Old Idealarc CC machine . . . to LN-25 . . . to spoolgun running aluminum?

[old jupiter]

In his response above, Cruizer says it might be possible to run silicon bronze wire with this set-up; I have never used sil-bronze, but isn't it a solid MIG wire?

[snoeproe]

I run self shielded flux core wire in my voltage sending feeder powered by my ideal arc. It does the job but it jcould be better with a cv power supply. You will never run solid wire with gas on a cc only machine.

[old jupiter]

Thank you both. Cruizer, you've got me, I admit that this time I did not try a Search, because I didn't recall having seen anything just like this. My bad. Good to see you back here.

[cruizer]

Ok, the cc/cv switch on the on-25 merely allows the feeder to work on the higher voltages in CC. It does zero to convert cc to cv. The ONLY wire your going to run in CC is dual shield, and maybe some silicon bronze. No Aluminum. Never get it started. Question has been answered a thousand times....

[Meltedmetal]

I would guess but have not researched that the LN-25 is not going to give you any advantage over a direct connection to the Idealarc. I suspect that the switch in the LN-25 is to change the LN-25 to a voltage sensing feeder and unless there is some way to use it to drive the spoolgun I don't think it will probably help you much. Just my guess.

[old jupiter]

Miller and everybody else tells us it's best to do wirefeed welding on CV machines. But it seems that if all you have is a CC machine, Dual-Shield and aluminum MIG spray-arc are two processes that can work reasonably well with CC. The latter is what I'm interested in at the moment.

I have an almost-new Traffimet medium capacity spoolgun and control box. It came set up to plug into a Miller machine, which in my case is a Millermatic 175 CV MIG welder. The problem with this is that the poor little 175 doesn't have the horsepower for most aluminum work. I also have a Lincoln Idealarc 250A TIG/stick CC welder, and can hook it up to an LN-25 suitcase feeder . . . which has the switch inside that lets you use it with a CC power supply. Doesn't give you a true CV output, but evidently it can be a livable compromise.

If I come up with the right hardware to plug my now-Miller-adapted spoolgun to plug into the LN-25 with the Idealarc, does that sound like I might end up able to do some more aluminum work than I can with the little Millermatic?? Has anybody here done this?