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Thank you, you’ve confirmed a lot of what I’ve read / in the process of reading about the gas vs no gas debate, as well as wire feed wear.
I guess I’m at a point where I’d like to learn and got a relatively good project to learn on.
Perhaps(definitely), as always, being impatient/impulsive as I have a rare quiet Sunday where all I want to do now is practice welding.
Should probably focus on the more immediate necessity of the prep work.@dbr - 1mm ish steel / stainless steel car bodywork. I believe due to portability that MIG is probably the one? Also doesn’t have to be that pretty, probably more spot welds than nice flowing seams.
Dick-
MIG has a much easier learning curve, also better if the fit of your parts isn’t prefect and you need to just squirt a bit of filler in to join them. TIG is more portable really, most TIG sets are the size of a big toaster, but that’s by-the-by, sounds like MIG will be more suited to your use case.
I get my argon from London Gases, don’t bother trying to get a BOC account, it’s a racket unless you’re using industrial amounts of gas. Forget flux wire or gas-less, waste of time and will make you hate welding. Auto darkening helmets can be had cheap on eBay, I’ve been using the same £25 helmet for 3+ years and it’s been flawless, as was the one it replaced. My workshop colleague has a fancy Miller one and has had lots of problems. You’ll shrink the index finger and thumb of your left glove at some point (from heat while holding parts together) so don’t spend load on fancy gloves, they’re a consumable. Wear a dark top, arc light can be reflected off your chest behind your helmet - you won’t know you have arc eye until you wake up in the middle of the night in a bad way. Bit dramatic, and not really a problem unless you’re sitting at a station welding all day. You can get mini reels (2.5kg maybe?) of stainless wire so you don’t have to drop loads of cash in one go. RTech are supposed to be good. I have a Jasic DC TIG which I like a lot.
End of brain fart.
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Mig is generally used for car work. You can get more done with fewer hands and it’s a bit more forgiving. I restored a vespa px body shell with tig and it was a bit of a ball ache. Tig needs to be super clean and old bodywork tends to have impurities and grot you can’t see. I think mig is a little more easy to work around with that aspect. Also it’s just easier to do in general.
dbr
Dogtemple
I haven’t got a mig for sale but done a lot of welding and bought welders. Forget gasless mig welders they are not very good.
I used to buy high end machines secondhand but the most recent one I bought was a new RTech for similar cost, which is quite a popular option these days. The quality isn’t the same but it’s more disposable and easier to replace. My older high end one was too expensive to fix.
Clarke are generally cheap end, any machine mart couple hundred pound type things will usually need modding to overcome issues like plastic wire feed parts and the like that wear out too fast and cause problems.
Get yourself some hobby gas and an rtech you will probably be sorted for lowest cost and performance. If you’re doing anything pro look at a Lincoln/murex/etc. but they’re £££