![]() For instance my MIG (Esab Smashweld 250) was a gift, as 'broken', but was easy to fix. If you keep a lookout, you can likely get a very good second hand industrial welder of whatever type you decide you need, for relatively little cash. With a MIG, a TIG (different gas needed), and an oxy set, the yearly cost for those four gas cylinders dwarfs all my other yearly running costs together. You can only rent them, and that's expensive. Here in Australia it's not possible to purchase the cylinders to achieve zero 'idle' cost. Professional MIG machines are very nice, with the downside of having to pay rental on a gas cylinder. I second the 'leave it alone, use it to learn, and then someday buy a better one if you need it' comments. It also slowly disintegrates some types of cloth. Oh and btw, the arc UV doesn't just burn exposed skin. Wear high sided full-leather boots, full trousers, and leather jacket and gloves. Even worse is it burning through your plastic sneakers and sock. Cuts 1/4 steel plate like a hot knife going through butter. The very coolest tool in this space has got to be a plasma cutter. The Miller can run 150A at 100% duty cycle all day. On the top range you could only weld 1 minute out of 5 or the transformer thermal cutout would cut off. Other than the duty cycle, it works pretty well now. By the time I finished, it was a pretty good welder and had performance comparable to a large Millermatic 250 MIG, which I have since acquired. I also ended up replacing the rectifiers and adding a filter cap or two. On mine, I threw out the entire wire feed unit and built a new one from scratch, throwing in a bunch of extra features like post feed gas timeout, a gas purge switch and a wire feed jog. The low end machines actually work pretty well, all things considered, but kind of fall down when you push toward the high end of their capacity. Basically, the cheap machines cut corners on feed mechanisms and copper in the transformer, heatsinking, power rating of semiconductors, etc. They used a fairly basic motor speed control based on back emf, but the speed varied with the selected voltage. That was a major disaster, the feed roll was eccentric which caused the wire feed speed to vary up and down. A number of years ago, before HF was all over the place, I bought a MIG welder from Northern Tool.
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