Review Cebora Pocket Pulse

[Hood]

Last week I sold a load of things to get some funds together for a standby welder just in case my EWM Phoenix has a heart attack.
One of the things I sold was an R-Tech MTS255S which was very nice but it was just standard spray mig for Alu rather than Pulse and with using the EWM for the last year or so I wasn't keen on having to go back to standard spray.
So after a bit of searching and investigating I asked @Tom Orrow L if he had done any Alu with the Pocket Pulse, he hadn't but said he would give it a go and let me know how it performed and he also offered to send it up for me to trial out and see if it would be any use for me. It is a bit on the small side only being 185Amps so I wasn't too sure whether to take him up on his offer or not. Tom sent me a video and a pic of a weld he did the next day on some 3mm or possibly 1/8" angle and it looked good so I thought I might as well give it a go.

Today it arrived but I have been busy all day welding up a hopper so only got a chance to haul it out of the box this evening before I headed home.
First impressions were that it is nice and compact and looked well built.

The work lead doesn't fit via a dinse but rather just goes through a gland in the front and fits to a terminal via a ring, not a huge deal but could easily be adapted to a dinse if required by either fitting a dinse socket to the case itself or to keep the warranty probably making up a small lead with a female dinse on it would be the best option.
The wire feed is only 2 rollers so I wasn't sure how that would perform but in the brief test I gave it it seemed to work well. The Torch supplied however is quite short, I never measured but it can't be much more that 1.5m. Tom Also sent up a longer Parker torch but I have not tried that yet.

Ok so powered it up with the 0.8mm wire that was in it from Toms testing, the synergic line says 0.9mm or 1.0mm for Alu so it was set to 0.9 and when I cranked up the dial I was a bit sceptical that the max it said it would weld was as high as 6mm Alu, but when I set it up for 1.0mm wire and cranked it up I had a wee chuckle as it said it would do up to 14mm, aye right

Ok so back to the 0.9 settings and set it for 6mm and I grabbed a bit of 6mm from the scrap pile and gave it a blast, it was far too hot, I couldn't believe it. So I had a few more practice runs winding it down a bit at a time and 5.2mm seemed to be pretty good. I then fetched a new bit of 6mm Alu and did a run on the surface and then I welded a bit of 3" x 3/16" wall box to the plate as well.
I was very impressed, pic below.

I decided to etch it and see what it was like.

Looks pretty good to me especially from such a small welder.

The bad points for me are that it can not be used with a push pull or a spool gun although the latter may be possible if I take it out of pulsed mode. I will be trying it later on with the slightly longer (I think 2.5 or 3m) that Tom sent with it and if that is ok I will try it with the 4m MB36 I have.
I will also get some 1mm wire and see how it performs with that but on first quick testing it is looking promising.
If all goes well with the next lot of testing I will almost certainly be keeping it as a standby welder and will likely use it when in the workshop. I may also see about getting a 6m Kemppi Weld Snake torch as that would really extend its capabilities for the work I do, still not ideal as a push-pull would be better but as a standby welder it would be fine.

 

[Hood]

Forgot to say there are 3 trigger options with the welder, 2T, 4T and what they call 3L. The latter is the same as I use with the EWM, you pull the trigger and you get the pre flow, the wire starts and arcs then goes to Hot start current, once you have enough of the Hot Start you release the trigger and it drops to the main current and then when you want to end you pull the trigger again and it drops to crater fill and once you release the trigger the arc stops and you get the post flow. Very impressed that it has that feature as I thought only the high end welders such as the Phoenix had that.

 

[Hood]

Tom has just informed me that the torch I was using was one he had set up for testing the last day and it is 2.2m long, the Parker is 3m and is the one that comes with the Cebora.

 

[HughF]

Awesome, I saw one in person at Mach and really liked the look of it. You’re the first person I know who has run one in the flesh...

Much more portable than the nearest competitor (picomig pulse 180) without the unnecessary mig/tig functions.

Oh for that cebora sound 2035m that was for sale recently with push-pull...

