they spray sparks. Good alignment and enough pressure and you shouldn't have any sparks.. sparks and slag are weld pressure venting. You need welding pressure to forge the metal together so venting the pressure means a weaker weld.

Thanks for the input, Specs!

I can't run water cooling in anything at this time, as the shop areas where I'll have it, at least for the next few seasons, will not be conditioned, which means -20F is going to happen. I WILL be using it, although not in high volume or duty, probably not enough to worry about cooling until then, but bleeding compressed air through it seems like a viable option for my (very non-industrial) use.

Thank you for the note about pressure. The STRYKO has an interesting footpedal linkage pushrod with a spring, so that when pushing, the clamping force is determined by that spring. The spring is adjustable, and on the pushrod is a swinging contact which closes about an inch past the spring's full extension point... which means when I depress the pedal, the tongs close, then continue, and once foot pressure exceeds the big spring's setpoint, the swinging contact closes.

Here's where it gets interesting... There's some parts missing, but there's an extension bar coming off the swinging contact that acts like a 'sear'... it appears that there was a laminted bar on a pivot, and I believe that when the pedal was depressed, this laminated bar was in close proximity to the main welding transformer, such that the transformer's magnetism pulled on the latch, releasing the sear, and opening the contact...

Which means, the burn timing was FAIRLY constant, but based on magnetic strength and proximity of the transformer.

Mine is missing whatever those were, and the sear was defeated so that the operator simply did it 'by instict'. I guess, depending on what the workpiece material was, it was probably sufficient, but not what one would call accurately repeatable.

Here's what I'm thinkin', and tell me if I'm stupid here:

I went digging through my surplus warehouse and found a 5-second motorized process timer. My guess is that most spot welds will be about a quarter-of-a-second, which this timer CAN do... a 0-2 second would've been better, but it's what I got. I also have some very large contactors, easily fine for this dude's digestion.

I'll trigger it off that foot contact, but I also need a de-bounce, because that big contact will trigger, but it might cause a re-trigger of the contactor while I'm lifting my foot off, so I'll use another little relay or two, to enforce the sear function, to make sure that a release and reset of the tongs will happen before enabling another burn...