Technical Anybody buy cheap mig for sheet metal?

Not exactly a cheap machine, but I'm very happy with my Hobart Handler 140. Bought it at the recommendation of the steel shop Forman at work. Never a problem with it.

 

I found a blue point mb120 for basically nothing BUT, always a but, "grandpa took it apart to clean it because wire feed spools were gummed up but never put it back together and it sat in garage for 4 yrs until he passed last summer".

So it seems to have everything in a little plastic bag set inside where to wire spool goes so maybe there is some truth to the story. Seems to be all there and the parts are gummy so just maybe a good cleaning, a new spool of wire and my 25 bucks might just pay off!

Don't find a whole lot of people giving them outstanding reviews and it is old but maybe it will weld sheet metal, run .023 wire just fine.

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Remember to get tips and a liner for the .023 size wire to avoid birdnesting. Never heard of the rollers getting "gummy" unless he tried to spray something on the rollers because he was having a problem with the wire feeding. Usually means rollers not adjusted tight enough or theyare the wrong size or worn. Resistance caused by a worn liner or damaged tip might make someone think the rollers were the problem. Worth $25 to find out though...........

 

I bought a Lincoln "Easy Mig 140" a few years back to do sheet metal. It is, by far, the worst piece of crap I have ever welded with. About the only thing it is good for is to spot weld pieces in place so I can TIG 'em. Almost not even worth draggin' it out for.
So, don't buy one of those.

 

yes, never use a lubricant on the rollers or inside the liner.
Get yourself a bottle of graphite. Straight graphite not the stuff that also has a lube mixed in with it.

 

My Miller is setup for .030" wire, and I weld everything from thin sheet metal to heavy steel and just adjust the temp and wire speed to do so. Never used .035 or .023 wire, and never felt the need to do so.

 

Thats the way I used to do it too.............and I found that when I went to sheetmetal I could often get things tacked together...........but I also found that I blew thru the sheetmetal a lot more often. Remember that the diameter of your wire may be thicker than the sheetmetal. Its a lot easier to weld sheetmetal with .023......but it was simply too much trouble to switch rollers,liner, tip, and wire spool back and forth. Thats why a second small Mig makes it a lot easier and faster........and a lot fewer blowholes along the way.

 

220v wasn't an option for me so I got an older Miller Sidekick off craigslist for about $300. It's a big bastard but I haven't had any troubles with it.

 

I have a internet friend, he bought a cheap welder from amazon. I know it could do both mig & flux.
It never worked when he got it & had to return it .... no idea how it all worked out in the end.

One welder I never hear about is Forney. They are American made for more then 100 years. Parts are available.
That is what I bought on a clearance sale .... making room for next years model.
Because I never owned a welder or knew how to weld, I had problems with bird nesting.
Totally my error.
I called the service department, they were great to talk to & worked me through possible fixes to try.
They took my problem very serious & opened a ticket on my machine & setup a return label for me to send back the machine so they could repair or replace it on their dime.
I thanked them & let me try your suggestions before sending the return label.

I fixed it by adjusting tension .... forgot about it. A week later they sent me a email inquiring how I was doing ..... all was fine so they went ahead and closed the open ticket on it.
I call that excellent customer service.

So I'm just throwing Forney out there as a possible machine.
Earlier I said I like fluxcore, I weld much better with gas. Gas is a better weld.
The Forney I set my digital heat at 17, wire speed at 14.5
I think this floor pan is 20 gauge .... thinner then 18 anyways. I am only getting the pan tacked in place And ran out of wire here. I have not burned through, it leaves a brown soot & tiny little ball all around.
.030 wire takes more grinding. Gas is better! IMHO, the Forney is a good machine, I can set it wherever I want for what metal I'm working with. When you're working on a Dodge, flux is good enough!
To be fair it will be finish welded, seam sealer both sides before paint, then insulation & carpet.
I have a small 55 CF bottle of gas set in the back room for when I need gas .... jobs like this I do not.

 

Eastwood 140 looks like a good deal...anyone use it...3 year warranty too...

 

Can't be too sure. Mike

 

That’s the residue I recall when using flux core. I just used it a few times, wire bushed and then sprayed over it. Not automotive, just didn’t want to pull the welder where I needed to go with the bottle on it.
That MM35 is heavy enough.

 

That looks pretty accurate to me I wont dispute it. .... They had me fooled.
Many companies over the years have sold out.
This is what I see on the front of my welder.

 

I haven't delved into it yet to see what's actually on the rollers yet, just peeked into the bag of parts.

I have so much welding to do on the A as far as sheet metal, patch panels, floors, side interior panels etc, plus all the welding I still need to do on the frame, shock brackets, x members etc if I can run 2 machines and keep the .035 in the lincoln and .023 in the other one I'll be time ahead.

I like to bounce around, frame stuff one day, body another. Yesterday I finished welding in mounting studs into my radiator shell for my homemade grille. That would have been alot easier with .023 wire, especially when welding #10 bolts...

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I’m sure you know get a name brand welder so you can get nozzles for it. I bought one made by a video game company ignorance on my part and I found a gas nozzle but I had to make it work also the gas hose was hose clamped on both ends and leaked like a sieve another thing I had to engineer. I got it off eBay.

 

I’m fairly new at wire welding and my welder came with .030 wire. Will the .023 wire make a smooth weld without burning through. It’s hard to find a happy medium with the .030.
Most of my experience has been with stick welding and I’m far from pro. My 51 Chevy has floor patch panels that are poprivited in and they fit pretty good.

 

@Randy Rollins

This is my perception, you are using a smaller wire so in effect your using less wire, less wire-smaller welds-less grinding.

Also lower voltage because again smaller wire, less heat to melt and bond it so theoretically less warping and I would think it would be easier to manage the Weld puddle as it would be smaller.

