welding lead roller

[jniolon]

OK guys... I know some of you have figured this out... help me....

I work for a industrial piping contractor doing commercial/industrial piping and maintenance... lots of our work is outage work in steel mills, plants etc. We tool up and trailer everything we can imagine using to the site nice and neat... but when it returns to the shop it's one tangled nasty mess all thrown in the trailers. wet...dry...greasy...broken...smashed.

One of the jobs I hate is untangling and rerolling welding leads... sometimes hundreds of feet of heavy 2/0 to 4/0 welding leads that are kinked, twisted and heavy. Mostly we roll up as best we can and lay it on pallets... but it wastes a lot of space...

I'm looking to make a welding lead roller where you can stick one end of the lead on the spool, wind it up neatly in a compact package, tape or cable tie it together and the REMOVE it from the roller for storage... preferably like a roll of garden hose at the home depot

I know they sell them and they are expensive... this needs to be a shop fabbed project to save money. Doesn't have to be powered...can be manually turned... fairlead would be nice but not absolutely necessary...

so ?? who's got pictures/plans/ideas

thanks

John

[Hotfoot]

I imagine "hundreds of feet" of 2.0 and 4.0 leads will make for any kind of handy little hand crank reel. The gear reduction required to handle that weight would make such a reel very slow, so I'd say a motor driven reel is going to be your solution.

Designing one will be easy enough if you study the existing ones out there...but in the end, your employer will probably save by buying one already made over paying your time and experimentation expense.

[Rocky D]

This might give you some ideas. It is how we stored 440v extension cable on our portable welders.

The first is a Miller 300a TIG on a water cooler



This is our 500a Hobart Mega Arc stick machine. On both reels, the end of the plug is mounted into the disk, and the other pays out. Then you plug the pigtail from the machine into the reel. Some reels had 300 feet on them, cuz the 440 outlets were few and far between in the plant.