Mig welders.

[Deleted]

Jan 15, 2019 11:38:13 GMT Darkspeed said:

The OP has already decided on his R-Tech 180 Invertor - so has a pretty good budget to work with and the machine spec looks like its a nice capable unit.

My advice on gas - I use BOC Argoshield light and always have good results with it - On my old Clarke 185E I like to use 0.6 wire it just works really well as I seldom go more than 3mm steel thickness. Mask wise I have a Lincoln (Viking)which is almost half your welder budget but I would say that £90-100 on the helmet will pay for itself. Prep is the key. Welding time is pretty much 90% prep and 10% welding.

20mm plate butt with a 185 ? - 30-40 Amps / mm so about 5mm thick as a single pass - prep with a 45 angle to a 4mm root and a 1.5mm gap first pass will put the heat in and form the pass to go with up to 10 further passes which will give the heat to provide the penetration as the passes build - depending on the weld length it may well give the welder a pounding on the duty cycle but if you needed to weld something that big together there are ways. A 10mm pass through a double 45 one side 10mm deep 3 passes and then 3 passes on the other. 90 T - root and two sets of caps 6 passes.

Quite right with the prep & gas advice but welding 20mm plate with a under rated MIG - it's bit like a twin axle car trailer loaded with a Range Rover and towing it up hill with a Reliant Robin - it might do the job somehow - however the vast majority of us just want to get the job done and in the 20mm plate example would just go and hire the right piece of kit to weld it with or take it to a local fabricator and get the job done efficiently.

[kent24v]

Again thank you guys for all the stellar advice.. I thought I'd update the thread and let you guys know I've purchased an R-tech 180, Second hand off eBay. Chap barely used it in the 2 months he owned it and I saved £150 over buying new (main reason for purchase) plus 16a socket and upgraded earth clamp included.

Calling a local firm tomorrow to arrange delivery of 20l bottle of mig gas and a mate in a shop/part motorfactors has ordered some 0.6 wire, mask+gloves for me. All going well, I should be up and welding by the end of the week 👍👍👍 oh and a quick look on the r-tech website shows an extended 2 year warranty for £56 so it would be rude not to seeing as I did save a bit by buying it second hand.

[Deleted]

Jan 21, 2019 1:05:14 GMT kent24v said:

Again thank you guys for all the stellar advice.. I thought I'd update the thread and let you guys know I've purchased an R-tech 180, Second hand off eBay. Chap barely used it in the 2 months he owned it and I saved £150 over buying new (main reason for purchase) plus 16a socket and upgraded earth clamp included.

Calling a local firm tomorrow to arrange delivery of 20l bottle of mig gas and a mate in a shop/part motorfactors has ordered some 0.6 wire, mask+gloves for me. All going well, I should be up and welding by the end of the week 👍👍👍 oh and a quick look on the r-tech website shows an extended 2 year warranty for £56 so it would be rude not to seeing as I did save a bit by buying it second hand.

Well done that man - let us all know how you get on with it

[toast00]

Probably a bit late now but i've owned a Clarke for going on 15 years now and to be fair it has always been one of my best purchases.

Yes it has basic settings, no it doesn't have a euro torch, but it can take gas or gasless wire, easy to source part can take large wire spools and to be honest, all the bad welds i've done over the years are down to me.

Not being able to see through a clean helmet,
Not protecting myself,
Not renewing the tip,
Not cleaning the area properly
Not setting the speed or current correctly
etc etc.

My point being, if you now have a machine that is known to be pretty good or has been recommended to you (congratulations on your purchase by the way!), and you do some bad welds, you are less likely to automatically blame the machine and logic says to look else where for the problem.Ruling out one thing will help you pinpoint where you are going wrong more quickly and get you on your way to making a better job!

[kent24v]

Jan 21, 2019 17:19:21 GMT toast00 said:

Probably a bit late now but i've owned a Clarke for going on 15 years now and to be fair it has always been one of my best purchases.

