Tattoo Machine Troubleshooting

If you’re having problems with your clip cord and you don’t know what it is, it just doesn't seem to work, you want to check your clip cord for problems. You can do the same thing with your foot-switch. You have to take apart the footswitch. You don’t want to do that though. It’s the same concept. This is the, basically, two wires running into this jack right? These two wires go to two leads. The first lead is going to be right here. The second lead is right here. We end up on the other end with two leads as well. One is right here. One is right here. All it is, is a wire running all the way down, inside here, and ending right here. It’s a circuit.
We’re going to complete the circuit. With this open, these two wires, one here and one here. These two leads are not touching each other. They’re open. We can see that by attaching our multimeter when it’s in continuity mode, which continuity just check to see if the circuit is touching. We can actually take these two leads and touch them together. We can see that the multimeter’s changing. Some multimeters will have a tone. They’ll beep. This one just changes. You can see some resistance on the display. It’s telling you that something’s happening. There’s a little bit of a play with the current. If I put this on to my clip cord here, then I can see that there is nothing happening. That’s because this end is open. Nothing should be happening.

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If we take a piece of aluminum foil and wrap it around our clip cord, just around the plug, and make sure it just hits where these two lead that I showed you are, we’re now bridging them together. This becomes a looped circuit. These two, when you touch them together, are going to create some sort of continuity. You can see now that it does. That means that our circuit is good.
If one of these wires had a break in it somewhere or a tear, we would not get any continuity but by touching the leads together with this shorted out, that’s a quick way to check your continuity on the wire. If you don’t understand what any of this just was, then you need to search on the Internet for continuity and wire testing with the multimeter. Most multimeters that you purchase will come with an instruction manual that will tell you exactly how to do that. You can check your own foot-switch. You can check your own clip cord. You can save yourself a little bit of cash by buying expensive or high-quality clip cords and high-quality foot pedals. You’re not scared to invest in them that they’re going to break or wear out. You can easily repair them yourself. You can keep them going for 10, 20 years. You can have the same clip cord.

Here’s a tip that goes in the tool tips thing. I always recommend that you buy an extra clip cord and an extra footswitch, just a cheap one, because if you have them on standby while you’re tattooing and something happens, you know you got ….

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Checking Gaps on the Machine prior to tattooing.
Thumb screw stays tightening with locking screw
it is kind of hard because plastic or nylon, not going to hurt if it is plastic or nylon, but electricity is running thought he frame.
Will give you a little zap – getting electrocuted is not important compared to the movement of the actual contact screw moving during the actual tattoo and the machine is running worse and worse.
This is not from dirt or worn down – just moved and if you did not the good gap you have to lock the screw with a little notch, use a rear spring from another machine – tighten like that. Replace w/ a metal screw.
Metal screw will damage threads...
tight tight tight
keep it consistent.