Welding machines and welding stuff

[Wapiti]

I am wondering what you blokes use when you make stuff around the home or farm, maybe even as a job?
Was just thinking about this topic, because I know there are a lot of blokes who'd love to be able to get into welding, and wonder what is useful or would do the job they are wanting to do. And get their purchases right the first time too.

I'd be stuffed without being able to weld, being a steel guy since I was 15. So many routine things to get done or to fix, things dreamed up that can become a reality too with some spare time.

Not so much industrial stuff, but what you guys (that dabble in it) find do it for you.
Stuff that's easy to use, maybe easily available, machine perhaps, welding consumables that are forgiving, even examples of your work to spruce the place up a bit.
Anybody game to show what they've been doing, or made, or use?
Welding machines, wire, gas or gasless, a mega-solid reloading bench with a 6mm top and SHS frame, a trailer, a gate frame, a go-kart for the kids?
Do kids even use go-karts now?
Because there's heaps of guys out there that would love to get into it, but just don't want some hardware salesperson recommending something because "we sell heaps of this mate so they must be good" sort of stuff.

[No1Mk3]

150A stick welder, 90% of what you want to do around the house, can run off a half decent gennie in the field, wide enough choice of rods for ferritic steels, stainless, cast iron. I use oxy-acetylene for everything else. Somebody starting may find gasless mig a better choice, during my years as a Fitter/Turner I seldom used mig but did a lot of tig, better results and easier than gas welding alloys, I understand some low cost mig machines these days offer a tig option as well. My suggestion for anyone wanting to start at a hobby level is to attend a local TAFE course or your nearest Mens Shed, a lot of assistance can be found there.

[Fester]

I was also a steel guy, a first-year apprentice Fitter at 16 years old.
Only did the tech basics and wasn't a good welder until later years, when I had no choice but to learn.
A big broken machine shaft would never last the shift out unless Ved and welded well with LHdrgn rods.

A good sheety mate, who ended up a welder, taught me to do proper rust repairs on our old cars (now classics)
worth a fortune.
Gasless had only just been invented, and I bought a small CIG mig that was near too heavy to carry.
Gassles was too sparky to use on the cars, and small bottles were cheap to rent back then.
I waited, and waited for those tiny inverter arc welders to become affordable in the next size up from the small 100AMP units.
Eventually got an Italian 120AMP unit for about $500 at Total Tools.

Although a mig is great for sheet and thin stuff, I chucked mine, as I can do near anything with the tiny, light, easy-handling arc welder.
Just pinched brand-new sets of leads from work, before the contractor trashed them, should have pinched a new welder, but everyone beat me to them, before the contractors killed them by dropping them into hoppers and crap.
Leads don't work as ropes when they fall out.

One good contractor who actually used his own tools, as they were supposed to, lent me his when the bad contractors wrecked our 3 small welders and told no one.
It had that soft start feature, and so smooth to use.
The best small unit that I ever used, but they are all throwaway; when they fail, it seems.
Even if fixable, it would be cheaper to buy a new on now-days.

I can do nothing without 240V availability, and I have NFI what you blokes set up in utes for power.
Likely get issues when needing the power for heavy steel welding jobs too, unless tech has solved that.

[JDM9691]

I learned to weld on an ancient 130A stick welder and made/fixed a lot of stuff with it. Then in the 90's I bought a Cigweld 210A mig, and it revolutionized the workshop - much easier to get a good weld in tricky positions. Hardly touched the sticks except for specialty stuff like cast, low H and hardfacing, where I don't have a roll of wire. I did buy a cheap inverter stick welder/plasma cutter combo, but it didn't last the distance while the Cig mig is still going strong 30 years later.