Yes it has basic settings, no it doesn't have a euro torch, but it can take gas or gasless wire, easy to source part can take large wire spools and to be honest, all the bad welds i've done over the years are down to me.

Not being able to see through a clean helmet,
Not protecting myself,
Not renewing the tip,
Not cleaning the area properly
Not setting the speed or current correctly
etc etc.

My point being, if you now have a machine that is known to be pretty good or has been recommended to you (congratulations on your purchase by the way!), and you do some bad welds, you are less likely to automatically blame the machine and logic says to look else where for the problem.Ruling out one thing will help you pinpoint where you are going wrong more quickly and get you on your way to making a better job!

Thanks for the advice mate. Yeah was looking at a Clarke mig initially due to reviews both here and elsewhere however I believe the newer ones are lacking when compared to the older machines. Mate with experience recommended a machine with a euro torch simply for ease of use. Although he said a fixed torch would also suffice for my application.

Again many thanks Chris for your top advice and i, of course, will be sure to update you all when it arrives and I get a few hours to play with it 👍👍

[kent24v]

Another small update for those interested, welder arrived last week and looks like a reliable unit. Very sturdy and no fiddly/ easy broke components. Userface seems simple enough. Waiting on gas to arrive tomorrow to begin welding 👍👍

[steveg]

Hope it's OK to add to this but I've got a need for a mig welder. The old SIP I have had since about 1985 blew the wire feed transformer a few months back and I need to do some welding to get a car MOT'd within the next week or so.
A brief search suggested a Portamig might be an option but as suggested on here they are a bit old tech now and that something like the R-Tech might be a better bet. For home use on a standard power supply they seem to be one of the cheapest available, is there anything else around with a similar spec and price anyone could recommend ?
If I had a bit more time I could wait for a better used one perhaps but I would still be struggling to decide what to get.

[chris y]

Portamigs have a great reputation, so last year I bought one.

To be fair its excellent, however on reflection I could have bought a decent quality inverter for half the price (or so).

My thinking was that with the Portamig its a machine for life, there is no way it is ever likely to have anything highly electronic go wrong thats not an easy fix, and an inverter is more likely to have that one day, but now I think, at half the price, if an inverter becomes uneconomical to repair in quite a few years time I've saved enough to buy another.

The Portamig is great, but if I was buying again, all things considered I think I'd buy an inverter.

[steveg]

Thanks Chris.
Back in 85 the SIP was pretty much the first hobby mig and at the tie was slightly better built than similar priced Clarke and Sealey Migs.
To be fair it's been very useful but has also been a bit of a pain to set up etc.
I visited my local welding supply place and all they had in stock and the sort of money I can afford was a GYS machine but having looked online for info I found some pictures of it's innards and they look pretty much the same as my 30 years plus SIP !

[moglite]

My 2P worth.

I had a Portamig.....
It arrived broken, the euro torch connector got broken off in shipment.
Customer service sucked - then eventually sent me the piece, but it took a fiddly hour or two to swap over.

18 months later - it started cutting out. A faulty control board was diagnosed.
It took about three weeks to get a replacement board.
Again it was quite a tricky thing to swap.
The old board had great gobs of silicon on it.

So quite expensive and terrible customer service, but it welded like a charm.

It took up so much room in my garage I decided to sell it, and replaced it with an R-tech inverter unit.

It arrived super quick, and without problems.
It does everything I've asked of it, but feels like a Mondeo - 100% competent, but the Portamig (when working) was more like a Jaguar - if that makes sense.

YouTube Legend UrchFab has been using a basic inverter MiG in some of his videos. A bit more spendy than the R-tech, but I can't for the life of me find it now. 

[steveg]

I was looking through the Urchfab videos as well. I was trying to think of a suitable car to describe my SIP. Not wanting to upset anyone the only way to describe it is having to walk !
Biggest problem with the Portamig is the time you are supposed to have to wait for them to build it.

[steveg]

Due to the time I have to sort things out it's looking like the R tech welder is going to be the best option. I still have a slight doubt about it as it's an entry level inverter welder and for a bit more I could get what is supposed to be a better quality transformer welder.

