About Switchklip

Our story

Switchklip was started by Landon LaRocque, a working TIG welder. Like every other welder running a remote HF start button on his torch, Landon was cycling through $25 momentary switches every few weeks. The switch would start firing intermittently, then die, and he’d order another. Tape, zip ties, repeat. The replacement cycle was just baked into the cost of doing business.

One afternoon at the bench he pulled the tape off a freshly dead switch and looked at the housing. There were oval-shaped indentations where the zip tie had been compressing the body. Cracking the housing open showed exactly what he expected: the internal printed circuit board had been taking the load every time the zip tie tightened. The switch wasn’t worn out from use — it had been crushed from the outside in. (For the full failure mechanism walk-through see why your TIG torch switch keeps failing.)

That was the moment Switchklip started. If the switches were dying because of how they were mounted, the fix wasn’t a better switch — it was a better way to mount the switch. So he engineered one.

The engineering rationale

The Button Clip GTAW grips the switch at its outer body geometry only. Where tape and zip ties wrap around the entire housing and apply compressive force through it into the PCB, the clip’s cradle holds the switch externally and leaves the housing un-squeezed. The internal mechanism is stress-free. The switch lasts the way the manufacturer designed it to.

On top of that, the clip allows full 360° rotation around the torch handle, so you can re-position the button mid-job without re-mounting. For pipe welders rolling around a 5G or 6G joint, that single feature is the install win. (See TIG button vs foot pedal for why this matters in pipe and out-of-position work.)

The clip is sized to fit standard TIG torch handle outer diameters across the major brands — Miller / Weldcraft, Lincoln Electric, Fronius, CK Worldwide — in three buckets that match the industry-standard Series 9, 17, and 26 air-cooled torch handles.

Manufacturing & sourcing

The Button Clip GTAW is manufactured to spec from materials rated for TIG shop conditions — heat, spatter, daily handling, glove abuse. We’re a small team and we keep the supply chain short on purpose: it lets us iterate on the design when welders tell us what they need.

We don’t make the OEM switches themselves — those come from Radnor, American Torch Tip, EWS Pro, and the established torch-supply industry. We make the clip that holds them in place without killing them.

Why we built this

Most welding accessories are designed by people who don’t weld. You can tell by the way they don’t solve real problems — they solve marketing problems. Switchklip is the opposite. The Button Clip GTAW exists because a welder looked at a real failure on his real torch and engineered a real fix.

If you’ve been replacing button switches and assuming that was just the cost of TIG, this is for you. Stop replacing switches. Mount your existing one properly and let it last.

What we’re working on next

We’re a single-product company today. We’ve got a list of welder-shop accessories we want to make — every one driven by the same rule: real problem, real engineering answer. If you’ve got a welder-tool idea you wish someone built, send it our way via the contact page.