Thread: What welder

If you must also do Aluminium, then inverter, but forget about a pulse version unless you have $6000+ to spend.

Hi Steve,

It sounds like a big ali project is coming up, a boat perhaps?

If that's the case a remote feeder is just the thing to have as it can be hung over the area to be worked on and the wire feed remains in a straight-ish line as out of line, wire feed for ali will cause all sorts of problems if not kept straight. You might want to consider looking at a Lincoln spool gun which can obviate all the above feed problems but does have the downside of a small spool size.


I won't make comment on the brands other than my standard spiel
on after sales service ,spares and repairs availability.The torch or gun should be a Binzel, Bernard or other well known brand that has the spares back up and availability of the low friction wire liners .

Look for a robust wire drive assembly with a die cast alloy ( not plastic frame - I have seen wire drive frames distort with age ) Also look for a good range of drive wheels in the wire size diameter sizes.

The machine will be hard pushed to propel a long length of soft aluminum wire through a couple of meters of liner.This is why you go for the harder 5356 and biggest diameter you can handle. Conversely you can get away with smaller wire in the spool gun as it only has to push wire a couple of hundred millimeters

Your wire if not through the spool gun should be a big diameter as the job can support, as in the smaller diameters they will snarl due to lack of cross sectional strength (through the diameter sizes) 5356 is the stiffest and if the boat is the job 5356 is the marine grade alloy.



I would expect that all them would have 15kg spool capacity as that is the cost effective purchase size.

The question of inverters is reasonably easy to explain if your think of the transformers (old style) that push current to you as 50 cycles per second.They are and were a pretty much bullet proof system - robust and long lasting.

These new fang dangled inverters take the incoming power supply from 50 cycles and change it to something around 20,000 cycles. In doing so it soothes out the power and allows all sorts of electronic manipulations to be applied, so you can get a much softer and more stable arc. It still requires a transformer but only a fraction of the size of the old style- hence lighter and smaller machines.

Downside is when the inverters go poof, its usually expensive requiring technicians schooled in the black arts of high frequency welder circuit board repair - usually just binned and replaced. This is where the after sales service and repair facilities start to come in to their own.

Now we are seeing lower cost machines machines junked as they fail, as the labor cost alone of dis assembly and fault diagnosis may exceed the cost of a replacement machine.

Hope this is some food for thought.

Grahame

Well I guess it depends whether you hace a serious project in mind or just the odd bit of Ally work that will hold together OK.
I just went through a process of choosing a machine to build my next Ally boat, looked at the models you spoke of but the Jasic 350 inverter with RWF seemed quite good as a standard MIG process.
I still wasn't convinced that I could do the project considering my Ally welding experience with that machine after doing some test welding with it, so I just bit the bullet and trialed a Kemppi 350 Fastmig Pulse with a bit of prompting from Rappy on this forum and it is just an awesome welder. Ended up buying it and extremely happy with what it can do. I figured that yes, a lot of cash to fork out but I want as good a result as possible on my boat project and I know that I can always get good money back for it down the track if I have no further use for it. I am so happy with it though I doubt if I will ever want to part with it as insane it may seem for a home user to have such a machine.

But regardless of what you decide I reckon buy the best quality machine that you can afford

wow everyone knows what i plan to build, a plate boat .

johncar i see you live at Ningi, i drive through there almost every day on my way to work on bribie island .

i have a limited budget of $2500 - $3000 and was hoping that this would get me something that will last for a loooong time and do a good job on a boat. majority of the work with the machine would be mild steel tho.

Originally Posted by stevo81

wow everyone knows what i plan to build, a plate boat .

johncar i see you live at Ningi, i drive through there almost every day on my way to work on bribie island .

i have a limited budget of $2500 - $3000 and was hoping that this would get me something that will last for a loooong time and do a good job on a boat. majority of the work with the machine would be mild steel tho.

OK Steve, that's good you live close by. So you are welcome to drop in and have a chat about it all, just PM me for contact details. I will be good to compare notes. Your budget was the same as mine when I started looking around and in that price range. I was considering a Jasic JS350SWJ which gives 221A at 100% but is 3 phase power supply.

I took one for a test drive and it seemed to do a decent job on the Ally for a standard MIG process and it had a couple of little extras such as crater controls.
http://www.iwws.net/files//literatur...0swf_flyer.pdf
Jasic 350SWF
They make a similar single phase machine JS250SWF which I think is about 135A @100%.
I dont think either will take a spool gun not as standard at least.if your are considering this. On a smaller machine it may be handy.
http://www.iwws.net/files//literatur...0swf_flyer.pdf

I saw some machines at Tradetools Caboolture as well that looked the part but never test welded with any of them, but I definitely would want to before making any purchase. Somewhat similar features to the Jasic, at least one model had spool gun capability + 4wheel drive separate feeder and priced fairly well under the $2500 with spool gun from memory. The ones I was looking at were 3 phase power supply as well.

I am just going to try and work with a good 4WD separate wire feeder hanging on some sort of overhead support when needed with a 3 metre or so teflon lined cable to my standard MIG torch and 1.2mm wire. I don't think I should have too much trouble.

Anyway I had been on the lookout for a good pulse machine to try out second hand plus a few guys told me it's the way to go for an Ally Plate boat project. But then again a few told me that you don't need pulse as well.
Every pulse machine that came up second hand over a few months sold for big $$ and some of them looked like wrecks and unknown issues, no warranty etc.
Running out of patience,I test drove a couple of new quality pulse machines and I was ruined and then couldn't consider anything else. But I have no experience with Ally MIG process and it seemed that I could do a decent weld straight out of the box with pulse. So I have just had to put my boat build back a little while I pay off the extra $$ spent on the machine. I am not in a big rush, just something to do over the next year or two and still have to build the shed to build the boat in although I want the shed for other reasons too.
My machine will also be mainly used for mild and stainless steel other than my boat project, but if all goes well I may build a second one, who knows??.

I just got a Unimig 270 SWF a few weeks ago and am very happy with it so far. I wanted a 240V welder with the highest duty I could find so this was the reason I went for this one with 210A @100%. From my research there isn't anything from other manufacturers that is comparable in cost that is even close to this (assuming it not just lies). The shop was very keen to sell me a newer inverter but I had good success with my old transformer machine despite some harsh abuse and I am not convinced that an inverter will survive the same. As far as i'm aware the only difference between this and the unimig 250 is that this has a higer duty cycle... they both only do 250A max.

The seperate wire feeder takes 15kg spools and has a 4 wheel geared setup which appears pretty good... It looks solid and is certainly a lot smoother than my old welder. I didn't think it was working when I first used the machine because it was so quiet!

My machine cost me a shade under $3k but I know they are cheaper over east.