Still love the mig, but hate having to pay rent on the cylinders. Currently the volume of my welding is less, so I'm using small cylinders from Bunnings, which is an hour's drive to get, but at least there's no rent. I've tried LPG instead of oxy/acetylene, but it doesn't get hot enough for some jobs, so still paying a lot more on rent than I am on gas, which drives me nuts. Would love to know if anyone has worked out the answer with gas cylinders!
Haven't tried flux cored wire. Anyone else swapped to them?

[niteowl]

Hey Bunnings, and others, have gas bottles you "sort of buy" and just pay for refills as required. You get your money back when you don't want them any more. They take the normal gauges too.
Flux cored wire, yes all the time (mostly), no gas bottle unless you do ally. They do spatter quite a bit though which can be a pain.

[bigrich]

geez lot of metal working based people on the forum . i'm almost 58 and still on the tools as a sheetmetal worker , i've done all sorts of welding and fabricating over the years . i have a 150amp mig at home that i rarely use anymore , was using a 250amp CIG mig at work couple of hours ago . for the farm and out bush the stick welder is king . different rods for different material , no reliance on having a gas bottle . just gotta remember to keep the welding rods bone dry or they're stuffed . i used a mates gasless mig with fluxed wire years ago , absolute crap in my opinion . you'd get a better weld with a stick . cheers

[Fester]

Small portable migs are only good for really small thin stuff, really.
They come into their own when big enough to need wheels.

When using my portable (if you could lift it mig) when I found a new max setting that wasn't advertised.
I practiced my vertical-up welds, and the gun blew an extra gas hole, just bigger .
No wonder that C3 setting wasn't in the manual.

What happens when you reach the lowish duty cycle time on small welders on bigger jobs? Do they just stop working, like they tripped out, or go stupid?

[GQshayne]

I find I use my TIG the most now. I still have a MIG, but the TIG sees the most use. Much harder to use, but more useful.

[Wapiti]

Great input guys and very informative for me.
My trade is a Boilermaker, but Iater in life I also became a Welding Supervisor and became a Mechanical Engineer. This was mainly to better do my role as a fabrication superintendent and have it over the d**kheads that were my bosses, Engineers from Uni with no experience in hiring/firing, people management, scheduling, client relationships or any other thing involved in sire and workshop work. I've written 130 welding procedures in AS1554.1,4,6 AS3992, ASME9 pressure vessel codes and qualified about 40 myself. Most men I was manager of was 200 men over two large workshops.
I only say that because I have some firm opinions of what works for beginners, and in the field.
In the shed, and off the back of the ute.
I love welding, the hand/eye coordination and muscle memory is unreal as is seeing the results.

It's amazing to me, the strange opinions of people out there when it comes to welding outside of a workshop or mine/gas fields.

Firstly, if you have a heap of work to do in the shed or the field, on ferrous metals, whether carbon or stainless, thin or thick, there is no alternative to productivity and speed than Mig. Fabrication stuff. or even repairs.
Years ago, I stopped screwing around with gas-mig and solely use gasless wire, specifically 71-T11 spec, and 0.9mm only as it's so useable over a wide thickness range of metal being welded. Yes, even car panels.
In the ute, I just power it with a good Aussie-made 8KVA genny.
I also use Tig, of course with gas, but that's the only gas welding I do now.
Tig is of course, best for the sheet-metal welding of stainless. Think p*ss troughs and servo cisterns.
If I was doing large stainless fabrication, I would use mig with argon and solid stainless wire, either 316 or 309. But for repairs and fine work I do, I use tig.
Stick is slow, expensive, very difficult to teach newbies on and it amazes me that so many people choose stick and spend their lives fighting the dam things.
AND spatters like hell.
Anyone know what the air humidity does to the welding arc and joint strength, through the rods sucking it up?

