Welder question

[Rob]

I'm looking to upgrade to a better wire feed welder and I'm hoping for a little knowledgeable advice. I currently use a little Mastercraft wirefeed 70amp which is OK for small stuff and tacking pieces together but I need to do some light fabrication (i.e. welding square tube or angle iron) and some sheet metal repair work (similar to rover chassis material or lighter) and I plan to run gas (probably argon/co2 mix). CT has their "version" of a Lincoln mig 180 on sale these days for $599 and they also have their mastercraft brand inverter welders on sale for a similar price (~$550). I am wondering if anyone here is currently using any of these or similar welders and recommend one over the other? Is the MC inverter really any better than the Lincoln for my purposes?

Cheers, Rob

[punkinracer]

Rob, stay away from that crap! You would be much better off finding a used brand name one than those. Gas is the only way to go, Praxair has a good co2/Argon mix called starshield an it is a good all around shielding gas. They have some good deals on small Miller welders as well. If you can run a 220v welder you will much better off, or you will find yourself in a shoulda woulda situation down the road. Come by and use mine sometime to see how much of a difference there is.

Thanks,
Pat

[mepham55]

I bought a Lincoln 140amp welder for my rebuild. It worked fine for all the frame welding and smaller patch jobs I had to do. I just used the flux core wire as well and as long as the metal is clean it worked fine. Here's a link to some pics:
http://www.series2club.co.uk/forum/foru ... #msg144559

Matt

[Rob]

Thanks for the advice everyone... I can run 220 in my garage so I am starting to think about going that direction or possibly a dual power 110/220v unit (something like a Lincoln 180 "C"). I appreciate the responses and thoughts. Cheers, Rob

[Greg S]

I bought a Lincoln 120v wire feed, flux core welder. It worked okay but could have been better if I had added the gas adapter kit. I wound up using the neighbours 220v wire feed with gas. It had trouble welding small stuff. It simply couldn't get cool enough to weld 12 and 14 gauge, so be careful you don't go too big. $12 a month for bottle rental can get pretty heavy after a while too.

[sailourboy]

You can also buy a gas bottle from KMS or I would think pretty much any full service welding supplier. At $12/month would only take a year or 2 to pay for it depending on the size you wanted.
Cheers
ted

[tony]

Too big a welder you cant buy, a local welding shop told me if you want to weld thin material you must use thin wire (.023) and the gas helps out as well flux core gets too hot, even if the wire is thin. Thick wire gets hotter and gives you better penetration in thicker material.

[BOlson]

personally I have a Miller 251 mig welder that will weld pretty much anything up to 1/2" thick , but for the metal thickness on the " average " rover repair a lincoln or miller 220 volt 175 amp wirefeed machine would be just fine ...... what you really gain by going to a KMS or welding shop machine from the home depot/crappy tire machines is that they tend to use better materials in the things you cant see like wire drives and transformer wiring on the " real " machines

look up Weldingtipsandtricks on youtube for really helpful advice on MIG welding and some machine reviews too

[swamijake]

I bought an old 3 phase miller cp-200 unit for cheap and converted it to 240 single phase following directions from here : http://www.practicalmachinist.com/vb/tr ... se-199832/

It will pump out 200 amps all day long or turn right down to do fiddly stuff. It really didn't cost much and works very well.

As for flux core vs gas, gas is almost always better. Here are the only times I can think of for flux core:

Outside and windy (gas blows away)
Manky old metal that you can't grind clean
Super thick plate and you need some extra penetration
You ran out of gas

[swamijake]

I bought an old 3 phase miller cp-200 unit for cheap and converted it to 240 single phase following directions from here : [url]http://www.practicalmachinist.com/vb/tr ... se-199832/[/url]

It will pump out 200 amps all day long or turn right down to do fiddly stuff. It really didn't cost much and works very well.

As for flux core vs gas, gas is almost always better. Here are the only times I can think of for flux core:

Outside and windy (gas blows away)
Manky old metal that you can't grind clean
Super thick plate and you need some extra penetration
You ran out of gas