Single phase welder upto 6mm

[aposegil]

Hello all

Ive been floating about on the forum for a few days and found the information on here great. So firstly thank you to all you guys.

Well I started off with a Clarke 135amp welder which was great peice of kit sadly whilst i lent it to a friend his neighbour garage caughty fire and the welder in his garage suffered from heat damage

So another friend for a while has been lending me his SIP 150amp and even thou another great learning welder it did suffer from feed probs which a lot of post on here reflect that. I just thought it was this welder. So that has now put me off SIP's but not completely.

Now I want to get my own one now again and even thou 90% of my work will be with the car I.e. 3mm think metal max? my friend wants me to do some work for him with some 6mm metal.

Now I have read and for single phase the opinion on here tends to be a portamig around 200amps upwards? I am correct in saying that is what I should go for? or should I consider other options?

 

[Redeye]

aposegil,

It all comes down to budget, and how much weight you want to carry around.There are an awful lot of machines out there and every dealer is pushing there own brands and the cut price deals are being snapped up by the lorry load to Euro zones. Some good deals are to be had at the moment on top of the range models which makes some of the mid range machines - like the Powermig not so good buys, but do value your local supplier first but even this can vary. Just recently I was pretty sure on the machine I was going to buy - I had been to their premises, tried it out, went away and confirmed to have it later on that morning, and would be back to get it that afternoon. On my arrival they reported that they had sold their entire stock to France - along with my machine............

 

[aposegil]

uh didn't realise the market moved so much with welders

ok 80% of the time its going to be in my garage. Thats where I do all the work to the cars. maybe once in a while I will take it some where. So weight not going to be to much of a problem. I dont fancy have a full tall bottle, one of them smaller gas bottles would suit me better. Ive been using halfords C02 bottle then last me a while no probs.

I just like being able to have a welder and when I fancy doing some work just getting on with it.

also budget is a weird word for me. I rather pay average price for a good one than expensive one thats to much for what I need. But then I don't want a cheap one if they have issues after a while. So i prefer to see whats out there and read up on peoples opinion before deciding which one to go for.

thanx for your reply