One thing I will say that you blokes who reckon flux-core gasless spatters too much, a couple of suggestions.
Did you swap your machine polarity over? Gasless needs electrode negative earth positive. Opposite from gas mig/solid wire. Not doing that is a helluva mess and can't be sorted.
The other thing is getting the wire speed just right for a slight "spray" arc... that's where the arc is a little come of plasma fluid that just doesn't spatter much at all. Certainly no more than a nice argon/CO2 mix and a swwet bare wire mig setting.
The arc sounds fiery, that's the characteristic of the active arc that is generating it's own gas shield.
Think of it like a beautiful woman, she's still incredibly hot despite her voice not being sweet and smooth... just ignore that part and enjoy the rest.
Gasless 71-T11 welds over galvanised steel without a stutter, paint, in drizzling rain, high wind conditions... you all know the slightest breeze ruins gas-mig and Tig has no chance outside...

I only use stick for hardfacing augers, jobs where stainless needs to be welded to carbon steel (309 rods) or strange nickle steels where the composition cannot be known. In that case, time doesn't matter.

The other thing is welding machines... people think that the most expensive welders are the best.
It's kinda like the marketing for 6.5 manbun... you can run faster than the bullet but somehow everyone is convinced that it's the only thing there is. Until tomorrow's gamechanger is announced to take your money.
here's a story to explain this:
I was welding some end assemblies on a bounday fence on the side of the road, and a neighbour rocks up. He hasn't a trade, and frankly he's not got the slightest mechanical mind at all but he is excellent at drinking XXXX and gossip. He looks at my old, Aussie made 175 amp WIA welder and says, "haven't you got a good welder yet? Aren't you a welder?"
He wasn't being smart, he has NFI what is going on, but the neighbour next door, a Mech Fitter who runs a maintenance crew subby'ing for shutdowns etc, had flogged four 200 amp Kempi's from a gas company up Chinchilla way and had "donated" him one, for being a great entertaining drinking mate. He told him that they are the only welders to buy, the rest are all crap and now that he has one, his bird-sh*t welds will be x-ray quality by magic.
I hardly believe that myself, but it's true. The BS, not the Kempi.
The reason they like it is, it has programmes in it where you pick the wire, the material, the thickness, and go weld. THAT is like a ballistics program for shooting, it's never correct.

Now I have a Kempi, it's a great light little thing. I don't use it off the back of a truck because it's full of circuitboards that fry when they suck in grinding dust, or any dust, and het dry solder-joints from bouncing and vibration in a ute tray.
The Kemppi. All of my migs have 5m guns for reach, this one has a quick-disconnect gun, extra-long earths and I run 5kg rolls in all.
The beauty of the Kemppi is that it will run on a 10-amp powerpoint or small genny, and has such great electronics it will not suffer voltage drop on a 30m extension-lead.

Kempi200.jpg (695.27 KiB) Viewed 86 times

This is why I use the old copper-coil 240v mig here, it's absolutely bomb proof. All my field jobs are with this "s**t" copper-coil welder, on an 8kva genny.

WIA175a.jpg (694.65 KiB) Viewed 86 times

WIA175b.jpg (688.79 KiB) Viewed 86 times

All workshop welding here is done with this old, copper-coil 150 amp Aussie made WIA mig. Again, with a 5m long gun and a 5m earth lead. Runs on 10amp power and for welds even on 12mm angle etc, only is running on about 75% of it's capacity. On gasless.
As a boilermaker, if I thought I needed a big 3-phase machine for any job here I've ever done, I would have one.

WIA150.jpg (677.44 KiB) Viewed 86 times

Here's an example of my routine welds this 150amp machine has done, on 6mm thick galv SHS with 0.9mm 71-T11.
Perfect deep penetration, no spatter, no grinder marks anywhere (try and find one), and the welds are as strong as the base metal.

WIA150welding example.jpg (699.68 KiB) Viewed 86 times

If ANYONE tells you that small mig machines are not adequate for anything, let alone thick metals, stop listening to them because they are fighting a lack of talent and should not be giving advice. No malice here, but people listen to plain rubbish and make the wrong decisions because of it.

