Millermatic 30A conversion to fast-tips from old style

Date 10-12-2011 00:50

Hello everyone, I had an older Millermatic 30A, it used the slip in tips that required that funky little spanner wrench that I always seemed to misplace when I needed it to change a tip. Some time ago I notice that Miller changed the nozzle assembly on the front end of the 30A, to the much simpler and as far as I am concerned, much better, fast tip configuration. After some thought and contemplation I decided that there had to be a reasonably simple way to modify the old configuration to accept the new. This was also prodded by the nearly $150 dollar price tag for the upgraded version available through Miller. I have included some pictures of the old/new scenario that I came up with. Cost: $4.00 for a 1/4" NPT brass nipple and use of the standard front end parts for the new configuration and the special silicon bronze wire guide. I hope that I can post these pictures in chronological order to somewhat show and explain what was required. This also required drilling and tapping the old aluminum rear section to accept the 1/4" NPT brass nipple. Hope you enjoy and best regards, Allan

By Tyrone

Date 10-12-2011 10:25

Very cool!
Tyrone

By qcrobert (***)

Date 10-12-2011 11:53

I respect your ingenuity!

By weldwade (***)

Date 10-20-2011 22:35

Allen, I am doing the very same thing. I am still looking for someone to do the machine work that wont charge me too much. Thanks for posting this up, it will sure take all the work out of it for me!

By aevald

Date 10-20-2011 23:59

Hello Wade, I hope that you can get enough information from the photos to get yourself to a successful changeover. You'll note where I parted off the front portion of the old aluminum endpiece, that dimension was based on using the length of the particular 4" brass nipple that I was able to purchase at the local plumbing supply. So, you might have some slight dimensional differences due to your particular supplier and the overall length of the 4" nipple that you come up with. Any differences there should be able to be addressed when you cut the silcon-bronze liner to fit, if you even have to.
There may be one additional benefit to doing this as well, if you are a user of "Centerfire" consumables, nozzles, and diffusers, they can be just as easily adapted onto this set-up as the internal threads for the diffusers are the same. So you have other options than just the "Fast tips", as a matter of fact, Bernard diffusers could be screwed on too, don't know about Twecos though. Good luck and best regards, Allan

By weldwade (***)

Date 10-23-2011 19:46 Edited 10-23-2011 21:14

I use the roughneck guns on all my other feeders, they are fastip. I have a flex nozzle on one of my 30A's and it uses the fastip. I want to change everything over so I can easily keep stock. I have a full time job tues-friday. Sat-monday I am usually working at my shop and even in the fairly large city of tucson there is no place to buy consumables on the weekend. So I need to keep everything I will need on hand. This can get expensive and a real pain to deal with! I am lucky to have good customers that understand what it takes for me to get them back up and running at 100%. It is also nice to have my oldest son that can pick up material etc for me during the week.

Now I just need to make the time to get this project completed. Holidays are coming up so I will have time to get it torn down and modified. Thanks for the pics and explanation Allen it gives me the blueprint to get mine done.