High Frequency Welding & Car Remote Damage

[bialecki]

A friend of mine was welding aluminum (AC) with a Syncrowave welder and he had his Nissian car remote in his front pants pocket and claimed that after his welding project the remote lost its code. Not thinking that the remote was permanently damaged took his wife's remote for the same car and did the same thing. Low and behold the second remote lost its code. Seeing that I have the same year and make of car (1997 Nissan Maximia) we decided to lookup how to reprogram the remotes, following the manufacturers procedure both remotes failed to accept the code. Next using my remote we were able to program mine to unlock his car. So we now know that the programming is successful, additionally, we changed the battery in both of his remotes to assure that the battery was not a factor.

My question is, has anyone else ever had electronic damage such as this or garage door openers that failed due to high frequency welding?

Lastly, a source for new remotes at a reasonable cost is www.keylessride.com

[LewisCobb]

I'm just a newbie welder hobbyist - but I have been designing electronics and microprocessor controls for 25 years. I have seen welding "fry" electronics before and in this case I would think that the cable was running very close - maybe right on top of the remote with some cloth pocket between - which is transparent to electrical and magnectic fields. The strength of the magnetic field set up around a conductor passing 200 amps is pretty strong - and when you consider that field is constantly collapsing and inflating again as the arc is stopped/started, not to mention the square wave sharpness (creates all sorts of radio interferrence) it's strong enough to induce currents and voltage spikes in a nearby circuit board - to the point that the metal oxide layers in the electronic chips are punctured with overvoltages.

I used to build electronic controls for farm machinery and we'd have no end of problems with the guys welding on the machines and blowing up the sensitive electronics in the control system. To the point where we finally had to stick a big yellow sign on the box that said remove and unplug box from machine when welding.

[metalmeltr]

There was a discussion abot this awhile ago and some one said that laying the cable next to each other or twisting the first foot together would eliminate most problems with interference.

[davedarragh]

HF Safeguards

Yeah, my garage door will open (if I have it cracked a bit for ventilation) when I TIG. There's a grounding diagram in the owners manual to safeguard against this, I also invested in a 6' x 8' welding curtain that I can roll around in front of the garage door to "hide" my arc.

[albertawelder]

It's true that hf tig can mess with elctronics. I've fried a couple digital watches.

[bialecki]

You know, I can see how things like this happen, although it cost my buddy $50 to replace one of the remotes, I never thought of a watch as well.

[FusionKing]

Crazy but I've never had anything fry...but my pager used to go off.

[albertawelder]

might be a good idea to take that $200-$300 cell phone out of your pocket and leave it in your truck..

[turboglenn]

I've had all sorts of weird things happen from HF interference, but thankfully haven't fried anything in quite some time.

I have a scenario to put out there though. Say i'm welding on a car that's equipped with an aftermarket computer system to run the engine (Haltech E6k series EMS) and i must weld on the car with a TIG and HF. If the computer is not removable by say "normal means" as far as work is concerned because i located it to be theft proof to a certain extent. This being said, I can unplug it, but the case which is also conected to ground would still be in contact with the chassis. So other than disconnecting the power and main wire harness from the unit, what can i do to help protect it from HF? I've welded with the MIG on the car at leat a dozen times and never had any issues, bu then again my MIG isn't running high frequency either.

These computers are stupidly expensive for what they are and i would hope to not replace the one in this car ever. As old the unit is un-replacable ( at least in my eyes) due to the model being discontinued and the newer models being interfaced through windows based programming instead of DOS which bothers me when tuning, especially when buying dyno time by the hour or 5

[Craig in Denver]

I've said this before, but...... A buddy was welding his alum prop with my Syncro 250. I went in the house, too much beer. The sprinkler solenoids were hammering their brains out. Bang, bang, bang......... My Syncro is on its own circuit from the box. It's 35 feet from the sprinkler clock. YMMV Now there is a post-it taped over the welder 'on' switch, it says: "Unplug the sprinkler clock".

[FusionKing]

One time I was welding on a boat between the road and the marina...they came out and was begging me to hurry because I was making all their phones ring continuously. I was directly over the fiber optic line with my Bobcat with a freekbox.

[H80N]

Know that our Porsche's and Audie' remotes are particularly sensitive... all the alarms go off in the cars.... and have ruined countless nice quartz seiko watches by not removing them befor tigging aluminum...

fyi german electronics tend to be not so nearly well designed as their engines and suspensions... they rank just a stinky nose behind Richard Lucas the prince of Darkness of british car fame
Heiti