 

[Hood]

Awesome, I saw one in person at Mach and really liked the look of it. You’re the first person I know who has run one in the flesh...

Much more portable than the nearest competitor (picomig pulse 180) without the unnecessary mig/tig functions.

Oh for that cebora sound 2035m that was for sale recently with push-pull...

Can't remember what happened with that, did it go too high or?

 

[HughF]

Can't remember what happened with that, did it go too high or?

It went for 700 notes, I forgot about the damn auction...

There’s a genuine cebora pushpull torch on the bay at the moment, and the mysterious cebora jaw-feed which is like a separate wire feeder in a metal box. Search for cebora and they’ll come up.

 

[Hood]

I saw the push pull, it is no use with the pocket pulse though.
Another bad thing is I found out even on the bigger sets if you shove on the Cebora push pull you get limited to 160Amps as that is all they are rated to, or at least I think I read that
Also they are only 4m which is a shame.

Never saw the wire feeder thing, will go and look but likely it won't work with the Pocket Pulse anyway or at least not in synergic pulse mode.

 

[HughF]

I saw the push pull, it is no use with the pocket pulse though.
Another bad thing is I found out even on the bigger sets if you shove on the Cebora push pull you get limited to 160Amps as that is all they are rated to, or at least I think I read that
Also they are only 4m which is a shame.

Never saw the wire feeder thing, will go and look but likely it won't work with the Pocket Pulse anyway or at least not in synergic pulse mode.

I’ve found the manual for the jaw-feed, it’s cebora’s Version of a snake feeder, kind of an in-line add-a-feeder thingy. Very simple wiring, needs a driver board for motor speed if you wanted to build a feeder from it.

 

[Hood]

I’ve found the manual for the jaw-feed, it’s cebora’s Version of a snake feeder, kind of an in-line add-a-feeder thingy. Very simple wiring, needs a driver board for motor speed if you wanted to build a feeder from it.

I saw it on eBay but don't think it would work at all with the Pocket Pulse. I think my best chance is a Kemppi Weld Snake, only thing I worry about is maybe the wire feed will not be good enough being as it is only 2 roll which is definitely a bad point compared to a PicoMig.
This is really just a standby welder for me though with possibly it getting also used in the workshop instead of the EWM, later on in the year I hope to be able to afford a new pulse Mig to replace the Phoenix.

 

[Hood]

I am officially a plonker, a halfwit, a ..... well many more things.
I connected up the Cebora again, removed the 0.8mm wire and fitted a 0.5Kg reel of 1mm. the reel fits no problem but you can't fit the tensioner part as it just turns with the reel and locks up so I had to just let the reel sit there which was not the best as the wire was getting loose and jumped over the edge quite a few times. I will have to make up a sleeve of some sort to keep the tension on but the locknut solid.
The feed roller also only goes up to 0.9mm which is a bit strange as there seems to be one with 0.6 and 0.8mm and the other is 0.9 on both grooves, I also think they are likely vee grooves rather than U grooves for Alu. So obviously these two things weren't going to make life easy.

I then put a teflon liner in the 4M MB36 torch and chopped up some bits of 10mm plate and went to set up the synergic line and that was when I discovered I was thicker than the thickest thing you can think of
I had previously said the Cebora reckoned it could do 14mm but I had been looking at the wire feed speed The true max is actually 6mm in the programme.
As I had 10mm chopped up I thought what the heck I might as well see what it does and it actually did a bit better than I thought it would. I was having feed issues, I think more due to the wire not being held properly and jumping the reel and the wrong size rollers but I did manage to do a few beads before I headed home.

A few pics of the welds and the etches.

A couple of runs flat on the plate.

I reckon it would handle 1/4" no problem, possibly even as much as 8mm but 10mm was beyond its capabilities, still quite impressive for such a small welder.

 

[Tom Orrow L]

Looks like I need to get you some 1MM rollers and a 5KG 1MM 5356

 

[Hood]

The 1mm rollers would be good but I reckon I should be able to make up a sleeve to stop the nut fully tightening onto the small reels. I was just too knackered today to have a right look at things.

