It has been many years since I have welded - remember the 1/8 rod? I need to do some light duty welding and have considered a wire feed welder, it needs to run on 120, no 220 available but I know little about them - - - the work will be 1/8 or less in thickness
Terry
With light duty arc welders, you can go a few inches then you have to wait for the welder to cool off then you can proceed. Sometimes the start and stop yeilds a poor quality weld. It depends on what you need.
There are stick welders (that uses 1/8" rod) and there are wire-feed welders (that use much smaller wire). A 120-volt wire-feed welder using
0.030 wire should do nicely with 1/8" or thinner mild steel. I have used only flux-cored wire which does not need shielding gas and leaves a slight powder residue. It's more expensive for the wire, but there's no need for a flow meter and gas bottle. Both Miller and Lincoln sell these units which weigh about 60-70 pounds. Mine rides around in a child's wagon since the unit does not come with wheels.Yes, the small 120-volt wire-feed welders only have a 20 percent duty cycle (2 minutes out of 10) but I have never had to wait for it to "cool down". Most weld beads only take 10 seconds or less to join the metal at one point, then the next weld takes time to set up and reposition the parts. Long beads are good candidates for burnthrough or heat distortion, so short beads put less heat into the part.
Wire feed, also known as MIG (at least over here), are very easy to use and produce a most satisfying smooth weld - taught myself welding in a couple of days (I had mates who could weld to watch). Never got the hang of rod welding.
Being in the UK, I have no idea of 120V units, apart from they're probably going to need >20A (perhaps as much as 25A) to be much use based on the rating of the 240V unit I had.
The unit I bought was made by Cebora - very good for a cheap end unit.
I would recommend googling for some reviews. Poor MIGs have erratic wire feed (real pain), poor duty cycle (cuts out after 6" of welding), poor controls. Good wire feed and decent duty cycle are a must. You should be able to control the wire speed and current consistently.
Don't bother with the silly disposable CO2 bottles - rent a proper gas bottle if you can (you'll need to buy a valve with gauges too, so that's a bit extra on top of the welder) - a small bottle (2' tall or so) will last a fair time before refilling. There are fancy gas mixes available, but I found plain CO2 worked fine on a range of mild steel jobs.
The beauty of MIGs is that they work very well on thin sheet, like car panels, without blowing holes. If you are planning to go upto 1/8" it would be advisable to check the specs carefully, some small units might struggle.
HTH
Tim (in the UK)
stay away from hobart mig machines.....
anyhow...get a mig machine...a good one...140 amp or so......flux cored wire is ok .....get a grinder and a wire brush attachement for the grinder.......
I'll be the first to ask the obvious and most important questions before I give you a bunch of useless advice:
What exactly is it that you are going to weld? How much of it?
Steve
I'm just the opposite. I can stick weld most anything. When I tried to use a wirefeed welder all I did was make a mess. The trick to stick welding is using the proper rod type and adjusting the power. The disadvantage of stick welding is that it's near impossible to weld thin sheet steel. I should mention, the one time I tried the wirefeed welder, I was welding 3/16 thick angle iron. Much too thick for that welder, if you ask me. It was a small 120V model, and the wire seemed to come out either too fast or too slow. I suppose practice helps, but the welder seemed to not want to cooperate. For that thick of steel, a stick welder would have been much better, not to mention the cost. I could have done that job with 5 welding rods (a cost of 75 cents). Instead I used half of a $15 roll of flux core welding wire. (7.50). So, it appears that it costs about 10 times as much to use a wirefeed welder. Maybe it's better on thin materials for cost, but I was not impressed with the cost or the weld quality of the wire feed on that thicker steel.
Mark
Like most guys in shop class *many* years ago, I got started with stick welding... Never was *great* with it, but I could weld well enough that the weld joint didn't break on those projects around the ranch when a 2500 lb bull decided that he could climb over the metal fence that I had just built... I tried using one of the wire feed welders on some 1/2" and 3/4" 16-gauge square tubing a couple of years ago and found it to be quite a bit messy... Seems that I either got quite a bit of splatter or a quite a bit of short pieces of wire stuck to the weld... Never could seem to get the wire speed adjusted exactly right... Maybe if I had stuck with it, I would have finally gotten the hang of it, but I just switched back to gas welding (oxy-acetylene welding, not brazing)... The ranch work that I had done was with one of the old Lincoln SA200 DC units...
SA200 welders were supposed to be extremely good welders.
iYes, I have been reluctant to try wire feed welders even back in the late
70's when it was TIG that is my dilema now.... TerryI love my little Lincoln 110v flux core Mig. It was $500.00. Its idiot proof. Pull the trigger and go. Never needed gas.
It tacks thin sheet and does a great job on 1/4 inch as well.
(I used it to weld shock mounts on a 1975 landcruiser 10 years ago for off roading - with no trouble yet)
A buddy had a mastercraft unit - I tried it once and hated it. (The feed was sticky)
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