Welding cable: rope-stranded lead from 1/0 to 4/0

Stranding is the whole design

Welding cable is a single flexible conductor made of very fine strands, rope-laid in concentric groups so the whole conductor bends without work-hardening at one point. The stranding classes run finer than building wire by a wide margin, which is why the cable can be coiled over an arm, dragged across a floor and flexed thousands of times without the copper breaking.

The jacket is a thermoset rubber, EPDM or a chlorinated polyethylene, formulated for abrasion, oil and ozone. It is thicker than a building wire jacket and it is not printed with a building-wire type, because welding cable is not a wiring method for premises. It is a flexible lead, and the reel tag says so.

1/0 through 4/0 and the length of a lead

The common sizes are 1/0, 2/0, 3/0 and 4/0, with smaller sizes down to 6 AWG for light work. A welding lead set is a pair: an electrode lead and a work lead, cut to the length of the shop or the reach of the job, with a lug crimped at each end. Twenty-five feet is a bench set, fifty is a bay, and a hundred is a yard.

Because the leads are cut to length, most used welding cable arrives as finished lengths with lugs on them rather than as reel stock. That changes the review. A fifty-foot lead with sound lugs is a usable lead. The same cable with the lugs cut off is footage. Both are worth handling, but they are not the same lot and should not be described as one.

What a forging shop does to a lead

Canton and the surrounding Stark County shops run welding as a production step, not a repair. Leads lie on the floor of a crane bay, get run over by carts, spattered with spatter, pinched in fixtures and dragged over the edge of a steel table. The failures show up as flat spots where the jacket has thinned to the conductor, as scorch marks where spatter burned through, and as a stiff section where the copper has been bent at the same radius for years.

Maintenance departments in every sector produce the same cable in smaller quantities. A lead that fails a visual inspection is replaced and the old one goes in the scrap barrel, which is often already holding short cut-offs and burned stubs.

What to declare

The two questions that decide a welding cable lot are whether the jacket is intact over its full length and whether the ends are still terminated. Everything else is secondary. Stubs under ten feet are counted on their own, because they serve as jumpers or as scrap and nothing in between.

• Size as printed, and the stranding class if it is legible
• Length of each lead, measured rather than estimated
• Whether lugs are crimped on and in what condition
• Jacket damage: flat spots, spatter burns, cuts to the conductor
• Kept apart from burned stubs and short cut-offs