Longevity's Stickweld 250 / my review.

[CJONE]

Shield thanks for the review, I have been looking for a stick/tig unit for a while now. I am tired of fireing up the portable everytime I need something welded outside the garage. A tig unit would be nice also. I also would have to run that off of the portable rig. For what little bit of use this unit would see I cant see spending a ton of $$ on it. I'll look a little closer at Longevity. CJ

 

[Sublifer]

Has this entire area of TBN just become an advertising area for yet another cheap chinese machine?? This is why I won't participate here anymore!

All of TBN is about people showing off their toys and their projects, asking for advice and looking for good deals.

This thread in particular covers 3 of those items (asking for advice via preemptive opinion of equipment via the review.)

If you don't like it then ignore it. You could also leave your opinion in a more constructive manner such as "I prefer lincoln and miller because I can get local support easily just by buying the unit for 3 times the cost of an import model, never mind that it would be a transformer based machine and I wouldn't get an inverter unit until I spent 6 times the import unit cost..." :laughing:

 

[longevity]

Hi Everyone

Thank you all for the support. I really appreciate the thread by shield. Our goal is to have a positive customer experience here. If we can do anything to improve. Please let us know.

Undercut... I look forward to the videos. We really need to get some stick welding ones up on or youtube channel

 

[CJONE]

Hi Everyone

Thank you all for the support. I really appreciate the thread by shield. Our goal is to have a positive customer experience here. If we can do anything to improve. Please let us know.

Undercut... I look forward to the videos. We really need to get some stick welding ones up on or youtube channel

I am looking at the weldall 250PI, what has been the reports on them? CJ

 

[undercut]

Hi Everyone

Thank you all for the support. I really appreciate the thread by shield. Our goal is to have a positive customer experience here. If we can do anything to improve. Please let us know.

Undercut... I look forward to the videos. We really need to get some stick welding ones up on or youtube channel

I need to save up enough to get a welder first.

I've been researching various entry level inverter stick welders by various companies while I save up.

Not sure if you can help but I'm trying to get onto the Longevity forums and my account hasn't been activated yet. Is there someone I can email?

 

[longevity]

I need to save up enough to get a welder first.

I've been researching various entry level inverter stick welders by various companies while I save up.

Not sure if you can help but I'm trying to get onto the Longevity forums and my account hasn't been activated yet. Is there someone I can email?

undercut, email dan@longevity-inc.com

He will get your account setup and making sure it works! We have a spam blocker on there to avoid weirdo posts..

 

[yomax4]

One thing to remember..The Inverter power Supply was not invented in the USA. The fact that USA companies now offer them, Does not mean that the USA ones are better. Example?? Sanrex out of Japan. Several US companies use Sanrex Inverters in their machines. The IGBT Transistor has evened the playing field when installed in any inverter power supply. Switches, Knobs and Pots are cheap so the rest comes down to warranty and accesories and the accesories quality. That's where many imports fail. They offer a great machine with piece of crap arc accesories. Funny thing is that the accesories are the cheapest part of the package. What's the mind set on the cheapo accesories?

 

[Haywire]

For electrode holders and ground clamps I agree, but have you priced plasma torches? IIRC, a quality name brand replacement torch costs 3/4 of what my whole cutter did.

 

[Shield Arc]

Furu brought his Stickweld 250 over again today. We hooked up my Tig rig to it. Turned the hot start and arc force all the way down. I didn't see any issues at all when Tig welding with this machine. About the only stone I could throw is when breaking the arc, the arc has a really long tail. This must be from a lot of OCV? Other than this one little thing, this machine has a really nice arc for Tig welding!:thumbsup:

 

[Furu]

At the beginning of the thread Shield Arc mentioned when we were looking at the unit that the arc force seemed to work a bit backward/different than was thought. One contributing individual mentioned that maybe it was wired backward and Simon said he would have engineering look into the issue and see what could be found.
Never saw a response back from Simon so do not know if he followed up or if he got a response back from the tech folks.

Shield Arc who has been aiding me in developing my arc welding skills and I got together again yesterday. (As an aside, if I can learn 1% of what he knows I will count myself very fortunate. He is an excellent individual from whom one can learn a great deal.) Among other things we looked at the arc force very carefully and tried to eliminate any variable other than just the arc force setting. He did the eval as I would not be able to detect a small change of setting from my own inconsistencies. We tried it at arc force 0, 5 and 10 for three separate settings. Unlike the first time we got together where it seemed as if the setting of 5 was better/stronger than the 10 setting for arc force, this time it appeared as if there was no difference between any arc force setting. We were very careful to ensure that other variables were not there this time, where they might have been the first time. Bottom line he reported no real difference as the arc force was changed but could in all three positions tested, bury the rod with no problem.