irondarren
Member
- Messages
- 2,583
As promised i said i would give a full review of my new portamig when it arrived, well today it has. Its taken about 3 week from order to delivery. Weldequip told me he would specify delivery to be on a truck with tail lift. well at 10am this morning a curtain sided truck turns up with no tail lift. Lucky enough i had 3 people here including myself, we all grabbed a corner and the delivery driver the other and proceed to lift it off and at 120kgs its what you call heavy. signed the delivery note and notice on the paper work it said to be delivered with tail lifted lorry. So the carriers had just ignored what they had been told.
Got it all unpacked check for damage, none apart from a tiny chip of the frame work of the wire feed, which is almost not worth commenting here on. check for instruction and there were none what so ever. Someone on here commented about how bad the portamig instructions were, well at least they got some.
Didn't take a lot to work out what is what. There were 4 piece the power unit, the wire feeder, an earth cable and the interconnector cable. checked all the cables over for damage couldn't find any and proceed to connect the wire feeder to the power unit all fitting were a nice secure fit. with a seperate wire feeder unit the gas supply goes to the wire feeder and not the machine, as the wire feeder contains the gas solonid. Earth lead connects to the power unit, the lead is only 3mtrs long which is perhaps a little short, but no different to that supplied with most machines regardless of manufacturer. The earth clamp is of a reasonable quality, not to dissimilar to any quality crocadile one you would buy from any weld distributor.
One of the things i did notice on the wire feed unit, is the printing on the front is not exactly crisp, its like it has been double printed and hence is slightly blurred, again not exactly a problem. Weldequip was going to try to get them to supply me if possible with rollers that run 0.8mm / 1.0mm wire, but it was supplied with 1.0mm/1.2mm rollers, bit of a bummer as i have 2 rolls of 0.8mm wire. I certainly wasnt going to go out and get a roll of 1.0mm wire so decided to put a 0.8 roll on and see how it goes. Mounted the roll on the back, and threaded the wire through using the 1.0mm groove, once the wire was through flicked over the wire feed tensioners closed and hit the wire inch button on the wire feeder unit. the feeder leap into life and began feeding wire through. got an inch poking out of the wire feeder, and then fitted my 5mtr torch from my old machine, once secure turned up the wire feed to 4 and hit the wire inch button and waited for it feed through the torch. Feed through with absolute no problem, even though there was very little tention on the wire feeder and the fact that i was using 0.8mm wire with 1.0mm feed rollers, a good sign i thought. well i will see when i weld.
Got it all unpacked check for damage, none apart from a tiny chip of the frame work of the wire feed, which is almost not worth commenting here on. check for instruction and there were none what so ever. Someone on here commented about how bad the portamig instructions were, well at least they got some.
Didn't take a lot to work out what is what. There were 4 piece the power unit, the wire feeder, an earth cable and the interconnector cable. checked all the cables over for damage couldn't find any and proceed to connect the wire feeder to the power unit all fitting were a nice secure fit. with a seperate wire feeder unit the gas supply goes to the wire feeder and not the machine, as the wire feeder contains the gas solonid. Earth lead connects to the power unit, the lead is only 3mtrs long which is perhaps a little short, but no different to that supplied with most machines regardless of manufacturer. The earth clamp is of a reasonable quality, not to dissimilar to any quality crocadile one you would buy from any weld distributor.
One of the things i did notice on the wire feed unit, is the printing on the front is not exactly crisp, its like it has been double printed and hence is slightly blurred, again not exactly a problem. Weldequip was going to try to get them to supply me if possible with rollers that run 0.8mm / 1.0mm wire, but it was supplied with 1.0mm/1.2mm rollers, bit of a bummer as i have 2 rolls of 0.8mm wire. I certainly wasnt going to go out and get a roll of 1.0mm wire so decided to put a 0.8 roll on and see how it goes. Mounted the roll on the back, and threaded the wire through using the 1.0mm groove, once the wire was through flicked over the wire feed tensioners closed and hit the wire inch button on the wire feeder unit. the feeder leap into life and began feeding wire through. got an inch poking out of the wire feeder, and then fitted my 5mtr torch from my old machine, once secure turned up the wire feed to 4 and hit the wire inch button and waited for it feed through the torch. Feed through with absolute no problem, even though there was very little tention on the wire feeder and the fact that i was using 0.8mm wire with 1.0mm feed rollers, a good sign i thought. well i will see when i weld.