Again this is my perception. Maybe someone with technical knowledge will chime in !

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No technical knowledge from me.
I'm a big fan of a 2nd welder. .... Just like my 5" grinders. .... I have 2 of them setup to use while welding.
I really would like 3 ..... just such a pita to have to swap the tools back & forth.
I like to have a cutoff disk, wire wheel, grinder or sandpaper depending on he job.

I feel a 2nd welder is the same way if you use them often enough. Just a pita to stop working & swap wire. Eats up A lot of time.

I'm just not sure I'm a fan of cheap welders.

Really depends what style welder you have .... If it uses a bottle of Argon gas then you could use .023 wire.
If your welder does not use gas, then .30 is about as small of wire you can get.

 

I really prefer the .023 to the .030 on body panels with gas, have done the flux core on panels but burns a little too hot have not seen anything smaller than .030 in flux core, just remember to change polarity to electrode negative when flux coring to get a better looking weld

 

@Los_Control I agree! Especially on grinders, I have 2, a black and decker and a cheap harbor freight with plans to pick up another HF one. I use one with a cut off wheel and the other with the flap wheel.

Also agree it's nice to cut something with the cut off wheel then just grab the other one to clean off the cut. 30 seconds and done.

@Heavy Old Steel I've heard that numerous times that welding sheet metal with .023 is so much better and in wanting to find out myself! Also I'm always looking for a better looking weld too.

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13 yrs. ago I bought my Miller 140 Autoset for $700 which included a cart and a full tank of 75/25 80 size. I don't get my tanks refilled and returned, they simply swap them so I never have the issue of tanks getting too old.
If I'm building a car I go through a lot of wire and gas. But my welder sits a lot between cars. If they swapped me a tank that was too close to being out of service I'd pass on it, as I wouldn't want to end up having to buy one again! But they've never looked at the dates when I swapped for a full tank, so not sure how that happens?

 

Look at the rollers for the wire feed and see if they have more than 1 groove. Some have 2 grooves so you can flip them over for a different size wire. You WILL need .023 rollers as well as a liner for .023. and a few tips. If you try to use the larger liner for the .030 wire, you will probably "birdnest" the wire a lot. The .023 bends really easy if you don't use the right liner.

If they are swapping them, then there should be no problems with the cert dates. I think some companies used to charge a recert fee built into the exchange process, but my experience is if they are swapping tanks each time, they take care of the certification. Recert here usually ran about $40 for mine. Those tanks last pretty much forever, so very seldom do they go bad.

 

If you (around here) want your bottle refilled, it has to be certified beforehand, used to be (I was told) the place would slip a ring over the bottle-this was back in the 80’s, maybe something different now- and if the ring didn’t slide down top to bottom, you had a choice, but another, or have no gas.
My dad taught me to take a spray bottle with soap mixed, check it for leaks around the valve area before leaving.

 

Cheap flux core is all I've got. Would I like something better - For sure!

 

@Budget36 that's interesting, never heard of the ring test but it makes sense for a quick simple test to check for thin walls and bulging.

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Ive never had a tank refilled,
only swapped out.
Wasn’t @gene-koning in the business? Maybe he can share some information on it.

 

I handled welding gas cylinders for 30 years. I was a company drop off and exchange sub-dealer. The company I was with was really easy to deal with.

I put a rubber ring (or a plastic ring) around the empty cylinders guys dropped off, that was so I knew which cylinders were empty. I stocked a total of 52 cylinders of different gases and of different sizes for most of those gases. In 30 years, I had 2 customers that were billed for cylinder re-cert fees, both had bought used cylinders from an auction or a privet seller. Anyone that bought the cylinders through the company never had to pay a re-cert fee as far as I knew. I had customers with purchased cylinders, and customers with leased cylinders. All the smaller cylinders, under 100CF were customer purchase, the only way to get larger then 100CF cylinders was to lease them from the company on an annual lease (during the 30 years I handled the cylinders for that company). I pretty much exchanged the cylinders, and the company took care of lease billing, and any re-cert needs. There were a few customers that would drop off the lease payment with me, and I sent it with the truck, when the truck stopped every other week.

The cylinders over 100CF all have a company name brand ring, or collar, under the valve that has a company name on it. Many of the older companies no longer exist and have been bough up by other companies. I could only exchange the cylinders from 4 or 5 companies. If the name on the collar did not match the company I worked for, I had to call them for permission before I could take a cylinder, unless the cylinder was under the 100CF size. Those are all customer owned and were freely exchanged for the price of the contents.

 

OK got to play with the blue point mb120 today and this is what I found out.

First off pulled the pieces out of the bag and found that the upper roller assembly was all greasy and dirty and that the plastic piece it mounts to is broken. The reason it's gummy is the upper wheel is a sealed bearing and the seal failed allowing small amount of grease to cover the wheel and it dried to a gum.

Now the good news, it had a new upper assembly in the bag and the upper wheel is new to.

The second thing I found, interestingly the gun and liner had .035 stainless wire still in it. With a .030 tip in the gun. Unscrewed the tip and grabbed the stainless wire with pliers and pulled it out with no problem.

Plugged it in, pulled trigger and everything seemed to work fine, now I have no wire or gas hooked to it but the wire speed wheel turned and sped up and slowed down with the knob adjustment and I could hear the gas solenoid kick off and on with the trigger.

Now again bad part, can't find any manual on line and it doesn't have a reversible or removable drive wheel for different sized wire. From what I can find out, it should feed .023, .030 or .035 according to guys that owned them according to the manual that they could remember. So I guess it's a cheap 1 size fits all grooved wheel.

Well I guess at this point I'll grab a spool of .023 and some .023 tips and connect it to my gas bottle and see what happens ! Haven't found any replacement parts for it either...

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