Welder choice, sealey, Excalibur or par weld

[jim painter]

Hi, I'm going to be in the market for a new welder soon as my cebora is past it's best, so I was after some info on a few welders. More from experience rather than what it says in a brochure.
My choices are
1 sealey supermig 180

2 par weld 171

3 Excalibur 200

I restore VW for a living but every now and then do work with thicker box section, so the machine has to deal with that as well as thin bodywork which all these machines will. As I said I'm after personal experiences if possible.

Thanks

 

[overload]

Forget Sealey for a start. Got a permanent earth cable wired in and is rubbish for the job.

The others have din connectors so can be changed for a better earth cable in seconds if the original supplied is not up to scratch.

 

[jim painter]

Ok, sealey wasn't my first choice, the par weld is my favorite at this moment in time, just haven't seen the Excalibur before.

 

[daleyd]

Portamigs have a good reputation on here for thin panel welding as they go down to 15A rather than 30A like the others, although they are £100 more than the others you mention (Going off the weldequip site).

 

[BrokenBiker]

i have a sealey mig and a parweld mma, and you can tell the differnce straight away with build quality, quality of components etc, much prefer the parweld for reliability

 

[steviec_lj]

Portamig, MTA, Oxford and I'm positive there are others are pretty much all the same.

15amp isn't needed for car body work, 20amp like on the MTA machine is quite low enough.

An inverter would probably serve you well, some multi process machines can go as low as 5amps, but I can't comment on how effective that would be at sticking 2 bits of steel together.

 

[BrokenBiker]

the r tech 250 mig inverter is a good looking machine, doubleboost has a series of vids on its capabilities