Hello welding people! What a great forum. Wish I'd checked here before buying my Aldi Powercraft MIG thingy in 2009 (Looks exactly like this Wolf Weld sold at Amazon and came with exactly the same accessories, but I paid £200 ish). To plasma cut a long story short, I impulse purchased this thing and never used it until a couple of days ago. So at nearly 5 years old, I opened the box, assembled it together and hesitantly started on a project.
The project was to manufacture the frame out of 5mm angle iron for a stove register plate (I over engineered it and would have been better off using thinner gauge). This particular Aldi welder came with a CO2 gas cylinder and a pretty pathetic valve adjuster for it.
Anyway, got the wiring sorted, got everything cut to size, cleaned up the metal at the intended joints with a grinder and starting to weld the joints with 0.6 wire and some CO2 gas. The result? Just spatter. At first I tried the higher settings given the gauge of metal but went the full range, adjusting for gas, wire speed and current - and it was having none of it! I just could not get a bead no matter what I tried. I'd been messing around for about a couple of hours at this point: practicing, stress testing, grinding back and starting again etc but to no avail.
Anyway, almost gave up in frustration, but then i thought, "What about flux-core 0.9mm and the no-gas option?" So swapped the wire and roller over (what a pain with this cheapy), but as soon as I started I attained beads of weld. It wasn't long before I was making great beads that stood up to stress testing. Managed to weld the entire thing up in about 45 minutes.
So there you go, I was better off with gasless MIG welding. I got a price on people doing the welding for me and this never came in at less than £100. So figured if I could do just a few of these, then the welder has paid for itself.
Okay so i also struggled with the 0.6 wire feeding as it would often kink and had to keep cutting back and re-feeding, and the 0.9 was much easier to deal with, and yes, my welder is a cheap instrument, but it came good in the end.
Pleased with the final result after cleaning up. But can anyone advise on gas welding? Should I persevere, change gas, change welder?
I plan to do some thin metal welding this summer (car body), but don’t really know which way to go.
Thanks in advance,
Ian
The project was to manufacture the frame out of 5mm angle iron for a stove register plate (I over engineered it and would have been better off using thinner gauge). This particular Aldi welder came with a CO2 gas cylinder and a pretty pathetic valve adjuster for it.
Anyway, got the wiring sorted, got everything cut to size, cleaned up the metal at the intended joints with a grinder and starting to weld the joints with 0.6 wire and some CO2 gas. The result? Just spatter. At first I tried the higher settings given the gauge of metal but went the full range, adjusting for gas, wire speed and current - and it was having none of it! I just could not get a bead no matter what I tried. I'd been messing around for about a couple of hours at this point: practicing, stress testing, grinding back and starting again etc but to no avail.
Anyway, almost gave up in frustration, but then i thought, "What about flux-core 0.9mm and the no-gas option?" So swapped the wire and roller over (what a pain with this cheapy), but as soon as I started I attained beads of weld. It wasn't long before I was making great beads that stood up to stress testing. Managed to weld the entire thing up in about 45 minutes.
So there you go, I was better off with gasless MIG welding. I got a price on people doing the welding for me and this never came in at less than £100. So figured if I could do just a few of these, then the welder has paid for itself.
Okay so i also struggled with the 0.6 wire feeding as it would often kink and had to keep cutting back and re-feeding, and the 0.9 was much easier to deal with, and yes, my welder is a cheap instrument, but it came good in the end.
Pleased with the final result after cleaning up. But can anyone advise on gas welding? Should I persevere, change gas, change welder?
I plan to do some thin metal welding this summer (car body), but don’t really know which way to go.
Thanks in advance,
Ian
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but if this works out, I'll do some research and get a better welder. It's the fiddly feed mechanism I like the least about the Aldi welder, but other than that it's been a laugh with flux core.
