Hi Bill,
With wire fed welders, the wire speed controls the amperage. The more wire you pull from the machine, the more amperage. You should run at the lowest heat setting possible and increase wire speed until you see a good bead contour and penetration. If the setting is too low, you will feel the wire pushing the gun back when you get to the point that there is not enough heat to melt it. What you are feeling is the unmelted wire impacting the work piece. At that point, go to the next highest setting and manipulate the wire speed up or down accordingly. You should run at the lowest setting allowed and do all the amperage adjustments with the wire speed control. If you have a voltage setting and an amperage setting that are infinitely variable, set the voltage at about ten o'clock and adjust the wire speed until you see a good bead contour. Wire welders produce the highest degree of penetration when pushed. Stick welders, when pulled. You should also be aware that each wire manufacturer provides parameters for optimum performance for any given wire design. This will consist of stick out, wire feed speed in inches per minute, voltage settings, amperage settings, shielding gas requirements if any, and polarity. These things are important. For instance, in regard to stick out, when arc length is increased when wire welding, the voltage goes up. The higher the voltage, the more spatter and the less penetration. If you don't know what the proper stick out is, you can have all of your other parameters set correctly and still not get satisfactory welds if the arc length is way off. Experienced weldors can tell you if your amperage settings is close to being correct by the sound being produced. Stick welders sound much like bacon frying when the settings are good. Wire machines sound more like a static cracking sound when using hard wires. The sound is a little less pronounced with open arc wires. Without experience, it's going to be hard to rely on that alone.
Steve
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