[niteowl]

A quick comment, yes I am aware about polarities and those sort of things about welding. I am or was, no I guess I still am, a fully qualified mechanical fitter (and bloody old now), and have had a large amount of welding time. Not a boilermaker though.
Anyway the gasless mig wire spatters too much for my liking. Old stick welding does NOT spatter if you use better spec / brand rods, and if you use a DC system you can weld with absolutly no spatter at all. At one time many years ago, I had a welder tell me I should not use "those rods" any more as they made him look bad (they were rods from my own tool kit) He was a great bloke and not really that serious.
My only welding these days is general repair work around the farm.

[bigrich]

for high volume welding and good consistent "peno" there is no substitute for a mig from my experience . i think my 150amp home mig is the same brand as your 175 wapiti . if i was out bush myself a stick would suit me for occasional fixes without having to worry about gas bottles . i was pretty good with a stick , just like a mig it's all in the settings for the job at hand , with the right size and type of rod for the job . hardest thing is keeping the rods dry and moisture free . no freaking way would i use a stick for the sheer volume of gate welding you've done, it'd take a much longer time than a mig. fussiest job i ever did was tig welding the little "hook" on a windscreen wiper arm for a fella with a GT falcon hard top, up to welding hydraulic ram brackets onto our sheet metal folder at work after bolts had torn out of it recently with a mig . i used to do mobile rust cutting and hot rod fabrication out of the back of my HZ holden ute on weekends years ago to earn extra money for building my own cars. welding is a valuable skill with good dollars being paid for welding jobs these days. tried teaching some young ones at work over the years how to weld. most of them saw it as something they didn't want to do , rather than a good skill to know .

[Wapiti]

My dad was granted immigration with my mum to Australia from Europe in the early 60's after he'd done his stints in the army because he was a tradie Boilermaker, back in the '80's when I did my apprenticeship, he was called a "Special Class" welder. He certainly was, I will never be as good as he was.
Remember when Aus only allowed immigration of skilled people to make the country better?
What a change now that university student activists have gotten the reins, voted in by similar useless art-degree pointlessness.

My job was to make the company money, and the workers money too, take one out of the equation and it all falls over.
Stick was the first welding process, after gas-welding.
Gas welding - a sure-fire way to destroy any heat treatment in a piece of steel, but that was a ground-breaker in its day.

That's why I use gasless-mig excluseively now, I need to get the job done and move on. For the material used here, this process is faster, just as strong and neater, has no clean up save for a run-over with a wire wheel on a grinder.
Gas shielded welding does not work in the field.
But I wouldn't use self-shielded wire if my work looked like crap or it wasn't the right process, because it's my trade and I am the biggest critic of my own work.

I will go for a stroll later and take a few pics of the kind of things made with 71-T11 wire, and a couple of brands or commonly found wire available easily.
Good stuff makes the process so easy, Bunnings type crap makes for a big struggle and is the main reason, I reckon, why people don't use self-shielded (gas-less)

[bigrich]

My dad was granted immigration with my mum to Australia from Europe in the early 60's after he'd done his stints in the army because he was a tradie Boilermaker, back in the '80's when I did my apprenticeship, he was called a "Special Class" welder. He certainly was, I will never be as good as he was.
Remember when Aus only allowed immigration of skilled people to make the country better?
What a change now that university student activists have gotten the reins, voted in by similar useless art-degree pointlessness.

My job was to make the company money, and the workers money too, take one out of the equation and it all falls over.
Stick was the first welding process, after gas-welding.
Gas welding - a sure-fire way to destroy any heat treatment in a piece of steel, but that was a ground-breaker in its day.

That's why I use gasless-mig excluseively now, I need to get the job done and move on. For the material used here, this process is faster, just as strong and neater, has no clean up save for a run-over with a wire wheel on a grinder.
Gas shielded welding does not work in the field.
But I wouldn't use self-shielded wire if my work looked like crap or it wasn't the right process, because it's my trade and I am the biggest critic of my own work.

