Plasma,tig,arc

Has anyone purchased one of the plasma,tig, ,arc combination units? If so Is it any good ? Some of the ones on ebay seem too good to be true.I can get buy with what I have but a plasma torch would be very handy. Jerry

 

i had a plas never used it easier with cutoff wheels

 

...you had one but never used it? but a cutoff wheel is easier...huh?

...the way i look at it is, if you buy a dvd/vcr/tv unit and one of those bad boys brakes down, you replace everything.

...now i haven't seen one of these combo guys you're talking about, but it would make sense to me to stick with buying the three seperate.

 

Plasma has it's place, but cut off wheels and a sawzall are usually better alternatives. The heat from plasma can really do a number on delicate stuff.
A stand-alone TIG machine would be the best way to go as far as I'm concerned, like a Miller Synchrowave.

Sort of like when me and my guitar playing friends would buy new gear. They'd buy the amps with 20 built in effects and I opted for a Marshall JCM900 tube amp. All their effects sounded like **** and my Marshall sounded bad *** because it did one thing kick *** instead of ****ing at a whole bunch of stuff

 

I bought one of the Chinese 160amp Tig, Stick and Plasma cutting units. I've used the TIG and Plasma options, but haven't tried stick.

I had not tig welded before I picked up the unit, and found it fairly easy to use. I did buy the foot control option, and that helped alot. When welding at high amperage I did find that the torch got quite hot thru the gloves, I expect if I do more I'll have to figure out how to rig up an aftermarket water cooled torch, I really doubt it's a plugin.

I already had a plasma cutter (Hypertherm 600) and found that on thin material (14-22 Gauge) it worked as well as the Hypertherm. When I tried cutting 0.100" wall tubing it cut ok but was starting to look a little ragged. You can't beat the price of the consumables, they were very cheap, but wore out more quickly than the Hypertherm consumables.

Ron

 

I am not a fan of spending as much on tools as I am putting into my car so I would go for one of the combo jobs if you are doing a lot of light duty stuff. Just about all the fabrication I do is on a small scale so I have been looking for one of those combo units also!

I have a smaller lincoln mig 240v with gas and it does just about everything I need. I would love to get back into a TIG but I just don't have 3-4 grand for a good one!

 

Just one thing to add about the Chinese unit, it may be a bad ground in my shop or it just may be the unit, but it puts out alot of RF noise. I would not expect you'd have good luck using the plasma cutter with a CNC unit.

Ron

 

Thanks for the input guys,I think I`ll go with the single function unit when the price is right. " Money in hand = cost of unit" Jerry