In the past month while I've been doing some welding, I noticed my (auto-darkening) welding helmet had occasionally not been working properly at what I thought was random times, not darkening properly and giving me a few quick arc flashes. Luckily it didn't give me any eye flash burns but I figured out that it was flashing me when welding in specific positions where one sensor (it has two sensors) was blocked from the welding arc so one of the sensors was faulty.
Your eyesight is absolutely not something to mess around with and I had no hesitation in halting all welding activities until I could replace the helmet with a new one. With auto-darkening helmets being very affordable, there is no excuse to get a new helmet if you think your helmet is faulty.
Here in Australia, you can source a good quality helmet suitable for home use for around $100-150 (trade quality, not professional). I was lucky enough to find one that was on sale from $135 down to $89. It has FOUR sensors, and the standard features of auto-darkening in 1/30,000sec, grind mode, variable 9-13 shade, battery backup.
Although I had no choice on design for the helmet that was on sale, I do like this one. My old vs new helmet :
One small mod that I made before using it was to fit some material over the top/rear of the helmet. When I am welding at night and looking down at the workbench, the fluorescent lights sometimes cast light into the helmet, washing out the inside of the helmet and making it harder to see what I'm welding. I found some scrap curtain black out material that we had in a sewing box and attached it to the helmet with some velcro tabs to stop light entering the helmet.
After a few uses, the optical clarity seem better than the old one and everything else seems to work as expected.
Your eyesight is absolutely not something to mess around with and I had no hesitation in halting all welding activities until I could replace the helmet with a new one. With auto-darkening helmets being very affordable, there is no excuse to get a new helmet if you think your helmet is faulty.
Here in Australia, you can source a good quality helmet suitable for home use for around $100-150 (trade quality, not professional). I was lucky enough to find one that was on sale from $135 down to $89. It has FOUR sensors, and the standard features of auto-darkening in 1/30,000sec, grind mode, variable 9-13 shade, battery backup.
Although I had no choice on design for the helmet that was on sale, I do like this one. My old vs new helmet :
One small mod that I made before using it was to fit some material over the top/rear of the helmet. When I am welding at night and looking down at the workbench, the fluorescent lights sometimes cast light into the helmet, washing out the inside of the helmet and making it harder to see what I'm welding. I found some scrap curtain black out material that we had in a sewing box and attached it to the helmet with some velcro tabs to stop light entering the helmet.
After a few uses, the optical clarity seem better than the old one and everything else seems to work as expected.
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