Hello rtnnhazel, as Lawrence conveyed to you, the use of the magnetic ground attachment can be highly detrimental to arc stability, go to a standard clamp system. I believe the other issue for you is the cleanliness issue, whenever TIG welding, the joints have to be ABSOLUTELY clean, one of the other responders to this thread said that as well. Quite some time ago I was following a conversation on a particular topic where GMAW and TIG were being compared, an interesting point came up, with the wire process, the filler metal, due to the use of DCEP current concentrates the majority of the heat at the end of the wire where it is melted and then transferred to the base metal, this causes very minimal dilution of the base metal, thus the cleanliness of the base metal has a lesser effect on the finished weld in some ways. The TIG process on the otherhand utilizes DCEN current, in this case the heat is concentrated in the base metal and provides the heat to melt the base metal and melt the filler rod to form the weld bead. Because of this, the base metal has more dilution with the filler metal and also requires the base metal to be much cleaner. I hope this explanation somewhat explains why you may be having some of the difficulties you are experiencing, as you aren't able to clean the weld joints as they probably should be cleaned in some cases. The balling of the filler rod can possibly be caused by a couple of things, if the torch angle is laid back too far you may be directing too much heat towards the end of the rod causing the balling. If you don't quite withdraw the rod away from the weld pool quite far enough when dabbing the filler rod this can also occur, care must be taken though when withdrawing the rod from the pool, if you are using a dabbing motion take care not to withdraw it too far, this will cause oxidation of the end of the filler wire and upon adding the rod back into the pool will introduce this as a contaminant into the weld pool. As much as I hate to say it you may want to consider a different welding process on certain parts of this work, especially if you can't clean the parts correctly. Best regards, aevald