[chris y]

I agree on portamig customer service, there is one woman who usually answers the phone and everything is too much trouble for her, lazy and bad mannered.
I hope she reads this, and I'm not someone who normally speaks badly of anyone.

[steveg]

It got late last night and I decided to get the R tech one, should be here tomorrow. I spoke to a few local suppliers and they didn't seem very keen to help despite me saying I needed one in a bit of a hurry.
With any luck I will be able to get the car fixed at the weekend ready for an MOT next week. I will report back on how things go, thanks for the comments.

[gtviva]

Funnily enough I have just bought the R-tech Mig180, it does everything well enough and its nice and light, they were also very helpful if you speak to them on the phone

[hairymel]

I am a welder/fabricator in my day job and have a choice of probably £50k worth of mig welders to choose from.
I prefer transformer machines.
I have personally owned many mig welders,
From 90a Clarke's with 2 power settings, through portamigs to a £2k new list price Merkel synergic mig.
My, car body repair, go to welder is a £16 ebay migatronic 180a transformer welder.(with no side panels and a resoldered control board)

However horses for courses - for a 'home gamer' if you have the cash a rtech or gys inverter mig is probably the way to go. If not then your budget and technical ability will obviously have to guide your choice.
Choose old pro quality in preference to newer consumer grade welders if you are going second hand.

If you can't weld yet then find someone to give you a bit of hands on advice - that is worth more than anything else.

Plus practice and lots of it.

Google mig welding forum for lots of tutorials and advice ;-)

[Dez]

i agree with slater, people badmouthing transformer machines are talking bullhonky.

A good transformer machine ain’t cheap, you’re talking £800+, but it’ll outlast most owners let alone any inverter welder on the market. I had to replace mine (a thermal arc) last year after 15 years as I lost it in a fire. In that 15 years it had nothing but consumables an a cooling fan which they replaced for free...
but thermal arc no longer make transformer machines, so I I bought a oxford (same company as portamig but their industrial rather than hobby line). The entire thing has lifetime warranty, because they are robust and don’t wear. Most inverters don’t even have 5 years. Why? Because they wear out through use and are susceptible to moisture and dust. Unless your end up keeping it in a dry dust free environment, don’t even think about an inverter. Also, their ‘portability’ and ‘convenience’ is massively overplayed. It becomes a moot point once you’ve put 15kg of wire in and connected up a 30kg gas bottle. Every single person I know who has one has ended up making a trolley for it to go on, compared to a transformer which invariably has bottle stowage as standard.

The big push within the industry towards inverters is down to one thing, and one thing alone- profit.
They cost less to make as they use much less expensive materials, so can be marketed at a lower price point so they sell more of them. They need replacing more often so they sell more of them. nothing more, nothing less.

[steveg]

I think the comments raised in the last two posts were some of the reasons I wasn't sure. I'm a bit stuck as I needed something quickly and didn't have a huge amount to spend. I could have probably got a higher spec welder, cheaper but waiting for the right one to turn up could take longer than I have. I also really needed it to work off a normal 13 amp socket.

Thanks for the opinions, it arrived today and I'm pretty happy with what I have got, just need to go and do some welding. Whatever it does it will be better than my broken SIP Migmate so that's a start at least !

[chris y]

I feel a bit better about my Portamig choice now (only detail differences to Oxford), I spoke to them to clarify).
I think it cost £715, rings a bell, for I think 235 amps.

Its so easy to set up and do great welding with, I've read points about Inverter sets being synergic and almost setting themselves, but I don't want that, one of the important things with welding is to learn what the controls do and how you can change things to get what you want. Its not a washing machine where the user just needs to set nylon or cotton and press go.
I know you can get a transformer synergic set but not for a hobby budget.

You learn a lot more about welding by being in control of everything and trying no good conditions while you practice, while you work out what does work.

[steveg]

The R Tech is fully manual adjust so there is plenty of wrong settings to try !
I've been out watching car racing today so I will have a go with the welder tomorrow.