subject: Everything You Need To Know About a Gasless Mig Welder [print this page] Everything You Need To Know About a Gasless Mig Welder
Essentially a small MIG welding machine, gasless MIG welders are a very hand thing to have in the shed at home.
Using gasless mig wire they can very easily weld the thickness of metal that a home welder would need to work with.
There are many things that you can weld with one of these machines.
A small gasless machine can weld mild steel sheet metal, box sections, angle iron and plate. What it really comes down to is how much power the mig welder has. The thicker the metal, the hotter the weld needs to be. You can weld up box trailers and do repairs to them. You can make modifications to you street cars or race cars. Any little welding project a gasless mig welder is handy to have.
110v mig welder, 115 and 120 volt gasless wire feed welders.
There are a range of smaller machines that you can get. These are the smallest of the small and have input voltages in the range of between 110volts and 120volts. This is all depending on which country you live in and also what part of the country you live in. In general these machines have the least amount of power available for mig welding.
220volt and 240 volt MIG
Now the machines in this range of 220 volts to 240 volts will offer the most power that you can get from a single phase mig welding machine.
Duty cycle-beware of this....
Mig welding duty cycle will also vary between machines. In a nut shell you want a machine that has a higher rated duty cycle value. This will mean that it can weld longer than a machine will less duty cycle.
Pros and cons of these little units
The biggest thing going for the small machines is that they are now really cheap to buy. You can pick one up just about anywhere and they are much better and easier to use for welding jobs at home. They are light and small which makes them reasonable portable. You can pick them up and put them in the car to take around to a mate's place quite easily. Try doing that with an industrial mig.
On the downside, these machines are usually cheap mig welders and as a result some are not worth buying. Sometimes spare mig welder parts are hard to get for these machines too.
And finally gasless mig wire is rather messy and spattery compared to normal mig wire and using welding gas.
To sum it all up...
If a little bit of spatter doesn't worry you these gasless mig welders are a good investment for and workshop. You can also get dual purpose machines which can do both flux core and solid mig wire.