 

[Hood]

If I get a chance tomorrow I think I will hook up the spool gun and see how it works with that. My thinking is the Pocket Pulse may not actually be altering the wire feed speed like my EWM does during the pulsing but rather just pulsing the current, if that is the case then the spool gun should work fine, all I will have to do is dial in the thickness on the Pocket Pulse and then adjust the wire feed on the spool gun to suit.
It would still not be a perfect situation as just altering the wire feed on the spool gun for different thicknesses wouldn't alter the welder so that would also have to be adjusted at the same time as the spool gun but it would still allow a fair amount of freedom when welding which would be a bonus.

 

[Hood]

Well I tried with the spool gun and the first thing that happened when I switched on, and after its initialisation, it came up with an Inverter Fault (10) message. I switched off but it stayed on informing me it was powering down but didn't
I then hauled the plug then powered up again and the same so next time I removed the spool gun Euro connector and it started fine so there was a sigh of relief from me. I then decided to try again but this time I removed the wire from the spool guns control box which goes to the work clamp and it powered up fine, I then connected the wire back and it was still fine so it looks like when powering up it is detecting the circuit to the work clamp and thinking there is an internal fault.

Ok so that issue out of the way I decided to give it a go, took a wee bit of messing but I got it working.
First pic is 1/4" Angle, bit of an issue with the gas coverage but otherwise it went reasonably well.

Next I tried with some 1/8" angle and again a bit of messing to get the wire feed right but once I got there it again went ok and by this time there was no shielding gas issue, I think maybe I just needed to turn up the flow a bit for the heavier welds.

So on to the saw and chop them then a quick polish and etch, the 1/8" one didn't turn out very well and although I can see it has good penetration the camera didn't pick it up very well.

The 1/4 inch however came out nicely.

The spool gun is not ideal as I have to use it in 2T mode and there is no crater fill etc but at least I know it works even though it is not what I would normally choose to use with the Cebora.

 

[Hood]

I was welding up some funnels for the hopper today and as the EWM was still in the car I decided to load the 0.8mm wire into the Cebora and give that a go on an actual job rather than just test pieces.
I also fitted a teflon liner to the Parker torch to see how it performed.
Things didn't go as well as I hoped the wire feed was a bit poor at times and I ended up melting a couple of contact tips and also the nozzle

The liner was a 1.0-1.2mm one so not ideal so whether this was the reason I was having feed problems or maybe the 3m length of torch was just too much for the 0.8mm wire I am not sure.

I then put the smaller torch on that Tom sent and things were back to normal and I got the job done. It has a blue liner in it so is meant for 0.8mm wire so whether it is that or just the shorter length that made the difference or even it could be a combination of both.

I will have to try and make up a sleeve to hold the 0.5Kg 1.0mm spools and try that with the longer torch, I was up getting Argon this morning and should have got a few spares for the small torches but I forgot

 

[HughF]

That outside corner looks good

 

[Hood]

That outside corner looks good

A bit wobbly, taking bad with the tiny lightweight torch
Only thing is if I can't get a longer torch working then sadly it is not going to be for me, fine for workshop use but not for out and about on boats

 

[Richard.]

I hate to say it hood but that little box of tricks has put down some of the neatest alu mig I’ve seen in a long time. The results look neater than the ones I’ve seen you do with the ewm.
Those last 5 pics of welds look fabulous mate.

 

[Hood]

It is a lovely wee welder, shame it can't take a push-pull and is not just a tad more on the top end.
I think the EWM puts down a neater weld personally but........
If I can get it working with a 4m torch then I will almost certainly be keeping it, so far however I have been struggling. Then again, as mentioned above, there have been other factors such as wrong liner and small spool not being fitted properly which are certainly not helping. I am hoping when I get a chance to get them sorted it will perform well with the 4m Torch and and 1mm wire.

 

[Tom Orrow L]

Rollers, tips and liner should be on its way to you