I will go for a stroll later and take a few pics of the kind of things made with 71-T11 wire, and a couple of brands or commonly found wire available easily.
Good stuff makes the process so easy, Bunnings type crap makes for a big struggle and is the main reason, I reckon, why people don't use self-shielded (gas-less)

With regards to gas less wire I think you hit the nail on the head. As I stated in an earlier post my experience with gas less wire was a mate’s set with a cheap mug and gas less wire from Bunnings. Just goes to prove you get what you pay for at times

[fussy]

Wapiti, I now officially have shed envy.

[Die Judicii]

For those trying to get away from paying cylinder rental,, try BOC Flexi Gas.
I've found they have the best solution these days over and above all the other suppliers.

And I note some comments above regarding gasless mig welding,,,,

For those that are using a gasless system, Are you aware that it is NOT advisable to do multiple runs with gasless ?
And, that you should "drag" the run as opposed to "pushing" it like you do using a normal gas mig.

[Bugman]

For those trying to get away from paying cylinder rental,, try BOC Flexi Gas.
I've found they have the best solution these days over and above all the other suppliers.

And I note some comments above regarding gasless mig welding,,,,

For those that are using a gasless system, Are you aware that it is NOT advisable to do multiple runs with gasless ?
And, that you should "drag" the run as opposed to "pushing" it like you do using a normal gas mig.

Yep. If there's slag....you drag.

[Willie]

Being an old welder, I ended up with both Kempii and Esab welders. For myself, they have served me without fail. Good, reliable quality.

[Fester]

I did OK with gas when I used my small (in power, not weight) MIG, as the big company still charged about $80 a year in rent, but a small company started and was closer to me. They did a much cheaper deal, and when the company folded, I got to keep the bottle.

When it ran out, I was stuffed and refused to pay the new rents, just borrowing from mates when a job came up.

There is small, and too small with migs, unless things have changed; same with stick, really.
I held off buying a portable machine when the 100-110 units were cheap, as they are too lacking, and only ran the tiny rod size.
You don't need much more, but 20-30 Amps extra sure did fix things for me.

2 mates both bought the blue mig machines that cost about $1,200 at the time, and I did a big job with one.
Like racking that turned his truck into a double-deck to transport camper trailers.
Decent square tube and several days of welding; weeks if it was stick welding.

Things must have moved on now, and I wonder what a small machine can be capable of.

Some basic tips I found, back in the day, when we were forced to learn stick first, and do mig later, and they are 2 different techniques for sure, apart from both liking a close arc.

Stick was about that flowing pool; if angles and stuff are right, the nice flow is there.
The slag just lifts and falls off; I had a chisel or hammer, rather than a needle gun (sweat things, them).

Mig welding is like really sticking it in there, sort of forcing penno like, going in the forward direction.
Power set to do the job well, finger on the dial to fine-tune.

Weaving is the key; maybe some blokes can weld in a straight line without weaving, but I sure can't.

Plasma cutting was a revolution, and the old-school blokes were scared of using it, and change, really.
Before that came, we had to do electric arc burning, with the big old bullet machines cranked right up with these massive burning rods. Talk about sparky, and I got a serious V-burn when I forgot to do my top buttons up or wear leather.
Even with big steel wheels, we used the cranes to move those machines.

In later years as a maint Fitter, I noticed that some blokes were just naturals and sure could weld.
Others just had no chance, and the only way they could run a bead that didn't look like bird s_t was with those nice exy blue and white striped rods.
If one of those blokes welded a machine shaft, they often called me 20 min later to go down to the other plant and help him.
I always knew to pack a box of Low Hyd rods; they just never learned how to start them, and I couldn't teach them.
I tried, as one was my mate and started on the same day.
I said smash it, then get the chipped-off flux back to melting even, then you are off and welding.
Some blokes just can't learn, and I am no rocket scientist, taught heaps of apprentices though.
Some good, some bad, lots are average, but some just can't or won't ever learn.