Have been following this forum for ages now and a friend from another forum on alternative car fuels told me I should join up, so here goes.
Many years ago, sometime in the last century to be exact I used to work as a field service bod for a well known manufacturer of welding equipment. Those were the days before the cheap diy type mig welders were available. I had an Oxford oil arc set at the time but wanted a mig, so set about collecting some components to try and build something. I eventually made contact with someone up in Cambridgeshire who was trying to put together a kit of parts to build a mig. After a brief chat on the phone he suggested I come up for the day and we could swop knowledge. So set off from Kent where I was living at the time to the outskirts of Peterborough.
He had put together quite an impressive set up. A transformer with suitable characteristics for a mig plus a second identical units secondary winding used as an inductor/choke. A pcb control board, with spot, stitch and regen' braking was also on hand. The wire feed was a car windscreen wiper motor. As the transformer primary was not multi tapped, voltage control was by a suitable variac.
Back home I already had some 300 amp diodes, so lashed up a bridge rectifier with some hefty alloy channel as heatsinks and built up the mig as seen in the photo's. The symbols on the front were cut out from some black adhesive tape plus some stick on numbers. This welder has run without a hiccup for nigh on fifty years, have only replaced torch liners, tips etc and the outer torch lead sheath. I've lost count of the many rusty cars and vans it's repaired and many other projects. On a sunny day I think it kicks out around 160 amps. Latest project is a steel roller and the weld shown is some cleaned rusty 60mm x 4mm box to some 10mm plate.
ps. I'm only a self taught bodger when it come to welding, but nothing I have made has fallen apart ----- yet!. Have a couple of stick sets and also an R-Tech 160 amp ac/dc tig unit that I'm still learning to use.
Many years ago, sometime in the last century to be exact I used to work as a field service bod for a well known manufacturer of welding equipment. Those were the days before the cheap diy type mig welders were available. I had an Oxford oil arc set at the time but wanted a mig, so set about collecting some components to try and build something. I eventually made contact with someone up in Cambridgeshire who was trying to put together a kit of parts to build a mig. After a brief chat on the phone he suggested I come up for the day and we could swop knowledge. So set off from Kent where I was living at the time to the outskirts of Peterborough.
He had put together quite an impressive set up. A transformer with suitable characteristics for a mig plus a second identical units secondary winding used as an inductor/choke. A pcb control board, with spot, stitch and regen' braking was also on hand. The wire feed was a car windscreen wiper motor. As the transformer primary was not multi tapped, voltage control was by a suitable variac.
Back home I already had some 300 amp diodes, so lashed up a bridge rectifier with some hefty alloy channel as heatsinks and built up the mig as seen in the photo's. The symbols on the front were cut out from some black adhesive tape plus some stick on numbers. This welder has run without a hiccup for nigh on fifty years, have only replaced torch liners, tips etc and the outer torch lead sheath. I've lost count of the many rusty cars and vans it's repaired and many other projects. On a sunny day I think it kicks out around 160 amps. Latest project is a steel roller and the weld shown is some cleaned rusty 60mm x 4mm box to some 10mm plate.
ps. I'm only a self taught bodger when it come to welding, but nothing I have made has fallen apart ----- yet!. Have a couple of stick sets and also an R-Tech 160 amp ac/dc tig unit that I'm still learning to use.