My Miller Syncrowave 180 SD had died on me :(

[shootist2]

Had my 330 for sale, going to keep it now. Not going to buy crap that can't be fixed. 35 years and the 330 has never hic upped.

[Crepe Myrtle Farmer]

+1 again

While I can understand resistance to going open source hardware, I cannot understand why Miller does not provide schematics and service manuals. Inexcusable in my view. The OP is the owner of an old school machine and can't get service information. Can anyone make a good defense for Miller on the grounds of protecting intellectual property?

Miller's high end stuff is in one class and probably does have some proprietary design features, but I can't imagine that being the case for the Diversion series and especially obsolete machines.

The future of Miller's low end stuff will be overtaken by the Chinese. As the song goes, it's just a matter of time.

Cheers

You nailed that one. Although I wear overalls and boots these days, I do have a engineering degree from a really decent school in Tucson (U of A) and can't for the life of me understand what's so "proprietary" in Miller's designs --- although I haven't really kept up with the EE Profession, my guess is someone (over a couple of weekends) could easily design an open source multi-process welder that does everything the high end Lincolns, Millers, etc do.

[Aeronca41]

You nailed that one. Although I wear overalls and boots these days, I do have a engineering degree from a really decent school in Tucson (U of A) and can't for the life of me understand what's so "proprietary" in Miller's designs --- although I haven't really kept up with the EE Profession, my guess is someone (over a couple of weekends) could easily design an open source multi-process welder that does everything the high end Lincolns, Millers, etc do.

May be true, but the Chinese have some pretty smart engineers and they don't seem to be able to make a product that is replacing red and blue. People buy them, but seem to generally end up with one of the brand names after frustration with support and service. I'm sure there are exceptions but I'm speaking in generalities There is a lot more to a welder company than cool HW and SW. HTP, and perhaps others, may be exceptions but that is due to great support here in the USA.

[tommyg]

Thanks for all of the feedback on this. Looks like I'm going to try and repair this wonderfully component jam packed main controller PCB with help of some friends who are more qualified to trouble shoot this thing at a PCB component level than me. Will be interesting to see if we can do it and get away with just a couple of resistor, diode, cap, IC, or whatever replacements are needed to repair. If not, gonna sell it as an over glorified stick welder and get another machine that might not be blue which kinda stinks cause it matches my helmet so good

[MAC702]

...CST 280 (heavily modified ... as the NEC calls for higher AWGs than the back panel provides...

The NEC recognizes the differences between welding machines and typical machines. Article 630.

You are welcome to overkill, of course.

[ryanjones2150]

A can of spray paint can fix that hood color problem. Next time just get a black one.

[tommyg]

So happy. My Miller is back up and running. As I suspected it was indeed the main controller board. My electronics repair wizard buddy repaired the board and all is well. For anyone interested it turned out to be a shorted diode. Will be interesting to see if it fails again at some point.

[Aeronca41]

Congratulations! Glad it's working again.

[ryanjones2150]

I think you owe your buddy a six pack.