Mig welder? Is it ok?

[Ben Lessani]

My welding experience is limited, I've only really welded little bits and bobs on occasion, my go-kart, golf's floorpan and sills.

But I have used arc, gasless mig and gas mig. My welds with arc were moderate with good penetration, after a lot of fiddling with the voltage to get it to arc properly. Gas mig got me perfect welds with perfect penetration, albeit it was on a BIG shop welder. Gasless got a lot of spatter at first, little to no penetration - the welds looked okay, but were far from it.

From a beginner - I'd always go gas.

[danny_p]

with MIG the quality of the welder makes a massive differance.  it has to be said proper workshop migs take the piss out of minimigs the quality of the wire feed makes a massive differance to the quality of your welds.

problem with gassles wire is it has a flux core,  so the wire itself tends to be larger 0.9 mm  the wire is also quite soft as its actualy wound around the core so it behaves as if it's quite soft and as it's effectly hollow you need high wire speeds, all of whitch asks the most of wire feed from the welders with the crapest wirefeeds. the other advantage of gas is it cools the tip of the welder and those iccel mini mig tips need plenty of cooling as they get hot and then start pissing about.

for beginner,  argon mix gas with .6mm wire as it takes the strain off the smaller welder's and gives more flexablity in the settings ) it's also harder to blow holes in stuff.

the other thing is mini mings are rarely ever good enough for more than 3mm most start complaning at 2.5mm ( tips overheat, clamps cabels get to hot, and they run out of duity cycle a bit quick ) 

tho i rarely ever weld heavy steel with mig my baby 185 A sealy will do all up to 4mm happy but at 3mm i allways switch to ark even tho there is a feck off 3 phase 300A mig avalible

[Dr@c_GTI]

Thanks for the input from all, theres a fair bit to think on, but from the  general impressions it seems the gas is the way to go, and of course a better unit cheers again all

[VW-miniman]

Hi
New to this site as a very new Golf MK3 owner,
I have been a very highly skilled welder for over 20 years now including doing loads of welding on cars.
The welds that you get from a gasless set are weaker and not as neat and tidy because the weld is actually weaker and more brittle.
The only way to go is with argon mix and this you can get in small bottles from any leading gas supplier but if you are stuck then you can go for CO2 which is very cheap and easy to get hold off especially if you know someone in the pub industry but you will need a female regulator. If you get a CO2 reg as back up then if you have run out of gas then you can get hold of a CO2 fire extinguisher and remove the trumpet by undoing the big nut and the regulator will fit straight on so then all you need to do is cable tie the trigger open and just use the regulator to control your gas flow...

Hope this helps

G