Members, if you'd like to see
spray MIG welding in perspective with pulsed and others check out these 4 slo-mo vids of each.
MIG Welding Transfer Methods - A.E.D. Motorsport Products
btw, I have a hankering for A & W hot dogs with 'red sauce', mustard, and lots of chopped onion. I just hate to put on a suit & tie for such a short trip to get dinner.
That link is a great explanation of the differences in transfer. While I never used pulse in a welder, the idea with pulse is that spray transfer is subject to gravity and pulse allows the metal to transfer without dripping while still maintaining good enough penetration (or so I'm told).
Elsewhere, I've been having several discussions. The first with a friend who is an iron worker who told me that I'm out-thinking myself and that we should just stick-weld the mounts after tack-welding with a mig process, grinding the tack welds down, and then stick-weld the whole thing--hitting the root weld with 6010 for the best penetration and covering it with 7018 using his Miller generator welder after I rebuild its carb (no matter what, I learned that I'm rebuilding his welder's carb and whatever else I need do to make it work again).
Then through messaging it turns out that yomax4 is an insider knowing the guys at my local Miller jobber/dealer and yomax4 offered all kinds of good advice on the MIG process leaving whatever welder up to me.
So roll forward a few weeks and I can tell you a little bit about what I've learned, or what I have been able to learn through the internet (and as we all know--everything we read on the internet is always TRU, heh).
After name-dropping yomax4's real name, I still experienced sticker shock with Miller welders although I did open up to also looking at the 220, the 235 and well as the Multimatic 255 and offered to trade in my Multimatic 200. None of the welders I looked at could do AC Tig, and all of then could do DC Tig, but then my existing Miller Multimatic 200 already does DC Tig so I'm not really gaining anything there except easier Tig welding with the pulse ability and hot start (which I haven't tried but does look cool on video examples).
Contrary to Fredd's amusing explanation about customer support, every time I've called Miller Welding's mothership for support, within the first three rings they answer and I'm talking to a real human being, and then, within another minute I'm talking to a real tech person apparently from Wisconsin because we speak the same language and they've been able to intelligently resolve my issues quickly. What I'm saying is that I've never had better technical support and this in the context that I have a Miller dealer just a hop, skip, and jump away in Bemidji. This to say that I'm leery about moving away from Blue because of the customer experience.
So finally my eye started to wander a bit where I thought I could take the risk of purchasing a Chinesium 250 series welder. From that experience it became a hot mess. While Chinese welders are cheap enough, they have little to no explanations about what they can do, what guns fit or anything. At the end of that rabbit trail it looked like a cheap, hot mess and so I backed away from that option.
So I turned my attention toward American Chinesium welders and looked at Eastwood's second generation of their 250i. After calling Eastwood and looking through the owner's manual of the 250i, discounted Eastwood's new reiteration of their 250i which looks like a pretty good deal. To make it run 0.045 I'd need to purchase an aftermarket 0.045 MIG gun and flip the drive rollers around (which isn't a problem) but at the end of the day, the 250i has no pulse setting on any function. Bummer.
So I circled back to Everlast's MTS275 lightning machine. Everlast's specs are better than the Multimatic 255, basically offering water-cooling (which I'll never use) and AC Tig (which I would use), but I'm hesitant because the machine is just expensive enough to make it a real investment (base is about $2500) and I know nothing about the support. Worse, I have no local dealer to throw the thing though their window if it breaks or stinks.
Again, I can always stick weld my project but this is my "opportunity" to justify another welder and expand my welding horizons. What do you guys think?
